Will They Ever Get Past Arizona? A Note on 'Impeachment' 2.0
Cui bono.
With the second ‘impeachment’ of Donald Trump underway, perhaps it is worth noting at least one strange thing about ‘the Capitol storming’. The original intention of that day, let us recall, was that Congress would count the results of the Electoral College vote but also, crucially, consider and debate any legal problems on a state-by-state basis. This was, in other words, no mere count.1
Part of the argument of ‘impeachment’ and of ‘the official narrative’ is that ‘the mob’ invaded the Capitol ‘in a failed attempt to overturn his [Trumps’] defeat in the 2020 presidential election’. What is strange is that the ‘insurrection’ ended up providing a perfect pretext for choosing not to do anything but pass the election result as it was, ignoring many outstanding legal challenges.
In this sense, Trump is effectively ‘being impeached’ for ‘inciting’ a situation which made it possible to bypass all the legal problems that still exist with the results of 2020.
When the session resumed mere hours after the ‘invasion’, Chuck Schumer was the first up and within minutes was on-script for everything to come in the following month, ‘domestic terrorists’, ‘a group of thugs’, ‘our sacred duty’. Oklahoma Senator James Lankford, the next to speak after that, said, ‘obviously the commission that we have asked for is not going to happen at this point’. Note: the ‘commission’ that Lankford said was not going to happen was the consideration of the many outstanding legal problems with vote counts.
Trump ally Kelly Loeffler and others then also dropped plans to object to Biden’s apparent electoral college win. ‘The events that have transpired today have forced me to reconsider, and I cannot now, in good conscience, object to the certification of these electors’, Loeffler said to applause on the Senate floor.
The question is cui bono, who benefited? It was certainly not Trump or ‘the mob’. If their aim was to overturn the defeat in the 2020 presidential election, then their intervention had the very opposite effect, giving the perfect, emotional (pathos not logos) excuse for discontinuing the legal process that was underway, and meaning that the vote was never counted accorded to actual procedure.
In other words, they were going alphabetically through the states and they never got past Arizona. Wasn’t that the point?
As was the case with the vote count in 2017. See for example here, where Kyle Cheney writes that the joint session of Congress is ‘a legally required—and typically ceremonial—event to ratify the results of the presidential election. But members are permitted to challenge the validity of electoral votes, and for just the fourth time since 1877, they did so.’ Nancy Pelosi commented at the time, ‘Quite frankly, there’s nothing they [the objectors] could say in there that would be an overstatement of the reasons why we should have a floor discussion. But the fact is you can’t do it on a one-house basis.’ Also see here.