by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
While I doubt any effort to get Mike Pence to nullify the Electoral College votes in Congress will work, they’re likely to try. It’s possible that Pence might simply refuse to be on TV announcing that Trump has lost. As such, it’s my impression that the certification of votes by state governors will work if Pence isn’t willing to do his job.
But him doing this would be so destabilizing that there could be significant political violence. It seems to me that the goal of such a gambit would be to box SCOTUS into a up or down partisan vote. House Trump believes its best bet for success is to force a situation whereby SCOTUS decides the election like they did in 2000.
The disturbing thing about this gambit for me is not so much that it will work as it is what happens when it doesn’t. Right now, Trump has hope that he might steal the election — which he could have done very easily if he had done any autocratic prep work instead of playing golf — and when he doesn’t have that hope anymore, he may YOLO it.
As such, for about two weeks, Trump could be totally unhinged as it begins to sink in that he will, in fact, have to leave office.
So if we manage to get past a Pence Coup on Jan 6th, we have to deal with Trump decompensating and maybe even blackmailing the United States with his near-absolute ability to launch nuclear weapons.
