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Thursday's Presidential debate revealed to the world that President Biden is mentally incompetent and that an unelected and unaccountable group of people is running the country, and likely has been running the country for some time. This unavoidable truth has likely doomed Biden's 2024 campaign. However, it has likely also struck a crippling blow against the Democrat Party's primary value proposition: "Democracy."
The Democrat's have made "Democracy" the party's core identity, its primary rhetoric, and indeed, its very reason for being. The Democrats insist that the right to vote for one's representatives is sacrosanct, that voting is "Democracy," that the country is "Democracy," and that the Democrats are "Democracy." Directly or indirectly preventing or diminishing the right to vote for the representative of one's own choosing is, according to the party, fundamentally anti-democratic. Moreover, they loudly and repeatedly insist that a vote for the Republicans is a vote "against Democracy" and will "end Democracy" in the United States. The rhetoric is existential, black and white, and leaves no room for maneuver.
Thursday's debate transformed the party's "Democracy" rhetoric into a mortal wound. If Joe Biden is mentally incompetent, then the only value of his candidacy lies in the proposition that the party will wield Biden's executive power without his knowledge or control. But, according to the Democrats, being forced to vote for an unnamed, unelected cabal of unaccountable lobbyists, bureaucrats, and special interests is no vote at all. Indeed, it is anti-democratic according to the party's own terms.
The Democrat's only argument is that "if we don't run the country anti-democratically, it will be the end of Democracy!" This is rhetorical checkmate. The Republicans and left-leaning, dissident democrats will turn the Democrat Party's super-weapon against them and there will be no escape. By jettisoning every other value but "Democracy" from the party, the Democrats have left themselves nowhere to retreat. The Republicans will use the last decade of the Democrat's own histrionic statements against them, rightly painting them as tyrants perpetrating a coup. Dissident, left-leaning Democrats will do the same, and claim the mantle of genuine "Democracy" for themselves.
Its actually, literally Joever.
I doubt it. The central thrust of the "Donald Trump wants to destroy democracy" critique is that Donald Trump tried to seize power when he lost in 2020, and nothing has changed on that front.
Can we please stop with this? This type of claim is just absurdly bad faith.
Trump attempted to use some esoteric lawfare to force a debate about the merits of election interference claims.
Until such time as Trump's supporters unstorm the capitol and Trump didn't try to have his VP declare him the winner despite losing, it seems entirely reasonable to say that Trump tried to seize power. "It was to force a debate" is just another flavor of Trumpist cope deploy to reconcile the gap between their self-image as patriotic Americans and the reality that they prioritize loyalty to their wannabe caudillo.
Trump did not try to have Pence declare him the winner.
John Eastman may have suggested to Pence that he had the authority to do this (although as far as I can tell this is hearsay), but the plan was to have Pence reject some of the electoral slates, and force a debate within the house over the merits of the fraud claims.
It has been nearly FOUR YEARS since this happened. The evidence for this is well documented, and the plan has internal coherence.
Please just spend a few minutes reading about this and try to read it with the context that the people involved aren’t stupid, and their plan wasn’t lifted from a children’s cartoon.
If the election is thrown into the House because neither side gets a majority in the Electoral College, that is the opposite of "forcing a debate over the merits of the fraud claims". The process for forcing a debate over the fraud claims is an objection to a State certificate under the rules set out in the Electoral Count Act. Such objections were made, in the cases of AZ and PA debated, and rejected in Congress on January 6/7 2021. (It was during the AZ debate that the rioters entered the Capitol building and forced an adjournment.)
The contingent election that Eastman was trying to use isn't a procedure for debating who won the Electoral College vote - it is an alternative procedure specified by the Constitution for use when it is clear that no-one won the Electoral College vote. Consistently with most of Trump's strategy, it isn't an attempt to litigate the counting of the votes cast in November, it is an attempt to throw them all out and decide the election without reference to them. (In this case, a party-line House vote with unequal weighting of votes). In fact, the simple, obvious reading of the Constitution is that it doesn't even allow a debate - the Constitution says that the House should vote "immediately".
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