The Coup of 2024 A Clarification

The 12th Amendment and the coming coup.

It’s my 89th birthday today. I hate having to pen the analysis that follows: but truth is truth.

The Coup d’Etat of 2024 is actually unlikely to follow the path most of us are expecting, and preparing to resist: by sending hundreds of lawyers into the key states to protect the right to vote, as uniformed thugs empowered by the state legislatures try to prevent them from exercising it. But really, will the GOP destroyers manage to find 81,000 votes in Pennsylvania, or 155,000 in Michigan by cutting down effective Democratic turnout? The other three states that went Republican by close votes–Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin–will not produce enough electoral votes to get from Biden’s 306 to the necessary 269 (or tie vote). One of the two more populous states will have to go to the GOP by overturning those 2020 margins–and find them with a truthful final count.

That will all be very difficult. But it’s not how the coup is going to be brought about, as the would-be coupmeisters are planning it. Their ultimate guideline is not in the counting of votes, but in the reporting of them.

The plan–quite visible in its current applications–is not merely to falsify the results of the vote but to pervert and destroy the election itself, so that no legitimate outcome can be obtained through the uncertainties of the Electoral College: which produced a Democratic victory in 2020.

This is the hidden meaning of the often manifestly ridiculous complaints about vote totals, all of which have been thrown out unceremoniously by angry judges. The purpose of the unending campaign against that election, which has now been adopted by all ground-level Republican officials and spokespersons, is to discredit the system in the minds of Republican voters. As Jelani Cobb writes in The New Yorker (October 11), “The point… is not so much to delegitimize the past election as it is to normalize specious reviews of future ones–including, perhaps, a 2024 race in which Trump’s name is on the ballot.”

From the very beginning Trump has said he could not lose an “honest” election, and therefore any contrary result must be based on Democratic “cheating.” And it has worked–registered Republicans now agree that the election was “rigged” by a huge majority in recent polls–and that, therefore, they system is indeed untrustworthy and must be repudiated.

How can that be accomplished? This is where the 12th Amendment comes in. To see how the coup is expected to work, we have to look at that Amendment.

Oy!
The 12th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is probably
the most bizarre document ever to define a crucial political process. In fact. it’s so difficult to comprehend that if you Google “12th” the first response is “12th Amendment,” and the next is “12th Amendment simplified.”

Below, then, are the key passages from that document–I’ve simplified by cutting the language about the Vice-President, and about what happens if all else fails (e.g., the President-Elect dies); none of that changes anything. Here we go:

“The Electors shall meet in their respective states and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President,.. they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President…and they shall make distinct lists of all persons voted for as President… and transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate… The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted; The person having the greatest Number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states,”

Like Google, I’ll simplify, this time by taking it taking from the standpoint of the revolutionists. (Actually, the counter-revolutionists, as it’s the revolution of 1776 that they’re plotting to supersede with tyranny.)

Let’s take Pennsylvania as the prime–and perhaps essential–example. The Democratic candidate, whoever that might be, may improve on or fall off from Biden’s majority–it doesn’t matter. The Republicans there are in the process of removing electoral procedures from the Secretary of State (a Democrat) and putting it in the hands of the Legislature–which, being in the Party’s control, will declare that the vote in favor of the Democratic Party is null and void because of “fraud.”

The Electoral College in each state consists of electors chosen by their respective parties. Look at that Amendment again: It doesn’t envision disciplined political parties, and it doesn’t say whose slate gets “transmitted” to the Senate, nor specify exactly what the counting the popular vote has to do with it! Thus, the Republican State Legislature will instruct its electors to send their slate in–no matter the outcome of the vote. And of course the Democratic electors will also turn up in the Capitol, as instructed by the Secretary of State–who will however have been stripped of that role by the Legislature.

What happens next? There will be two competing sets of electors, fighting with each other, perhaps physically, as to who gets to report to the President of the Senate. Somehow or other, two reports will probably be made from the chaos that will have ensued, but the President of the Senate will be…Kamala Harris! Who, assuming that the Republican candidate has, clearly, not legitimately won the election…will do what?

It doesn’t matter. If she declares the Democrat the winner, the Republicans, if in the majority in either the House or the Senate, with all the anti-Fascists defeated or retired, will vote to over-ride her certification by rejecting the purple state votes that they’ve questioned: an action which the Democrats will appeal. If the they are a minority (which most prognosticators think is unlikely after the 2022 midterms), they will appeal to the Supreme Court, pleading that there is no legitimate majority since so many electoral votes are in question (their question, to be sure), and thus no firm ground for the Vice-President’s decision.

In either case, what will the Court with a 6–3 Republican majority then do? To uphold the Vice-President’s ruling would entail making a factual declaration as to which side had “truly” won. There’s a lot precedent for the Court refusing to enter that “political thicket:” to punt. That is, to agree with the GOP appeal on the spurious grounds that there is “uncertainty” about the actual vote, due to the existence of conflicting sets of electors.

If that’s the only chance the GOP has to win on the basis of the truly counted votes, then this is what they can and will do. To sum up,, they will cause such a breakdown in the process that it will have been robbed of any remaining. legitimacy for the large proportion of the electorate that is already persuaded of its subversion. That being the case it will be clear that the only apparent way to fix the (deliberately) broken system will be for the (Republican) majority of the Court to follow the spirit(allegedly) and letter of the 12th and send the election back to the House. And into arms of Donald Trump and his loyalist accomplices..

Of course Trump, or some other GOP candidate might win the election as by the vote itself, , given the Party’s success at vote suppression–thereby achieving the goal abolishing electoral democracy without a pitched battle: if the Democrats can do nothing to federalize the electoral process between now and ’24. In any event, the road to a Democratic Presidency in 2024 is narrow, and getting narrower every day as the Republican plot proceeds. That’s the awful truth.