“We don’t expect him to be there.”
Senator Chuck “Whoops-a-Daisy” Grassley, regarding Vice President Pence January 5th 2021
“I trust you Tim, but I’m not getting in that car.”
Vice President Pence, at the moment of truth
“You can’t do that Tony, Leave him where he’s at. He’s got a job to do. I know you guys too well. You’ll fly him to Alaska if you have a chance. Don’t do it.”
Keith Kellogg, National Security Advisor to Pence, to Tony Ornato, who was in charge of Pence’s Secret Service detail, upon being told of their plans to evacuate the Vice President to Joint Base Andrews.
In case there’s any confusion, this is why those notorious butterfingers at the Secret Service lost all those texts, and why, barring some incredible miracle, like actual justice, we won’t ever be seeing them. Grassley’s slip up the day before, and his office’s ham-handed fig leaf that he was “simply trying to explain what would happen if Pence had to step away...” hasn’t gotten nearly the attention it deserves.
Pence’s words are far more appropriate to someone worried about the realities of their personal safety, and responsibilities, than concern over window-dressing like optics. Especially on January 6th 2021: the USS Optics was one of the first ships to set sail. That Pence felt compelled to make up a cover story at all shows what a good sport he’s being about all this, although what passes for sportsmanship could simply be survival instinct. On the morning of the 5th though, even if the rest of us missed or shrugged off Grassley’s slip up, I doubt Pence did.
If the Secret Service planned on evacuating Pence and his family to Joint Base Andrews, were there contingency plans to evacuate the Trumps as well? If not, they might want to make some up for the sake of appearances. If so, they probably weren’t to Joint Base Andrews since keeping the President and Vice-President away from each other apparently ranked high on Secret Service’s list of priorities. Joint Base Andrews (formerly Andrews Air Force Base) is half an hour from the Capitol, and as Mr. Kellogg probably noted, home to Air Force One and a whole bunch of other airplanes too. But they wouldn’t need to take Pence to Alaska or anywhere really. They could’ve kept Pence at Andrews for a few hours, or even a day “just to be safe.” As Senator Grassley blurted, or rather pointed, out the day before, it was his job to fill in if the VP had to “step away.”
Remember, Grassley wasn’t going to “steal the election…” He wasn’t going to proclaim Donald Trump or anyone else to be the winner or loser of anything. He wasn’t even going to declare any of the electors invalid. All he was going to do was send a few of them back to the legislatures in a couple of states where he’d heard they may have had a few teeny-tiny problems. Before the fact, Team Trump painted delaying certification as an insignificant reconfiguration of process timing. If they’d successfully pushed it through, they’d have made it the catalyst for anarchy.
One of the last speeches on the Senate floor before the insurrectionists began banging on the doors was Ted Cruz begging for the certification to be held up just so the Good People of — I think it was Arizona — could have a day or two to really make sure everything was A-OK with their electors. This should always be a red flag: a man who’s trying way too hard to promote something he insists is insignificant — especially while diminishing the importance of things that actually are significant. Cruz’s contention that sending back the Arizona electors was such a tiny ask, yet somehow worth stalling certification because maintaining procedure wasn’t really that important was probably the biggest red flag of all: NEVER trust an authoritarian who’s dismissing the importance of maintaining procedure and/or protocol.
Al Franken says the first time he ever talked to Cruz was when the Texas Senator came up to him and, without any attempt at nicety or introduction, accused him and other liberals of “sophistry.” Then Cruz walked away before Franken could respond. Franken said he went home, looked up the word, thought of a proper response and approached Cruz on the Senate floor the next day. Franken describes their second conversation like this: “I said ‘Senator, yesterday you accused me and other liberals as being guilty of sophistry...’ and Cruz said ‘No I didn’t.’ and walked away.”
The ability to lie straight to your face is one of fascism’s most characteristic and relied upon resources. Had Cruz been successful, his attitude towards delaying certification would’ve changed from “no big deal” to “the greatest crisis in our nation’s history” overnight. (I think ) it was in Arizona GOP Speaker Rusty Bowers’ testimony about Rudy Giuliani that spelled it out most simply (here summarized and paraphrased, not verbatim)
Giuliani: Just tell them you want to hold up the electors because of voter fraud.
Bowers: But there’s no evidence of voter fraud.
Giuliani: Yes, but once you hold up the electors that becomes evidence of voter fraud.
Transforming an investigation for wrongdoing into proof of wrongdoing has now become a constant of the Republican Party. For example see any Fox News story about Hillary Clinton from 1994 to 2016.
As anyone who’s ever unilaterally tried to hold a relationship together knows, it doesn’t work. Both sides need to have the same goal and work together towards it for there to be any chance at success, and even then it’s not guaranteed. If one side wants out and says so, that tends to resolve things pretty quickly. It’s when one side wants out but says they want it to work, that’s when the stage is set for a horrorshow, and without putting too fine a point on it, that’s where we are today.
Even if every official who helped plan, execute and/or cover-up what happened on January 6th goes to prison (I don’t know… maybe because of some ancient curse or a magic spell or something...) I’m afraid we’re still screwed. When dealing with a faithless partner, plans that might succeed or involve cooperation will be deemed “too difficult,” “impossible” or “crazy.” Attempts to find some sort of compromise will be entertained, but will only be accepted once you’ve conceded everything that made it a compromise to begin with. (See “US Legislative History, 1993 to the Present”) (also, “Manchin, West Virginia”)
When one side is allowed to take victory whenever the scores are too close to clearly and quickly call, they’ll take victory when the scores are problematic for any reason. And once that happens, keeping scores at all will soon become impossible. In 2019, when Nancy Pelosi said Democrats needed to win big in order to actually win, it was hardly a surprise nor a new phenomenon she was just saying publicly what we’ve all known since Bush V Gore.
What it meant to “win big” was never numerically specified and thanks to Steve Bannon, we now know it wasn’t even important: Trump was going to declare himself the winner no matter what the numbers were. Looking back it seems almost quaint that we would’ve expected anything different.
I remember hearing Pelosi say we needed to win big in order to win and feeling relief at first to finally hear the rip off being acknowledged. Then rekindled anger, now that it was official, over our having allowed it at all. I remember wondering if finally acknowledging that our votes are being marginalized was intended to inspire us to redouble our efforts to get out the vote. I understood the logic, but it still seemed like a pretty melancholy battle cry.
Three years later there’s every indication we’ve got to win by even larger margins in order to win at all. I let it go the first time, but in lieu of any progress, I’d at least like to have a rough idea of the numbers involved. Like how many “extra” votes we’re going to need just to stay even, and how much we’ve gotta win by for a victory to be considered “legitimate?” Is it a thousand votes? Five thousand? Has anybody been looking into this? How many thousands of honest, hard-working people gotta stand for hours in the sun just to pad the numbers enough for the tens of thousands of other honest, hard-working people to have the elections they’ve already won be considered “legitimate” enough to actually be honored?
I’m asking this because when I was listening to Donald Trump talking on the phone with Brad Raffensberger, he was literally trying to steal an election, which nevertheless would only work if the victory was considered “legitimate.” Since the votes he was asking for were essentially imaginary and didn’t require people being registered, waiting in lines and all that, legitimizing the victory with a few thousand more votes wouldn’t have taken much, if any, extra effort. Granted, Donald J. Trump’s an extraordinarily stupid man in a vast array of human and social endeavors, but stealing shit that doesn’t belong to him isn’t one of them. So how come he felt like he only had to win by one?