"Senator Sasse calls effort to overturn Electoral College vote a ‘dangerous ploy’" by John Wagner and Rosalind S. Helderman Washington Post, December 31, 2020
Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, called the effort in Congress to reverse President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory a ’'dangerous ploy,’' underscoring the challenge President Trump faces in persuading even members of his own party to join it.
In an open letter to constituents, Sasse wrote that there is no evidence of fraud so widespread that it could change the results and said he has urged his colleagues to reject “a project to overturn the election.”
“All the clever arguments and rhetorical gymnastics in the world won’t change the fact that this January 6th effort is designed to disenfranchise millions of Americans simply because they voted for someone in a different party,” Sasse wrote on Facebook shortly before midnight on Wednesday. “We ought to be better than that.”
His letter followed Wednesday’s announcement by Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, that he will object next week when Congress convenes to certify the Electoral College vote, a move that will force a contentious floor debate that top Senate Republicans had hoped to avoid.
Trump has repeatedly and falsely suggested that the ceremonial milestone offers a last-ditch way to reverse the election results and is urging Republicans to join his bid.
As he pursues his strategy, Trump departed his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, where he had been spending the holidays, to return to Washington on Thursday, earlier than scheduled. He did not speak to reporters before boarding Air Force One or upon returning to the White House.
I wouldn't speak to them either if I were him, and it really is no never mind. Trump warp-speeded the noxious vaccines so I take all the talk of saving the Republic and free and fair elections with a grain of salt. We have already lost the things he is supposed to preserve and unless he does a Lincoln and declares martial law, something I do not want in any event, he's gone.
Why did he let it get this far anyway, and if he is/was impotent to do anything then what good was he?
I know, just wait to more weeks and he will nail them (been hearing that for four years, and what difference does it really make as to which branch of genocidal Jewry rules us? It's all a contrived farce and $hit $how for the public to distract from the abominable agenda being rolled out beneath him).
Sasse has been far more willing to criticize Trump than most of his GOP colleagues, but even so, his staunch opposition highlights the nearly certain futility of the president’s efforts to hang onto power.
To succeed, Trump would not only have to prevail in the Republican-led Senate but also in the House, which is controlled by Democrats.
Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, and other leading Republicans had discouraged their members from challenging the Electoral College vote, conceding that the move would fail but could drag out the process through lengthy debate and, ultimately, force their members to take an awkward vote.
God forbid they take an "awkward" vote and actually have to stand for something and make their position clear!
Several House Republicans have said they plan to object to certifying the Electoral College votes of some states Biden won, and Hawley became the first senator to commit to signing on to the effort.
No Democrat did in 2000, remember?
Given the narrow majority in the Senate, Trump would need to convince nearly every Republican in the chamber to side with him. Several have already acknowledged Biden as the president-elect. On Wednesday, Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, said she wouldn’t join the effort “unless there is a some very unexpected revelation that I cannot imagine that would occur.”
The senators are torn over Trump’s Electoral College challenge of Biden and don't know what to do, and the Trumptards are saying he has got the goods and will present them on January 6.
In his letter, Sasse says there is a constitutional basis for what is being attempted but that it is “absolutely not” warranted in this case. “For President-Elect Biden’s 306-232 Electoral College victory to be overturned, President Trump would need to flip multiple states,” Sasse wrote, “but not a single state is in legal doubt.”
You don't expect them to actually follow the Constitution, do you?
More than 90 federal and state judges have rejected challenges to the November vote, notably finding allegations of fraud to be without merit.
Proving that the joodicial wing of this country is completely compromised.
Sasse wrote in his letter that his GOP colleagues realize what is happening but fear crossing the president and his supporters.
Why?
He will soon be consigned to the dustbin of history.
“When we talk in private, I haven’t heard a single Congressional Republican allege that the election results were fraudulent — not one,” he said. “Instead, I hear them talk about their worries about how they will ‘look’” to President Trump’s most ardent supporters.
They can't holler fraud or else their own election is called into question!
On Wednesday, critics charged that Hawley was seeking to ingratiate himself with Trump’s political base as Hawley considers a possible 2024 presidential run of his own. In a television appearance Wednesday night, Hawley sought to dismiss that argument.
On Thursday, Senator Lindsey Graham said he’ll listen to Hawley’s objection to the certification of Electoral College votes for Biden but doubts it will succeed.
“Senator Hawley has every right to object,” Graham, of South Carolina, said in an interview on Fox News Thursday, “but it’s another thing to overturn an election of another state.”
Graham, one of Trump’s most loyal supporters in the Senate, said for Hawley to win his support to throw out any state’s election results “you’re going to have to prove to me that the allegations you make are real.”
That's where the print copy ended it, and the evidence is vast and voluminous. Graham and others simply refuse to look at it and dismiss it out-of-hand.
“If dead people were voting, I want the names,” Graham said. “If you’re going to retry the case in the Senate that’s already been tried in the federal courts it would be hard for me to basically take over the federal courts’ role, but I will listen and we’ll see how it comes out.”
Graham pointed out that former Democratic senator Barbara Boxer’s effort to object to electors in 2004 ended with her only getting one vote in the chamber — her own.
In his letter, Sasse argued that politics is driving the effort.
“Let’s be clear what is happening here: We have a bunch of ambitious politicians who think there’s a quick way to tap into the president’s populist base without doing any real, long-term damage,” Sasse said, “but they’re wrong - and this issue is bigger than anyone’s personal ambitions. Adults don’t point a loaded gun at the heart of legitimate self-government.”
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Related:
The chicken won't call out the COVID hoax and is trying to use it to gain votes, or was this the medical tyrants way of getting him off the campaign trail?
The two runoffs in Georgia Tuesday will decide which party controls the Senate and, thus, how far President-elect Joe Biden can reach legislatively on issues such as the pandemic, health care, taxation, energy, and the environment as the Secret Service makes some staff changes in the detail that will guard Biden, bringing back a handful of senior agents whom Biden knows well and can be trusted to keep their mouths shut.
No administration from either party has ever prevented its successor from meeting with OMB staff, and Biden's inauguration will include a memorial to virus victims with lights ringing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
Someone better tell Bill Galvin so he can rest easy, and the Globe is of the idea that Biden should kick the door to thousands of refugees open as the GOP chooses power over democracy (then why are they losing it!?) and as Biden could redefine what it means to be ‘a Catholic in good standing,’ according to Michelle Boorstein of the Wa$hington Compo$t.
Maybe Trump can pardon him and the decorated Marine convicted of murder in Vietnam.
It was held on a record day for COVID-19 deaths as he bowed at the foot of the mountain.
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
The Globe's page A1 lead this morning:
The Senate wrapped up a rare New Year’s Day session with Republicans rejecting President Trump’s demand for $2,000 COVID-19 aid checks and overriding his veto of a sweeping defense bill, an unusual one-two rebuke at the end of a chaotic Congress.
Also see:
Those come ahead of the endless and fruitless peace talks, and the incidents sure have the stink of false flags.
The New York Times says the Defense Department is sending mixed messages as Iraq explosives experts work to defuse a mine on an oil tanker.
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
At least he gave all the $wamp creatures a raise for the new year:
"Federal employees to receive 1 percent pay raise under Trump executive order" by Eric Yoder, Washington Post, Jan. 1, 2021
Almost all federal employees will receive a 1 percent raise under an order President Trump issued late Thursday that ends months of back-and-forth over pay for the 2.1 million executive branch workers.
You aren't getting a chump change $2000 check, but the bureaucracy of the Deep $tate is!
Wow!
The executive order finalizes Trump’s original proposal early in 2020 for a 1 percent boost for employees under the General Schedule pay system, which applies to most white-collar federal employees.
The increase, to take effect Sunday with the start of the first biweekly federal pay period of the year, will be paid across the board to General Schedule employees, in contrast with the previous raises paid under the Trump administration, which varied somewhat by locality.
While a separate pay system, also locality-based, applies to blue-collar employees, for many years their increases have been capped at the local General Schedule amount. The budget bill that Trump signed into law Sunday continued that policy for 2021.
That turkey was $tuffed with all sorts of $hit, wasn't it?
That measure took no position regarding a raise, in effect backing the 1 percent amount in Trump’s budget proposal in February. Under the complex federal pay law, if no number is enacted into law by the end of a year, the White House’s proposed raise takes effect automatically; however, the outcome was uncertain because the administration in the meantime had advocated for a freeze, citing “budgetary constraints and the recent, pandemic-related impacts on non-Federal labor markets.”
The raise will be the smallest of the four paid under the Trump administration. The order will increase to $172,500 a salary cap that applies to employees in the uppermost levels of the General Schedule in some areas, including the Washington-Baltimore area. For most career executives and others at senior career levels, a cap of $199,300 will apply; most of them are paid within a range and receive raises based on performance ratings.
Maybe that will keep them quiet, huh?
The raise will not apply to senior political appointees nor to U.S. Postal Service employees, whose pay is determined in bargaining.
A separate cost-of-living adjustment of 1.3 percent will be paid to most federal retirees effective this month, the same increase going to Social Security beneficiaries and military retirees. That increase was determined in October based on an inflation measure.
The executive order also finalizes a 3 percent raise for active-duty military personnel contained in the recently enacted budget bill, effective Jan. 1.....
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Related:
I'd say like pigs at the trough, but that would be insultingly disrespectful to pigs and troughs.
UPDATE:
Maybe something is going on after all.
