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> almost failed Is there some magical switch inside the Capitol which can turn off our democracy? I really don't understand the constant hyperbole about 1/6.

by ng12 5y ago

willis936 5y ago
Yeah, it's called the entirety of congress and the peaceful transition of power. Peaceful transition of power is a fragile miracle and almost having it ripped apart is not something to downplay. Say what you will, I will live in the real world.
- ng12 5y ago
  I earnestly cannot understand what a tiny minority of people trespassing could have done to destroy anything meaningful. Our country has survived much worse. Don't forget that same building was once burned down by a hostile invading force.
  - willis936 5y ago
    Saying "tiny minority of people" is a flaccid lie. Watch the footage and stop lying. When has the country failed to have a peaceful transition of power? When has the entirety of congress been ripped apart by a mob of a thousand extremists? When has USA survived worse?
    - ng12 5y ago
      It was 2,000 people. What are you referring to? My point is that the building was literally burned down and our country bounced back to the point where most people probably don't even know it happened. There's nothing sacred about the Capitol building itself or honestly the people in it. Our collective commitment to democracy doesn't exist in a physical location.
    - seanw444 5y ago
      Ripped apart? Really? Imagine the damage if BLM had been there. And don't pretend like there isn't a long history of their extensive damages. The U.S.A. has survived literally splitting itself in half, and having a war against itself. Despite a presidential assassination. I'm pretty sure people who were videoed saying "we gotta keep it peaceful guys, we have the right to peacefully assemble" after Capitol cops told them to stay civil, are not nearly has bad of a threat.
  - beams_of_light 5y ago
    Congress was set to certify the election that day. Had the insurrection succeeded, Mike Pence likely would have been killed (remember the "hang Mike Pence" slogan?), along with Democrats in Congress. This would have allowed Trump to remain "president" indefinitely, especially because any election he wouldn't win would be "fraudulent". It was an extremely important moment for our country.
    - ryan93 5y ago
      Congress doesn’t need to be in that building to certify. How would trump have stayed president? You just glide over that part
      - willis936 5y ago
        If the executive decapitates the legislative how would the executive individual stay in power?
      - ModernMech 5y ago
        The law says what the process is on Jan 6. It is silent as to what happens if the process on Jan 6 is disrupted. There is no law that brings them back together, so if they don’t finish their job on that day, they would have entered a Constitutional grey area, a kind of hack of the electoral process system. Trump needed such a hack because the regular order would have, and did, end with him losing power. This is why Pence refused to leave the Capitol, McConnell insisted on finishing the certification that night, and Trump’s associates were furiously calling Senators to continue delaying the certification (even after the insurrection).
    - ng12 5y ago
      If they had killed Mike Pence I have absolute faith they would have been thrown in jail forever and the Speaker would have taken over his duties certifying the election. If all that's standing between us and fascism/anarchy is 2,000 people choosing to walk into the Capitol we are already lost.
      - 5y ago
vkou 5y ago
Almost half the country incorrectly believed that it won the election, as did the sitting president, and a large fraction of congress (147 Republicans, to be exact). It's trivial to tip that sort of situation into a successful coup. All you need is a convenient excuse (All electronic/late/mail-in/democratic ballots are fraud, and should be disqualified! There's a state of emergency in the capitol!). Do you think democracy just keeps working, regardless or whether or not all the mechanisms that ensure the transfer of power were carried out? If certification of the results is unnecessary, why do we do it? At what exact point is the winner of an election determined? It's not when CNN/MSNBC/FOX call the race. It's not when the last ballot gets counted. It's not when the electoral college votes. It's not when <some common sense thing> happens, because the law doesn't care about your common sense. It happens when Congress certifies the results. If Congress certifies that Mickey Mouse won the election, that's who you'll be seeing at the inauguration. If the only people voting to certify are those 147 Republicans, guess who will be getting certified? The transfer of power after an election is binary process. It either happens, or it doesn't. Any binary process, by definition, has at least one single point of failure. In the United States, one of those points of failure is certification. The transfer of power is the most important aspect of a democracy. It has to happen correctly, every single time.
- boppo1 5y ago
  > incorrectly believed that it won the election According to who? The polling companies that predicted a landslide for Hillary in '16?
- ng12 5y ago
  > Do you think democracy just keeps working, regardless or whether or not all the mechanisms that ensure the transfer of power were carried out? As long as they happen in a relatively timely manner, as they were in this case. Our democracy does not live in a building, there is no switch to turn it off. The Capitol Building and everyone in it could disappear in a wormhole and I'm confident we would retain our democracy, logistical nightmare aside.
ModernMech 5y ago
Yes, actually. Well, I think the better question is this: is there some magical switch that stops power-hungry people, endorsed by the President of the United States, from seizing extraconstitutional power? The answer is no. The coup plot has been confessed to already on live TV by one of the coup plotters. They even gave their plan a name: the "Green Bay Sweep" 1. No matter the outcome, claim victory. In the event of an electoral loss, claim fraud ad nauseum. The former President began this campaign on election night before all votes were even counted. 2. Begin a campaign of discrediting the election results. By the time the race was called for Biden, the former President refused to concede and claimed the election was rigged. He has persisted with this claim to this very day. 3. Use the pretense of a fraudulent election to overturn states results. A pressure campaign mounted to overturn election results in a number of states. It was directed at local elections officials all the way up to US attorneys, Secretaries of State, and the Governor of Georgia. 4. Use overturned state elections results to try to cause a contested election. This is the scenario where neither candidate reaches 270 votes, and the decision is sent back to the House of Representatives. In this scenario, the House delegates get one vote per state delegation. Since Republicans hold the majority of state delegations, they could install Trump as president despite the fact that he lost fair and square. The question is, how do you get to a contested election? Well, there's a process, but the hope of the Green Bay Sweep was that Pence would just unilaterally do it himself, but he needed a pretext. Hence the legal campaign, but it lost 62/63 legal cases so that didn't work. There was also a pressure campaign on the AG, but he didn't budge -- Bill Bar claimed there was no evidence of fraud and quit before he could be fired. They attempted to install a Trump loyalist Jeffry Clark who would claim there was evidence of fraud, but the entire senior leadership at DOJ threatened to quit if that were to have happened, which would have ruined the pretense. There was the likely criminal effort the former President took to threaten the governor of GA with prosecution if he didn't doctor the election results to favor Trump. That failed as well. The lack of concrete evidence of fraud did not deter this pressure campaign. Eventually the White House wanted Pence to decertify the election results even without a pretext. They wanted him to flatly assert nebulous and unspecific fraud occurred in PA, MI, WI, AZ, and GA, and that the electoral votes for those states should be thrown out. While the campaign to find evidence failed (because there was none to find), there were still GOP members of the House and Senate willing to go along with the plan if Pence would do his part of refusing to certify the contested states. During the counting of the certificates, objections were raised by GOP Rep. Gosar, and GOP Senator Cruz when AZ was called. This turned the counting of the votes from a perfunctory ceremony that would take a few minutes of counting 50 pages, into a 2 hour debate as to the merits of their claim. They had planned to do this for all contested states, for a total of 10 hours of delay. Given the makeup of the House and Senate at the time, each objection was doomed to fail, but their purpose was to buy time. Why did they have to buy time? To give Trump the opportunity to incite the mob, which he did masterfully along with his son, Mo Brooks, and Rudy Giuliani who urged "trial by combat". At this point there were two ways to get to a contested election. (1) Pence plays his role and baselessly denies certification, assume powers that are not granted to him by the Constitution or any law. (2) Completely circumvent the certification and try to get friendly states to send alternate slates of electors. But by the morning of Jan 6, Pence had already made up his mind and informed Trump that he intended to certify the results. This had taken (1) off the table before the join session even began in the eyes of senior White House leadership. This meant that (2) was the only option left to prevent Joe Biden from becoming the president elect on Jan 6. Delaying the counting of the vote certificates represented a sort of buffer overflow attach on the electoral process: The Jan 6 certification is the last step in the process, there's nothing on the books about what to do if that isn't finalized on Jan 6. Hence the mob. The hope was that the mob would cause so much disruptions that the entire Congress and VP would be sent to safe locations. At this point, the entire government would be in extraconstitutional territory (a sort of buffer overflow for democracy), where a raw exercise of power cannot be put in check by laws (none are written to cover this scenario). In such a situation, the winner is usually who can convince the most people with the most power to go along with their version of events. It's lucky we didn't get there, because all it would have taken would be the right group of a few people to decide to overturn the decision of the democratic process in favor of their preferred electoral outcome. Think of it this way: On Jan 7, 2021, the Constitution prescribed that Joe Biden was to have been certified President Elect of the United States the day before. If on the morning of Jan 7 he wasn't President Elect, that would have represented a step away from the Constitution, democracy, and the rule of law. Maybe the country can step back in line with the Constitution after that, but maybe not. Maybe it takes one further step. And another. How many steps away from the Constitutional order does it take before it's impossible to come back?

> almost failed Is there some magical switch inside the Capitol which can turn off our democracy? I really don't understand the constant hyperbole about 1/6.

by ng12 5y ago

> almost failed Is there some magical switch inside the Capitol which can turn off our democracy? I really don't understand the constant hyperbole about 1/6.

willis936 5y ago

Yeah, it's called the entirety of congress and the peaceful transition of power. Peaceful transition of power is a fragile miracle and almost having it ripped apart is not something to downplay. Say what you will, I will live in the real world.

ng12 5y ago
I earnestly cannot understand what a tiny minority of people trespassing could have done to destroy anything meaningful. Our country has survived much worse. Don't forget that same building was once burned down by a hostile invading force.
- willis936 5y ago
  Saying "tiny minority of people" is a flaccid lie. Watch the footage and stop lying. When has the country failed to have a peaceful transition of power? When has the entirety of congress been ripped apart by a mob of a thousand extremists? When has USA survived worse?
  - ng12 5y ago
    It was 2,000 people. What are you referring to? My point is that the building was literally burned down and our country bounced back to the point where most people probably don't even know it happened. There's nothing sacred about the Capitol building itself or honestly the people in it. Our collective commitment to democracy doesn't exist in a physical location.
  - seanw444 5y ago
    Ripped apart? Really? Imagine the damage if BLM had been there. And don't pretend like there isn't a long history of their extensive damages. The U.S.A. has survived literally splitting itself in half, and having a war against itself. Despite a presidential assassination. I'm pretty sure people who were videoed saying "we gotta keep it peaceful guys, we have the right to peacefully assemble" after Capitol cops told them to stay civil, are not nearly has bad of a threat.
- beams_of_light 5y ago
  Congress was set to certify the election that day. Had the insurrection succeeded, Mike Pence likely would have been killed (remember the "hang Mike Pence" slogan?), along with Democrats in Congress. This would have allowed Trump to remain "president" indefinitely, especially because any election he wouldn't win would be "fraudulent". It was an extremely important moment for our country.
  - ryan93 5y ago
    Congress doesn’t need to be in that building to certify. How would trump have stayed president? You just glide over that part
    - willis936 5y ago
      If the executive decapitates the legislative how would the executive individual stay in power?
    - ModernMech 5y ago
      The law says what the process is on Jan 6. It is silent as to what happens if the process on Jan 6 is disrupted. There is no law that brings them back together, so if they don’t finish their job on that day, they would have entered a Constitutional grey area, a kind of hack of the electoral process system. Trump needed such a hack because the regular order would have, and did, end with him losing power. This is why Pence refused to leave the Capitol, McConnell insisted on finishing the certification that night, and Trump’s associates were furiously calling Senators to continue delaying the certification (even after the insurrection).
  - ng12 5y ago
    If they had killed Mike Pence I have absolute faith they would have been thrown in jail forever and the Speaker would have taken over his duties certifying the election. If all that's standing between us and fascism/anarchy is 2,000 people choosing to walk into the Capitol we are already lost.
    - 5y ago

vkou 5y ago

Almost half the country incorrectly believed that it won the election, as did the sitting president, and a large fraction of congress (147 Republicans, to be exact). It's trivial to tip that sort of situation into a successful coup. All you need is a convenient excuse (All electronic/late/mail-in/democratic ballots are fraud, and should be disqualified! There's a state of emergency in the capitol!). Do you think democracy just keeps working, regardless or whether or not all the mechanisms that ensure the transfer of power were carried out? If certification of the results is unnecessary, why do we do it? At what exact point is the winner of an election determined? It's not when CNN/MSNBC/FOX call the race. It's not when the last ballot gets counted. It's not when the electoral college votes. It's not when <some common sense thing> happens, because the law doesn't care about your common sense. It happens when Congress certifies the results. If Congress certifies that Mickey Mouse won the election, that's who you'll be seeing at the inauguration. If the only people voting to certify are those 147 Republicans, guess who will be getting certified? The transfer of power after an election is binary process. It either happens, or it doesn't. Any binary process, by definition, has at least one single point of failure. In the United States, one of those points of failure is certification. The transfer of power is the most important aspect of a democracy. It has to happen correctly, every single time.

boppo1 5y ago
> incorrectly believed that it won the election According to who? The polling companies that predicted a landslide for Hillary in '16?
ng12 5y ago
> Do you think democracy just keeps working, regardless or whether or not all the mechanisms that ensure the transfer of power were carried out? As long as they happen in a relatively timely manner, as they were in this case. Our democracy does not live in a building, there is no switch to turn it off. The Capitol Building and everyone in it could disappear in a wormhole and I'm confident we would retain our democracy, logistical nightmare aside.

ModernMech 5y ago

Yes, actually. Well, I think the better question is this: is there some magical switch that stops power-hungry people, endorsed by the President of the United States, from seizing extraconstitutional power? The answer is no. The coup plot has been confessed to already on live TV by one of the coup plotters. They even gave their plan a name: the "Green Bay Sweep" 1. No matter the outcome, claim victory. In the event of an electoral loss, claim fraud ad nauseum. The former President began this campaign on election night before all votes were even counted. 2. Begin a campaign of discrediting the election results. By the time the race was called for Biden, the former President refused to concede and claimed the election was rigged. He has persisted with this claim to this very day. 3. Use the pretense of a fraudulent election to overturn states results. A pressure campaign mounted to overturn election results in a number of states. It was directed at local elections officials all the way up to US attorneys, Secretaries of State, and the Governor of Georgia. 4. Use overturned state elections results to try to cause a contested election. This is the scenario where neither candidate reaches 270 votes, and the decision is sent back to the House of Representatives. In this scenario, the House delegates get one vote per state delegation. Since Republicans hold the majority of state delegations, they could install Trump as president despite the fact that he lost fair and square. The question is, how do you get to a contested election? Well, there's a process, but the hope of the Green Bay Sweep was that Pence would just unilaterally do it himself, but he needed a pretext. Hence the legal campaign, but it lost 62/63 legal cases so that didn't work. There was also a pressure campaign on the AG, but he didn't budge -- Bill Bar claimed there was no evidence of fraud and quit before he could be fired. They attempted to install a Trump loyalist Jeffry Clark who would claim there was evidence of fraud, but the entire senior leadership at DOJ threatened to quit if that were to have happened, which would have ruined the pretense. There was the likely criminal effort the former President took to threaten the governor of GA with prosecution if he didn't doctor the election results to favor Trump. That failed as well. The lack of concrete evidence of fraud did not deter this pressure campaign. Eventually the White House wanted Pence to decertify the election results even without a pretext. They wanted him to flatly assert nebulous and unspecific fraud occurred in PA, MI, WI, AZ, and GA, and that the electoral votes for those states should be thrown out. While the campaign to find evidence failed (because there was none to find), there were still GOP members of the House and Senate willing to go along with the plan if Pence would do his part of refusing to certify the contested states. During the counting of the certificates, objections were raised by GOP Rep. Gosar, and GOP Senator Cruz when AZ was called. This turned the counting of the votes from a perfunctory ceremony that would take a few minutes of counting 50 pages, into a 2 hour debate as to the merits of their claim. They had planned to do this for all contested states, for a total of 10 hours of delay. Given the makeup of the House and Senate at the time, each objection was doomed to fail, but their purpose was to buy time. Why did they have to buy time? To give Trump the opportunity to incite the mob, which he did masterfully along with his son, Mo Brooks, and Rudy Giuliani who urged "trial by combat". At this point there were two ways to get to a contested election. (1) Pence plays his role and baselessly denies certification, assume powers that are not granted to him by the Constitution or any law. (2) Completely circumvent the certification and try to get friendly states to send alternate slates of electors. But by the morning of Jan 6, Pence had already made up his mind and informed Trump that he intended to certify the results. This had taken (1) off the table before the join session even began in the eyes of senior White House leadership. This meant that (2) was the only option left to prevent Joe Biden from becoming the president elect on Jan 6. Delaying the counting of the vote certificates represented a sort of buffer overflow attach on the electoral process: The Jan 6 certification is the last step in the process, there's nothing on the books about what to do if that isn't finalized on Jan 6. Hence the mob. The hope was that the mob would cause so much disruptions that the entire Congress and VP would be sent to safe locations. At this point, the entire government would be in extraconstitutional territory (a sort of buffer overflow for democracy), where a raw exercise of power cannot be put in check by laws (none are written to cover this scenario). In such a situation, the winner is usually who can convince the most people with the most power to go along with their version of events. It's lucky we didn't get there, because all it would have taken would be the right group of a few people to decide to overturn the decision of the democratic process in favor of their preferred electoral outcome. Think of it this way: On Jan 7, 2021, the Constitution prescribed that Joe Biden was to have been certified President Elect of the United States the day before. If on the morning of Jan 7 he wasn't President Elect, that would have represented a step away from the Constitution, democracy, and the rule of law. Maybe the country can step back in line with the Constitution after that, but maybe not. Maybe it takes one further step. And another. How many steps away from the Constitutional order does it take before it's impossible to come back?