UPDATE -- Donald J. Trump’s ongoing coup faces myriad legal issues beyond Democrats’ quixotic attempt to get elections regulation reform passed in the Senate.
The New York attorney general’s office Monday issued subpoenas to former first children Ivanka Trump and Donald Jr. for testimony as part of a civil investigation of the Trump Organization’s business practices. Donald Sr. is suing the New York AG in an attempt to block his subpoena in the case, and his children also filed to quash the subpoenas. The Trump family may be busy in court such that they’ll be distracted from promulgating the false narrative of a “stolen” election.
Members of the January 6 House Select Committee took to last Sunday morning’s news shows to say they had “firsthand testimony” confirming that Donald J. Trump watched the Capitol insurrection on television as his allies – including daughter Ivanka – tried to get him to put a stop to the “Stop the Steal” riot (per WaPo).
Speaking of The Washington Post, in a joint investigation with ProPublica, the newspaper reported Tuesday that “Facebook groups swelled with at least 650,000 posts attacking the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory between Election Day and the January 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol .…” Perhaps it is worth noting that there are some 3.1-million people who are a part of the WWE Monday Night Raw Facebook group.
That won’t happen here. Voice your opinion civilly on the column, pro or con, on whether “The Trump Coup Must be Stopped” below, by emailing your comments to editors@thehustings.news and let us know whether you are “left” or “right.”
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The Trump Coup Must be Stopped
By Todd Lassa
Turns out January 6 was more than a “dress rehearsal” [https://thehustings.news/was-january-6-a-dress-rehearsal/.] Donald J. Trump’s “next coup” has already begun, Barton Gellman writes in The Atlantic. Consider how the former president has maintained control of the GOP while so many never-Trump Republicans will retire from Congress next year, and it seems more like we are in the middle of one long coup that began with the 45th president’s pre-emptive warnings that a November 2020 re-election loss would be certain evidence of voter fraud.
Much could happen in time to defeat a November 2024 completion of the coup. A New York State court is conducting a criminal investigation into the Trump Organization alleging fraud, falsified business records, grand larceny and scheming to defraud the government. And, of course, there is the House of Representatives Select Committee investigating the January 6 insurrection. Critics worry already that the seven Democrats and two Republicans on the panel are not moving quickly enough before next November’s midterms, where a flipped House, putting the GOP in charge, would immediately dismantle the investigation.
As we head into Congress’ December holiday recess, the House has voted to recommend the Justice Department charge Trump’s fourth chief of staff, Mark Meadows, for contempt of Congress. The select panel wants to get its hands on a PowerPoint that Meadows put together January 5 entitled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference and Options for 6JAN.”
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), member of the select committee, has released to the press an edited, anonymous January 5 text to Meadows calling on then-Vice President Mike Pence on January 6 to “call out all electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all.”
Alt-right online publication The Federalist, in criticizing Schiff for “altering” the text, revealed its source as one of Trump’s biggest supporters on Capitol Hill, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH). The alt-right online publication traces the text’s origins to a memo from former Defense Department Inspector General Joseph Schmitz, who wrote, in part: “If The Navarro Report is correct, that ‘From the findings of this report, it is possible to infer what may well have been a coordinated strategy to effectively stack the election deck against the Trump-Pence ticket,’ including documented ‘Equal Protection Clause Violations in the six Battleground States’ the Vice President has a sacred duty NOT to acknowledge electors from those six still-disputed States.”
Yes, a tortuous argument predicated on the ramblings of Peter Navarro, Trump administration assistant to the president, director of trade and manufacturing policy, and the national Defense Production Act policy coordinator. Navarro is presently dodging a subpoena from a House committee investigating the Trump administration’s response to COVID.
In justifying such Electoral College machinations, many hard-right conservatives and Constitutional originalists have argued that the United States is a republic, not a democracy. It serves as a key argument for retaining the Electoral College over the popular vote and for retaining the Senate filibuster. Consider that state legislators chose U.S. senators until the 17th Amendment to the Constitution handed that over to the popular vote in 1913, seven years before women got the right to vote.
Since January 6, Republican-majority state houses have introduced stiff election restrictions limiting or eliminating mail-in ballots and absentee voting, but also shifting Electoral College count certification from independent and non-partisan election administrators and giving the responsibility to those same partisan legislators.
Democratic Party leaders, and more vociferously never-Trumper ex-Republicans, have begun sounding the alarm that these new election laws will be used to re-elect Donald J. Trump to the presidency in November 2024.
A successful Trump coup would not restore a democratic republic, but rather, an authoritarian government.
To those who still support Trump and his presidency, this might seem slanted analysis for what should be a more objective center column. We feel it is part of our mission to fight for democracy and against what, by all accounts, appears to be an anti-democratic coup by the former president and his lackeys.
Tell us why we are right or wrong.