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 S

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?