Start eating the votes of Black people

The Electoral College has confirmed Joe Biden’s win and Moscow Mitch has accepted the result. So the coup attempt is over? Probably not. Laura Clawson of Daily Kos reported there are still Republicans urging on the nasty guy:

North Carolina state Sen. Bob Steinburg, insisting that the Supreme Court ruled against Trump’s efforts to overturn the election result because “somebody’s got something” on the justices (all of them, apparently!), called on Trump to “declare a national emergency,” “invoke the Insurrection Act,” and suspend habeas corpus. A coup, in other words, although Steinburg claims that he’s fighting an actual coup.

Virginia state Sen. Amanda Chase wrote a smaller version in a Facebook post. Clawson concluded:

Trump will push it as far as he thinks he can get away with. Steinburg and Chase are telling him he can get away with a full-on coup.

Elie Mystal, writing for The Nation, disputes the idea that our robust democratic institutions withstood the attempted coup and won. Mystal wrote:

Trump failed to steal the election because he and his legal team are incompetent criminals, not because our democratic institutions defeated him. Saying that our democracy proved resilient against Republican attempts at subversion is like saying the fences at Jurassic Park proved resilient against raptors. Yes, technically Trump kept getting zapped on the electrified fence that is the federal judiciary. But his willingness to try—and the willingness of large swaths of the Republican Party to help him—shows that if the guardrails give way for even a moment, Republicans will break out and start eating the votes of Black people. This election witnessed new and destructive attempts by the GOP to win: Instead of merely trying to suppress the votes of Black people, the party tried to nullify those votes altogether. In predominately Black city after predominately Black city, Republicans urged courts, state boards of elections, and secretaries of state to throw away ballots cast by legitimately registered voters on the basis of “voter fraud.” They offered no evidence for these allegations but expected officials to throw out literally hundreds of thousands of votes anyway.

In just Michigan there was the Wayne County Board of Canvassers, two of whom refused to certify the election, then did, then tried to rescind their certification. There was the Michigan state Board Of Canvassers, one of whom abstained. And there were the 126 GOP House members who seditiously signed on to the Texas case that the Supreme Court dropped.

This election revealed an entire network of functionaries who were captured and corrupted by Trump and were willing to help him steal the election. Who knew that the postmaster general could be turned into a weapon against democracy? Who would have thought that the head of the General Services Administration was such a weak and craven partisan? How many officials would Trump have fired if they stood in his way, as he did with cybersecurity chief Chris Krebs after he dared to tell people that the election was secure?

The rejection of the incompetent nasty guy lawsuits doesn’t mean future courts will also reject them.

The next phase of the Republican project to own our electoral system is now clear. Having seen the obstacles to throwing out the votes of Black people, conservative law professors and their Federalist Society coconspirators can be expected to start cranking out legal justifications to do just that. … I do not think the institutions held during this election; I think Trump just got whupped beyond the point that the corrupted institutions could save him. Next time, we might not be so lucky.

Ben Franklin tweeted:

as long as Trump et al refuse to concede the election and are scheming ways to overturn it, it's a contested election. when either they concede the election or biden is in office, I will then consider the election resolved (even if Trump et al continue to claim they won) and then we can take a deep breath I think as long as we live in a country where there's an open sedition movement ongoing for which no one is getting punished, it's not unreasonable to say that the rule of law isn't exactly alive and kicking and can be relied on to definitively guide what happens next.

Bill in Portland, Maine, writing his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos quoted an article from Bloomberg that discussed a paper by David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King’s College London. They found that tax cuts to the rich over the last 50 years did little to promote jobs or growth. Trickle down economics don’t deliver the effects proponents have claimed. Bill in Portland included a little diagram that explains trickle down economic. In the top of the diagram, under a heading of “How we’re told it works,” is a pyramid of wine glasses. As wine fills the glass at the top the wine overflows to fill the glasses below it. Those fill and overflow to fill the glasses below them. In the bottom of the diagram, under a heading of “What actually happens,” is the same pyramid. As wine is poured in the top glass grows larger to hold all that is put into it. Nothing overflows to fill the glasses below it. Mark Sumner of Kos tackled the idea of herd immunity against the coronavirus. He went through the math (so we don’t have to) to conclude that to achieve herd immunity would cause an overload and collapse of our health care system and result in tens of millions of deaths. Herd immunity means that enough people in the society have gotten the virus and recovered that the virus doesn’t have enough uninfected people to allow it to keep propagating and it dies out. Sumner concluded that reaching for herd immunity

isn’t just a bad policy, but an impossible policy that cannot help but kill millions without ever reaching the described goal.

Sumner pulled in an article from Politico which reported on Paul Alexander, a senior advisor in Health and Human Services who tried to censor Dr. Fauci. Sumner wrote:

But, as Politico reports, it turns out that Alexander did far more than just kill Americans by depriving them of the information they needed to keep themselves and their families safe. He also pushed for killing more Americans directly. In a series of emails, Alexander declares “there is no other way” to deal with COVID-19 than pushing Americans to get infected so that we can achieve herd immunity. "Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle aged with no conditions etc. have zero to little risk … so we use them to develop herd … we want them infected …" We want them infected.

Since Alexander was appointed directly by the nasty guy, Sumner concluded:

Donald Trump has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans who didn’t need to die in this pandemic. But it seems that he didn’t kill nearly as many as he wanted.