reprinted from OpEdNews.com
Donald Trump and the leadership of the Republican party are aggressively staging a coup, inspired by the 1876 Tilden Hayes election, and the Democratic Party and their mainstream media surrogates, CNN and MSNBC have not yet caught on. They are laughing at a situation that must be aggressively addressed with dire urgency. Mainstream Pundits are smarmily laughing at Trump, when it is they who are the clueless ones.
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Donald Trump and the leadership of the Republican party are aggressively staging a coup, inspired by the 1876 Tilden Hayes election, and the Democratic Party and their mainstream media surrogates, CNN and MSNBC have not yet caught on. They are laughing at a situation that must be aggressively addressed with dire urgency. Mainstream Pundits are smarmily laughing at Trump, when it is they who are the clueless ones.
Mark my words. The 1876 Hayes Tilden election will become a frequently cited element of the news very soon.
It doesn't matter if Trump wins or loses the plethora of lawsuits he and his surrogates are filing across the nation. As long as he slows down the process and delays the finalization and confirmation of state vote counts he will win the election. If even a few Republican run states refuse to certify the vote counts, Biden will no longer have the 270 electoral votes. If that happens, Trump won't have the 270 electoral votes either. Under those circumstances, the election will fall to be decided by the House of Representatives. The process there will hand the victory to Trump.
Thom Hartmann and Greg Palast predicted this possibility earlier in the year.
Now, election integrity activist Jonathan Simon and journalist David Sirota are also weighing in.
Earlier this week, in an interview, Greg Palast explained to me, describing the coup as an "article 2 gambit. Now article 2 of the constitution says that the state legislatures pick your electors. Now i bet you thought we all know we don't actually vote for president we vote for electors. No, you don't even vote for electors, your vote is purely advisory.
America does not have a democracy. We give advice to each state legislature and the legislatures then determine which electors go to the electoral college."
On May 8th, in an interview on my Bottom-up Show, Thom Hartmann theoretically described what is actually now happening, citing a similar occurrence in the 1876 Tilden Hayes presidential election, where the article 2 Gambit worked to reverse the election.
The thing that really concerns me about this Rob, is the Tilden Hayes election in 1876. This was the first major election before the failure of reconstruction. This this is what led to the failure of reconstruction.
The southern states had finished the process of rewriting their constitutions to strip slavery out of their constitutions and guarantee the right of former slaves, of African Americans, to vote and participate in society. And in that election Hayes was the Republican Samuel Tilden was the was the Democrat and Rutherford Hayes lost the election. Tilden got a majority of the of the electoral votes and a majority of the popular vote and nobody disputed that.
But the problem is that in order to win the electoral college which is how you actually become president you have to have a majority of fifty percent plus one of the votes . The problem was that in three southern states, as I recall it was 'Florida, Louisiana' and South Carolina and Oregon, and Oregon at the time was occupied not by the Union Army but by the Klan.
In those four states the governors of those states were unable to certify the election results. In fact you had the Democrats in those four states saying that that Tilden won and you had the Republicans saying that Hayes won so there was a dispute about who won in each of those four states and those four states constituted enough electoral votes that even though Tilden won the majority of the electoral votes he was one vote short of winning the electoral college being that 50% plus one and so the 12th amendment of the Constitution says that when that happens the election gets thrown to the House of Representatives and in the House of Representatives each state gets one vote and that state's one vote is defined by the combined legislature of the state."
Hartmann went on to explain how even though Tilden won the popular and electoral votes, the four states stymied him and forced the election to go to the House of Representatives, where Rutherford Hayes was declared the president. There is precedent and history that proves this idea is not far fetched. It actually happened.
If a few states refuse to certify, and I assure you, they are already setting up the narrative for this, then Biden will not receive the 270 electoral votes he has earned. Then it will fall to the House of Representatives, where it is not based on the number of elected representatives, but more along the lines of which party controls the legislations in the states. Given the current situation, Trump will win by a solid majority.
There's a reason Mike Pompeo said that Trump will be having a second term. He's in on the planning and stupid enough to let out a "tell" of the strategy. And that's why so many Republican Senators and the House minority leader have refused to acknowledge Biden's victory. They are in on the plan to force the election into the house.
When MSM pundits mock Trump, they are really showing themselves to be ignorant of history and the real possibility that the theft of the election is well under way and on schedule.
Trump does not need to win a single fraud court case. He just has to raise doubts and provide cover so that Republican state legislatures can claim that the count is flawed. And they will argue that Democratic governors do not and cannot play a role in the process. That question may go to the Supreme court, since Wisconsin and PA have Democratic governors and Republican controlled legislatures.
David Sirota founder of The Daily Poster, raises a call of alarm, with his article titled, Trump Is Staging A Coup Why Are Dems Not Sounding The Alarm? in which he says, " Republicans are following a clear plan to try to overturn the election results, just like they did in 2000. And once again, Democrats are not sounding a loud enough alarm." Further in the article, Sirota says,
"Twenty years later, the lesson of that debacle isn't being heeded. Donald Trump and his cronies are quite clearly waging a public-facing campaign designed to create the conditions for the Electoral College process to pull off a coup.
This is a full-scale emergency and yet the Democratic strategy seems to be to try to pretend it isn't happening, in hopes that norms win out, even though nothing at all is normal.
Trump Has A Deliberate Strategy
In the week since the election, Trump's and his Republican allies have waged a public campaign to call the election results into question not just in the courtroom, but in the public's mind. Their lawsuits and Attorney General William Barr's recent memo are designed as much to win rulings and initiate prosecutions as they are to generate headlines. Their tweets asserting fraud, and their high-profile promises of financial reward for evidence of fraud are all designed to do the same thing.
Most ominously of all, Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona are already insinuating the results may be fraudulent.
Why is public perception so important? Because as Ohio State University law professor Edward Foley shows in a frighteningly prescient 2019 article, legislatures could use the public perception of fraud to try to invoke their constitutional power to ignore their states' popular votes, reject certified election results and appoint slates of Trump electors.
In an article that predicted almost exactly what has already happened in Pennsylvania, Foley imagined Trump seeming to be ahead at first, then losing his lead as votes are counted, then making allegations of fraud, setting the stage for this:
At Trump's urging, the state's legislature where Republicans have majorities in both houses purports to exercise its authority under Article II of the Constitution to appoint the state's presidential electors directly. Taking their cue from Trump, both legislative chambers claim that the certified popular vote cannot be trusted because of the blue shift that occurred in overtime. Therefore, the two chambers claim to have the constitutional right to supersede the popular vote and assert direct authority to appoint the state's presidential electors, so that this appointment is in line with the popular vote tally as it existed on Election Night, which Trump continues to claim is the "true" outcome.
The state's Democratic governor refuses to assent to this assertion of authority by the state's legislature, but the legislature's two chambers proclaim that the governor's assent is unnecessary. They cite early historical practices in which state legislatures appointed presidential electors without any involvement of the state's governor. They argue that like constitutional amendments, and unlike ordinary legislation, the appointment of presidential electors when undertaken directly by a state legislature is not subject to a gubernatorial veto.
Foley notes how public-facing politics outside the cloistered legal arena could then come into play."
Jonathan Simon nailed it when he wrote, first to a listserve of election integrity leaders and then in his article, titled, Trump Is Sandbagging to Send Election to the House; Election Integrity Should Not Help Him. Simon says, in his article
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Trump's current strategy is not about actually overturning enough votes to win election legitimately. His own aides have acknowledged that is impossible. Rather it is fixed on delaying certification past the applicable deadlines. The law favors delay and Team Trump knows it. His plan is to prevent certification of 270 Biden electoral votes by tying up several state processes in court past the state deadlines (the "hard" one being 12/14, when the Electoral College votes on slates) and then either importuning friendly state legislatures (the GOP controls Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona) to send Trump elector slates to Congress, or simply throwing the election to the House, where the GOP controls the majority of state delegations (under the Twelfth Amendment, the House votes for president by state delegation) so Trump wins.
Does that look like democracy or electoral integrity to you? To me it looks like yet another right-wing scheme to steal an electionand haven't we been through (and been irreparably harmed by) enough of those? Don't kid yourselvesthis is a clear and present danger."
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David Sirota observes, "We need a vociferous public campaign focused on preventing state legislators from feeling empowered to ignore their own voters," and says, "The Biden-Harris campaign has been proceeding as if everything is fine... as if this is a West Wing episode inanely presuming that any single Republican elected official in the country cares about such things," and Sirota adds,
"Biden may be calculating that any public pushback will only help Trump, and the best strategy is to try to starve the fraud allegations of attention. And sure, we may get lucky - things may eventually just sort themselves out with no big hullabaloo.
However, history suggests that it is pretty risky to bank on a passive strategy, leave it all up to fate and simply hope for the best through "normal" procedures during moments of obviously abnormal circumstances.
Indeed, refusing to wage a much more organized, public campaign to challenge Trump's coup attempt is exactly the kind of strategy Democrats went with 20 years ago in Florida during the Brooks Brothers riot - and look how that turned out. We got an illegitimate Bush presidency that gave us the Iraq War and a financial crisis that ended or ruined millions of lives."
So, when Democratic legislators or any of the MSM hosts or "experts" say Trump is being foolish, or Joe Biden says Trump is "embarrassing," the reality is that they are naïve and clueless and have not yet figured out what is really going on.
Once I read Jonathan Simon's thinking that Trump didn't need to win, he just needed to delay, my stress level went up and it's still up. And that's how every leader in the Democratic party should be feeling. Joe Biden and his team should be aggressively fighting every delay tactic and they should be coming out swinging. This is not a grudge match or a loser refusing to give in. This is a team of bloodthirsty people like Mitch McConnell, who go for blood and play to win, no matter who, including lady Democracy, gets hurt. It is time to call your legislators at all levels federal and state and wake them up to the reality that Trump is not being a fool. He's trying to pull a Rutherford Hayes over Tilden re-run.
And if the Republicans pull this off, which really just requires a few state legislatures, Trump will successfully steal the election. That will lead to massive demonstrations and cities burning. No wonder Trump just fired the guy who refused to bring in the military to deal with protesters.
An Update. Thom Hartmann tells me that Georgia passed legislation that would prevent an article 2 Hayes/Tilden gambit from happening there. But that still leaves Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Arizona, with their Republican controlled legislatures. Thom also observed that the best defense for an article 2 Hayes/Tilden gambit could be the MSM being smarmy and overly confident in concluding that Biden is the winner, and he notes that even Fox News has acknowledged his victory. But Thom also suggests that this is a warm-up to a 2024 election where true fascist and actual smart man Tom Cotton will probably be running against incumbent Kamala Harris. I don't think ignoring the problem, as the Democratic leadership and their MSM surrogates are doing is the best idea.
David Sirota observes, "We need a vociferous public campaign focused on preventing state legislators from feeling empowered to ignore their own voters," and says, "The Biden-Harris campaign has been proceeding as if everything is fine... as if this is a West Wing episode inanely presuming that any single Republican elected official in the country cares about such things," and Sirota adds,
"Biden may be calculating that any public pushback will only help Trump, and the best strategy is to try to starve the fraud allegations of attention. And sure, we may get lucky - things may eventually just sort themselves out with no big hullabaloo.
However, history suggests that it is pretty risky to bank on a passive strategy, leave it all up to fate and simply hope for the best through "normal" procedures during moments of obviously abnormal circumstances.
Indeed, refusing to wage a much more organized, public campaign to challenge Trump's coup attempt is exactly the kind of strategy Democrats went with 20 years ago in Florida during the Brooks Brothers riot - and look how that turned out. We got an illegitimate Bush presidency that gave us the Iraq War and a financial crisis that ended or ruined millions of lives."
I'm with Sirota and Hartmann. Assume Biden is the president, but also characterize the Republicans who can actually do the damage-- the Republican legislators in MI, WI, PA and AZ as the villains colluding to steal the election.
