CNN graces us with a long profile of Emily Murphy, the Trump-appointed General Services Administrator (GSA) now tasked with officially deciding that Joe Biden did indeed win the election, based on vote margins nigh-on-impossible for recounts to overturn in each of the states he has won. She has been rather inexplicably dragging this out despite the votes being unambiguous, even as she herself apparently looks for a new job in the private recognition that the Trump administration will soon no longer be a thing.
The CNN piece focuses nearly entirely on what Emily Murphy's friends say about Emily Murphy, so we hear that Murphy is an honest dealer here, a "deeply moral" technocrat and careerist with no devotion to Trump or Trumpism. She "feels like she is in a hard place" and is "afraid on multiple levels."
That last part is no doubt especially true. She is now a pivot point for our nation's entire democracy, and no matter what she does next she will become an absolutely hated person to some segment of the American population.
Even Murphy's friends and coworkers can't really explain why Murphy is waffling on deciding that Biden really truly did win the most electoral votes, however. We learn that she appears to believe that the current situation is analogous to 2000, the presidential election in which neither George W. Bush nor Al Gore could win the presidency without Florida, which was in a recount in which mere hundreds of votes separated the two, and which resulted in Republican attorneys descending on the state to sue and physically threaten them into stopping recounts, which continued to erode Bush's minuscule lead, and then the Supreme Court stepped in to save Americans from the tragedy of not knowing who the next president would be for weeks by declaring that our pathetic commoners cannot possibly bear such a burden so fuck you all, Bush wins.
While Murphy appears to have convinced herself that Biden winning Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia by recount-proof margins is very similar to the 2000 fiasco, it of course is not, and nobody can explain why Murphy herself would plausibly think so. The odds of any of these states flipping their results due to the discovery of a shocking, systemic error is charitably less than 1%; the odds of the necessary two or three of them all botching things, all in the same direction, is a fraction of that. Trump's attempts at Florida-style lawsuits in each of the states have been nuked into a fine dust the moment judges ask the campaign what evidence it has for any of its claims.
If the electoral results are going to be overturned, in other words, it would have to be from forces outside the actual vote-counting and justice systems combined. It's not going to happen based on the votes actually cast by Americans and counted up by the nation's officials. It's almost impossible. Even according to her allies, Murphy is looking at hoof prints and trying to determine whether they were made by the horse we all saw trundle by on live television or by the invisible unicorn that the nation's mad king insists broke into his home to steal the silverware.
So despite the fluff job coming from her allies, it's evident what's going on here. Murphy does not truly believe that the unicorn might be coming. But Murphy is rightly afraid that the moment she acknowledges Trump has no plausible electoral claim of victory, aside from doing things that would threaten to overturn democracy itself, she becomes the target of Trump's wrath, is immediately fired, and will be pummeled with death threats from Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson's audiences of rabid fascist conspiracy freaks. So she's going to drag this out as loooooooong as is possible, hoping Trump himself admits defeat and renders the whole thing moot.
It's an understandable position. Not the courageous one, perhaps, but an understandable one.
The denouement here is likely going to happen soon, simply because states will be certifying their results, turning the election counts as reported so far into official, final versions that have no room for the bureaucracy to claim vagary. Eventually, the horse is going to look everybody in the eyes and say, “Get on with it.”
What might help is if Murphy's friends can convince her that the standard of proof, for this "ascertainment" of a winner, was never intended to take into account every possible lighting strike, asteroid hit, demon summoning and other million-to-one happenstance that theoretically could stand between the election winner and their eventual taking of office. It is indeed possible that Biden could be eaten by a bear between now and January. That does not mean, however, that Biden and his entire team should not be allowed to prepare for the presidency until then because a group of bureaucrats once read about a bear eating someone and cannot entirely rule it out.
Biden is being prevented from receiving classified national security briefings, his picks to top government posts are being blocked from being vetted, his entire team is being kept in the dark as to what the current administration is doing in each department in anticipation of his win, and there is zero happening to transition pandemic response from one administration to the next. Providing these things is no significant burden to the government or the people, even if the most insane of possibilities resulted in Biden not being sworn in next January. Blocking those preparations does burden the nation, in very real and significant ways, and threatens the very security of the nation.
Murphy is doing damage here, and whether she is doing it out of technocratic attempts to preclude even the most absurd possible plot twists or merely because she does not want to be the face Tucker Carlson singles out to his white nationalist militia allies, it still produces the same result. If Murphy wants to pair her "ascertainment" of the winner with a long, long note explaining that this is merely a bureaucratic decision that does not take into account and should not impact Donald Trump's very real rights to have a legal shit-fit in whichever courts he likes, we would all understand that.
But there's no plausible argument that these election results are ambiguous, any more so than the results that put Donald Trump in office to begin with. If a coup is going to happen that's one thing, but there's no technocratic reason for the bureaucracy to set aside picnic space in anticipation of it perhaps showing up.