Supreme Court to Trump lawyers: Drop dead

 Iknow a lot of people who are absolutely convinced that Democrats stole the election and that Donald Trump is the rightful president-elect. And, for a while, there was some hope that one of the Trump campaign’s Hail Mary lawsuits would throw out the election results in a handful of close states. That hope dimmed as, one by one, the lawsuits were dismissed and now the Supreme Court has closed the door on a second Trump term entirely.

The decision from the Supreme Court in the case of Mike Kelly v. Pennsylvania is the shortest and most to-the-point opinion that I have ever seen rendered by the Court. The decision reads, in its entirety:

The application for injunctive relief presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the Court is denied.

The implication of the decision is much more important than the quantity of the 18 terse words implies.

The request for an injunction in the case claimed that Pennsylvania election law violated both the state and federal constitutions. The request, made by Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.), made a number of claims including that early voting was unconstitutional, that Pennsylvania had illegally expanded absentee voting, and that the Pennsylvania supreme court erred in dismissing the lawsuit at the state level. The applicants requested an emergency injunction stopping the state from certifying the election.

Note that the applicants did not allege election fraud in their appeal to the Supreme Court. The hype in the media and at the unofficial ‘hearings” notwithstanding, fraud claims were conspicuously absent from the legal documents that the Trump campaign brought to court.

Even so, the Supreme Court unceremoniously threw the case out with a succinct statement that it would not hear the claims against Pennsylvania. The implication is that the claims made in the lawsuit were not worthy of the Court’s time. It is important to note that there appears to have been no dissent from the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, which includes three justices appointed by President Trump.

There was never serious legal doubt as to how the case would turn out. The time to have questioned election law was before the election, not after voters render a decision that is unpopular in some circles. Act 77, a Pennsylvania law at the center of the suit, was passed in 2019 with strong Republican support yet no legal challenges were filed until after Trump lost the state. No court would throw out an election on that basis.

My Trump-supporting friends must now make a decision on what to believe. On one hand, they can continue to believe that Donald Trump was cheated out of an election victory and that Joe Biden is an illegitimate president-elect. However, that belief requires them to also believe that there is a massive conspiracy to cover up the theft of the election. This conspiracy now has to be enlarged to include Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, Neal Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett as well as Republican-appointed judges in several states.

The conspiracy would also have to include Attorney General Barr, who has come forward to tell the country that “we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election.”

On the other hand, they can accept that Donald Trump lost an election that was free and mostly fair. This belief is supported not only by the about 40 judicial decisions against the Trump campaign, but also by the fact that the Trump legal team has yet to file a lawsuit that includes the same fraud claims that they have been making in the court of public opinion for the past month.

Trump’s lawyers have two separate and very different narratives: one for the courts and one for the voters. When deciding which version of reality to believe, Trump supporters should ask themselves if the election fraud was so pervasive and blatant, not only why the Trump legal team has not presented their evidence in court, but why the Department of Justice is not investigating and making widespread arrests as we speak.

As a final point, even if the results in Pennsylvania were somehow overturned and Republicans could turn the state red, Joe Biden would still win the Electoral College with 286 votes. If either Georgia or Michigan, both with 16 electoral votes, turned red, Biden would still have the 270 votes necessary to become president. Trump needs to flip three states and the Supreme Court just signaled that it will not entertain requests to override the will of the people. The election is over.

To me, the truth is clear. Donald Trump lost and Joe Biden is the legitimate president-elect. I hope that more Republican elected officials tell their constituents that truth before the situation devolves into unnecessary bloodshed.

Posted on The Racket

Tucker Carlson takes on Sidney Powell

 “For more than a week, Powell has been all over conservative media with the following story,” Carlson said in a segment called “Standing Up For What’s Right” on Thursday night. “This election was stolen by a collection of international leftists who manipulated vote tabulating software in order to flip millions of votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. The other day on television, Powell said of Trump that when the fraud is finally uncovered, ‘I think we’ll find he had at least 80 million votes.'”

“In other words,” Carlson continued, “rigged software stole about seven million votes in this election.”

Carlson then plays a clip of Powell at a press conference with Rudy Giuliani in which she claimed to have discovered an algorithm with the ability to “flip votes.” Powell says this algorithm “probably ran all over the country” and added that “we might never have uncovered” the software “had the votes for President Trump not been so overwhelming in so many of these states that it broke the algorithm.”

“Sidney Powell has been saying similar things for days,” Carlson said, resuming his commentary. “On Sunday night, we texted her after watching one of her segments.”

“What Powell was describing would amount to the single greatest crime in American history,” he continued. “Millions of votes stolen in a day. Democracy destroyed. The end of our centuries-old system of self-government. Not a small thing.”

“We took Sidney Powell seriously,” Carlson said. “We had no intention of fighting with her. We’ve always respected her work.”

But Carlson had questions about Powell’s claims.

“We simply wanted to see the details,” he continued. “How could you not want to see them? So we invited Sidney Powell on the show. We would have given her the whole hour. We would have given her the entire week actually and listened quietly the whole time at rapt attention.”

But there was a problem.

“She never sent us any evidence despite a lot of requests, polite requests,” Carlson said. “Not a page.”

“When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her,” he added.

“When we check with others around the Trump campaign, people in positions of authority, they told us Powell has never given them any evidence either,” Carlson continued. “Nor did she provide any today at the press conference.”

“She never demonstrated that a single actual vote was moved illegitimately by software from one candidate to another,” he went on. “Not one.”

“So why are we telling you this,” Carlson asked rhetorically. “We’re telling you this because it’s true. And, in the end, that’s all that matters: The truth. It’s our only hope, it’s our best defense. And it’s how we’re different from them, we care what’s true. And we know you care too, that’s why we told you.”

“Maybe Sidney Powell will forward soon with details on exactly how this happened and precisely who did it,” Tucker speculated. “Maybe she will, we are certainly hopeful that she will.”

I have had my differences with Carlson over the years, but I am grateful for his decision to tell the truth about Powell’s claims. I’m sure it was not an easy decision and Carlson admitted as much the following day when he said that he had “heard from a lot of people,” including people in the Trump Administration, since the original segment aired.

In his update, Carlson says that he, along with the people who called his show, believes that the election was “not fair” and that he is “willing to believe any explanation for what happened,” but that he has still “not seen a single piece of evidence showing that software changed votes.”

“It doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, it might have happened,” Carlson said. “It means they haven’t seen any evidence that it happened.”

Carlson goes on to say that other members of the Trump legal team and the Trump Administration have also not seen evidence of Powell’s claims, but adds that Powell now says that she expects to be able to prove her claims in court within the next two weeks.

So save the date. The election is already two weeks past and the Trump campaign has been claiming fraud almost since Election Day. Yet, as I pointed out earlier this week, Rudy Giuliani admitted in court that the Trump campaign was not making legal allegations that fraud had been committed in Pennsylvania. However, if Powell’s statement is accurate, we can look forward to evidence by December 5. Mark your calendars.

There’s an old saying that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and Tucker is right that Powell’s allegations, if true, would constitute the greatest crime in American history. The American people should not be expected to take allegations about unprecedented voter fraud purely on faith. Powell should present her evidence to the country rather than making extraordinary allegations that she is not willing or able to back up. There is another old saying that applies as well: Put up or shut up.

I disagree with Carlson that the election was unfair. I have yet to see any evidence of widespread fraud that could have shifted the outcome of hundreds of thousands of votes across five states. In my opinion, Donald Trump’s loss can be easily explained by a number of factors, including the pandemic and its associated recession, but especially the fact that President Trump spent four years playing to his base at the expense of alienating moderate and independent voters.

A big part of Republican surprise at the outcome of the election is that we live in different media bubbles. In the Republican media bubble, we were told for four years that Donald Trump was the greatest and most popular president in history. In reality, his average approval rating never approached 50 percent, which goes a long way towards explaining the outcome of the election. I applaud Tucker Carlson for breaking out of the bubble now to tell his audience the truth about the fraud allegations.

Maybe there is evidence of widespread election fraud. If there is, I’d love to see it so that I can examine the claims objectively. The will of the people in the election should be honored regardless of which candidate won.

But if Powell and the Trump cannot support their allegations, we need to know that too. Hopefully, when the matter is settled, the American people will remember who lied to them and who told them the truth, because trying to overturn an election based on fabricated claims of fraud is just as bad as doing it with a software algorithm.

The election fraud narrative is dying

 We are more than two weeks out from the election. The votes have been counted and in many cases recounted. The allegations of fraud have been investigated. The lawsuits are being settled. And Joe Biden is still the winner.

The 2020 election has yielded a bumper crop of lawsuits. So many, in fact, that it is difficult to keep track of them. I usually steer clear of Wikipedia, but the site has the best roundup of election-related litigation that I’ve found. The site lists a total of 38 lawsuits across the country. Of these, 22 have already been dismissed, denied, or dropped. Another nine are ongoing and seven have been received the judge’s ruling.

Of all these cases, only one has been won by the Trump campaign in one of the states that are still considered to be contested. In that case, a suit against Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Kathy Boockvar, the judge held that Boockvar lacked the authority to prolong the deadline for voters to provide proof of identification. That ruling does not affect the outcome of the Pennsylvania election, however. Joe Biden currently leads the state by more than 80,000 votes, more than the margin of Donald Trump’s election victory across the three states that swung the Electoral College in 2016.

The remaining undecided lawsuits are also unlikely to change the outcome of the election. Although several of the remaining lawsuits are in states won by Biden and still contested by Trump, none allege widespread voter fraud and most, even if decided in Trump’s favor, would not overcome Biden’s lead. One exception is a Pennsylvania lawsuit that seeks to prohibit certification of the state’s election results, but that is a very long shot.

Earlier this week, there was bad news for the Trump campaign in two separate Pennsylvania lawsuits. Politico reports that the state supreme court ruled against Trump’s claim that election observers were not granted “meaningful access” to watch votes being counted.

In the other pending case in Pennsylvania, Rudy Giuliani admitted in court that “this is not a fraud case.” Per the Washington Post, Giuliani and the Trump campaign are arguing that the entire state’s results should be thrown out because some counties allowed voters to correct their ballots while others did not. The state has filed a motion to dismiss the case and the Trump campaign had until Wednesday afternoon to respond.

Other news from the states has also not been good for Trump’s claims of victory. In Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced on Tuesday that an audit of the state’s voting machines had turned up no evidence of foul play. In the Georgia recount, some additional votes turned up in two counties, including a deep-red county soon to be represented by Qanon adherent Marjorie Taylor Greene, but most counties were “spot dead-on” a state election official told CNN. Trump gained narrowly but Biden still leads the state by more than 13,000 votes.

The Dominion voting machines used in Georgia have been the subject of numerous conspiracy theories, but an independent audit of a random sample of Georgia’s voting machines turned up no evidence of manipulation. The Hill reported that the audit included precinct ballot scanners, ballot-marking devices, and central absentee ballot scanners.

In Wayne County, Michigan, election officials briefly deadlocked on a partisan basis over whether certify the county results. The news prompted a tweet from one of Trump’s attorneys who crowed that “if the state board follows suit, the Republican state legislator [sic] will select the electors” and called it a “huge win” for the president.

But Trump’s win proved brief. Republicans in the state legislature told the Washington Post that they did not plan to intervene in the matter. The Republican canvassers in Wayne County ultimately agreed to certify the results in exchange for county officials requesting an audit of vote tallies by the secretary of state.

In Wisconsin, the Trump campaign has agreed to pay $3 million for recounts of two counties. The president has said that Milwaukee and Dane counties were the location of the “worst irregularities” but has presented no evidence to support his claims.

Further, on Tuesday, President Trump fired Chris Krebs, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency after Krebs repeatedly disputed the president’s claims of widespread election fraud. Krebs, who was appointed by Trump in November 2018, had called election conspiracy theories involving Hammer and Scorecard “nonsense” and a “hoax.”

As the lawsuits and recounts fizzle, states are approaching deadlines to certify election results. Per Ballotpedia, barring court orders to the contrary, the certification deadlines for the contested states are as follows:

• Arizona – November 30
• Georgia – November 20
• Michigan – November 23
• Nevada – December 1
• Pennsylvania – November 23
• Wisconsin – December 1

After the election results are certified, Joe Biden will officially become the president-elect and Donald Trump’s already narrow path toward a second term will tighten considerably. The president can still ask for recounts, but the chances of overcoming Biden leads in excess of 10,000 votes are nil. There are scattered instances of small-scale fraud but nothing of the magnitude required to overturn the result of even the closest states.

In the US, we don’t vote directly for presidential candidates. Instead, we vote for electors who will vote for our preferred candidate at the meeting of the Electoral College. When the state results are certified, the electors will be officially selected. This year’s meeting of the Electoral College is on December 14. Even before that date, there is a “Safe Harbor” deadline on December 8 per the Congressional Research Service. On December 8, results are considered conclusive if state procedures to address contested results have been completed.

After the Electoral College selects the new president, the transition of power is automatic. The Twentieth Amendment states, “The terms of the President and Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January… and the terms of their successors shall then begin.”

President Trump has shown no signs of being willing to concede and is not required to do so. After the electors cast their ballots for Joe Biden, Donald Trump will cease to be president on January 20 and Joe Biden will immediately succeed him. Mr. Trump’s protestations and allegations of fraud will have no bearing unless he can prove them in court. So far, he has shown no ability to do so.

It should also be noted that President Trump needs more than just a Hail Mary lawsuit in one state. Even Pennsylvania, the contested state with the most electoral votes, would not be enough to swing the election. Trump would need to flip at least three states to change the outcome of the election. That is not going to happen.

The Trump campaign is not going to prove widespread election fraud for the simple reason that it is not actually trying to show fraud in court. The fraud claims are for consumption of the Republican base, not for judges and juries. Whatever Mr. Trump’s motives, he is not going to win a second term and is undermining faith in elections and the political and judicial processes with his false claims. With many jumping aboard the conspiracy bandwagon, Americans should be grateful that there are honest men like Chris Krebs who will stand up and tell the truth, even at the cost of their own careers.

Originally published on The First TV

Here’s what to expect from the Biden Administration

 As the battle over counting continues, it is increasingly evident that Donald Trump lost the election and that Joe Biden is the president-elect. The transition, which is constitutionally mandated to culminate on January 20, is beginning even without the president’s concession. So, what should we expect from the Biden Administration?

First, the good news is that the dire predictions are wrong. A Twitter follower asked me yesterday if I thought that America would “end up like China eventually if the Democrats take over?” The answer to that question is an emphatic “no.”

We have constitutional protections that the Chinese have never enjoyed that guard against that sort of thing. But the Constitution only protects us as long as we respect the rule of law. That is why it is so important to abide by legal limits and traditional norms even when Republican presidents are in power. Shortcuts around constitutional limits are a two-way street and it should have been obvious that Democrats would return to power some day.

More good news is that Democratic power will be far from absolute. The Senate currently stands at 50 Republicans and 48 Democrats with two races in Georgia yet to be decided. At best, Democrats will have a slim, two-seat margin, but it’s more likely that Republicans will maintain the majority. If the Democrats don’t have a majority then the filibuster gets a new lease on life and controversial progressive ideas such as court-packing, defunding police, tax increases, admitting Puerto Rico as a state, and gun bans are dead on arrival.

That will probably be true even if the Democrats hold a slim majority. A Democratic majority would have the same problem that Republicans did with more moderate members who refuse to go along with controversial proposals. That is especially true of Democrats in red and purple states and districts that have been picked up over the past four years.

Joe Manchin is the current poster boy for the conservative Blue Dog Democrats. The West Virginia senator is typical of centrist pro-gun, pro-life Democrats. There aren’t many conservative Democrats left but even one or two can make the difference in a closely divided Congress. Manchin has already distanced himself from the defund-the-police movement, earning a wordless Twitter rebuke from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Other moderate Democrats that might join Manchin in the role of swing votes are Kirsten Sinema of Arizona, Mark Warner of Virginia, and Gary Peters of Michigan. The three are not conservative by Republican standards but they do have centrist voting records. Sinema and Peters, who was just re-elected by less than two points, are from very competitive states. They will be voting with an eye toward re-election.

With the radical agenda of the progressives stymied from the outset, Coronavirus and the economy are likely to be the top two priorities for the Biden Administration. As I’ve maintained from the beginning, fixing the economy depends on ending the pandemic. Thankfully, we are growing closer to an effective vaccine that will allow us to return to normal.

The immediate problem is one over which Biden has no authority. Virus levels are rising around the country and the Trump Administration seems to have shifted from a containment strategy to one of treatment. In the absence of a nationwide strategy, many cities and states are implementing their own measures to control the virus.

While at least one Biden advisor has floated the idea of another nationwide shelter order, it is impossible to say with any certainty what the situation will be when Biden takes office more than two months from now. Dr. Anthony Fauci said in an interview with Sinclair Broadcast Group on Nov. 12 that another lockdown may not be necessary, noting that the country already has “COVID-19 fatigue.”

“You can get a lot done without necessarily locking down if you adhere to the fundamental principles that many of us, myself included, have been talking about for quite a while now,” Fauci said.

The measures include “the uniform wearing of masks, the physical distancing, the avoiding congregant settings, and crowds, doing things outside preferentially over indoors, [and] the washing of hands.” Fauci stressed the mitigations need to be done “uniformly throughout the country, not in a scattered way, ” to be most effective. If we abide by these countermeasures, new shelter orders may not be necessary over the next few months.

Fauci also noted that, although distribution of a vaccine may begin as early as December for some high-priority individuals, it will be several months before the vaccines are widely available. The incoming president will have to deal with several months of pandemic but the situation will hopefully be improving by then.

If no Coronavirus relief bill is passed this year, the Biden Administration might shepherd such a measure through Congress in 2021. It is entirely possible, however, that the lame duck Congress can reach an agreement with the White House before President Trump leaves office.

The good news is that as the pandemic recedes, the economy should swiftly improve. The economy will also be boosted by removing Trump’s trade barriers, another measure which should have broad bipartisan support. Biden has signaled that he won’t remove the tariffs unilaterally but will push China for concessions. If the trade wars end as businesses reopen and demand increases in the wake of the pandemic, the economy could be poised to enter a major bull market.

Another international change the Biden Administration will likely make is to rejoin the Paris Accords. It took three years for the US to leave the climate change pact, a process that was completed the day after the election. Biden tweeted that he would rejoin the treaty as soon as he takes office. Since we’ve been in the climate deal all along, rejoining should have only a minimal impact.

Other items that Biden is likely to tackle quickly are reversing many Trump Executive Orders. Trump began his tenure by reversing many of Obama’s executive actions but then followed his predecessor’s example in bypassing Congress with presidential decrees. Executive Orders are easier than getting bills through Congress, but they are also easier to reverse. Democrats learned this in 2017 and Republicans are about to get the same lesson. Among the executive actions in question are Trump’s pro-life Executive Orders, funding for the border wall, and immigration restrictions.

Pro-life conservatives don’t have to worry about a spike in abortions under Biden, however. Even though Donald Trump did not sign a single piece of significant pro-life legislation and his Executive Orders will likely be rescinded, the national abortion rate has been undergoing a four-decade decline. While Biden was vice president, the abortion rate fell below the level from 1973 when Roe v. Wade was decided. I don’t give the Obama Administration much credit for pro-life policy since the decline is likely driven by better and more widespread birth control along with technology that allows people to see the life in the womb, but the good news is that abortion is becoming more rare regardless of which party is in power.

I’ve seen a lot of my Republican friends warning that energy prices will skyrocket under Biden and that the Democrats will start and continue “endless wars.” Energy prices are likely to increase even if Democrats aren’t able to pass bills that constrict energy production. The reason is that demand for energy will increase as the economy strengthens. Economic recoveries often drive up energy prices.

There is less evidence for the charge that Biden will start a war. America still has numerous adversaries around the world, but Biden is no more likely to start a war than President Trump has been. Forgotten amid the pandemic news is that the US and Iran were at the brink of war less than a year ago. There is also the chance that Israel or the Trump Administration might order an attack on Iran before Biden takes office, but the president-elect has not signaled any hostile intentions.

In his recent speeches, Joe Biden, who is not and has never been a socialist, has broadcast an intention to seek bipartisanship and try to bring the country back together. With Republicans in control of Congress and able to block his agenda, Biden has every reason to be conciliatory. The longtime senator is also well aware of how Congress works and what is needed to get things done in Washington.

Biden will need to fend off angry progressives on the left, but he also must overcome vengeful Republicans on the right. Mitch McConnell will almost certainly have the votes to stop the Biden Administration in his tracks, but he will also have the ability to move forward good legislation for the benefit of the country. One of the biggest obstacles here will be angry Republicans who view any compromise as “caving” and “surrender” to the left.

Over the next four years, it will be Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell who will together determine the course of the country. If they work together and succeed, they will draw fire from the extremes of both sides, but the country will be better off.

Originally published on The First TV

What Trump needs to prove when it comes to fraud

It is six days past the election and President Trump has not conceded. Not only has the president not conceded the election, he is adamant that he defeated Democrat Joe Biden.

Trump’s defiance is based on allegations of rampant voter fraud, but the Administration has been slow in providing hard evidence to back up its claims. And in order to actually turn the tide in key states, that’s what’s needed. Let’s take a look at the big picture to see where the situation stands.

Last week in The Dispatch, David French provided a list of conspiracy theories that have arisen since the election. Most of these have been swiftly debunked and discarded. More recently, CNN investigated a list of 14,000 names that Trump supporters claimed were dead people who had voted in Michigan. Of 50 names chosen randomly, 37 were dead and had not voted, eight were alive and had not voted, and five were alive and had cast ballots that were apparently legal.

So where is the slam-dunk evidence to back up Trump’s claims?

The core problem for Trump is that it is difficult to show widespread fraud in races where down-ballot Republicans outperformed him. The lack of a blue wave in Congress hurts claims that Democrats miscounted ballots. Wouldn’t they have boosted vote totals for Democratic House and Senate candidates as well as for Biden?

But a bigger issue in terms of both the law and public opinion is that the Trump campaign must not only prove fraud, it must prove that there was fraud in sufficient numbers to affect the outcome of the election. With Biden leading by large margins, there would have to be massive fraud which should be easily detectable. I’m skeptical that standard can be achieved.

The Trump campaign must not only prove fraud, it must prove that there was fraud in sufficient numbers to affect the outcome of the election.

To me, it’s suspicious that the Trump campaign’s legal actions do not match its rhetoric. The election lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign have mostly not reflected the claims of widespread voter fraud. In a roundup of Trump lawsuits by NPR, only one lawsuit involved miscounting ballots. This lawsuit in Arizona, the “Sharpiegate” suit, was dropped after its claim that ballots were incorrectly discarded because counting machines could not read ballots marked with a Sharpie was shown to be false.

Other lawsuits, all in states won by Joe Biden, have mostly been dismissed by courts. In Pennsylvania, courts did agree that late-arriving ballots should be segregated in case a court strikes down the state’s extended deadline, but the number of ballots in question is not enough to overcome Biden’s lead, which is currently more than 46,000 votes. In Michigan, two separate courts found no evidence of Republican claims of lack of transparency in vote-counting. In Georgia, where Trump trails by more than 12,000 votes, a Republican poll watcher claimed that 53 votes from Chatham County arrived late but could provide no evidence. A discrepancy in Fulton County’s count over the weekend has also been resolved But even if the votes from both incidents were combined, it would not overcome Biden’s lead in the Peach State.

That didn’t stop Georgia’s two Republican senators, both of whom are headed for a January runoff, from issuing a joint statement throwing the state’s Republican secretary of state, the official who oversees elections, under the bus. The two senators called for the resignation of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger but again failed to provide any evidence of
wrongdoing.  Raffensperger responded that he followed the law and had
posted a monitor in problem areas.

One of my big concerns is that the overheated rhetoric surrounding the vote counting has the potential to escalate into violent confrontations. The words of people on both sides are pushing the national temperature higher and undermining faith in the elections process. A Politico/Morning Consult poll found that 70 percent of Republicans do not believe that the election was free and fair. Prior to the only election, only 35 percent of Republicans had doubted the process. People who believe that the election was stolen may take the law into their own hands, as two men arrested in Philly on suspicion of plotting to attack a ballot-counting location allegedly did.

Only legal votes should be counted, but every legal vote should be counted.

To be clear, the current situation is not like the 2000 Florida recount. That year, George W. Bush won Florida by 537 votes. This year, election results show that President Trump lost Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. Trump needs to reverse the election results in several of those states. The closest of these is Georgia where the president trails by more than 12,000 votes. Biden’s lead in Michigan is almost 150,000 votes.

Only legal votes should be counted, but every legal vote should be counted. If the Trump campaign has evidence of fraud, particularly fraud on a large enough scale to erode a Biden lead of tens of thousands of votes, it needs to present that evidence to investigators and courts immediately. If they can’t produce the evidence, President Trump and his supporters should stop undermining public faith in the election and accept that Joe Biden is the president-elect.

Originally published on The First TV

About those street celebrations for Biden...

 Since the remaining networks called the election for Joe Biden over the weekend, there have been spontaneous outpourings of happiness in the streets of American cities. Trump supporters have pointed out that the Coronavirus pandemic isn’t over and that the gatherings demonstrate hypocrisy on the part of Democrats, who have argued for months – with the notable exception of BLM demonstrations over the summer – that mass gatherings are a bad idea. The Trump supporters are absolutely right.

The rub is that many on the right want to take the wrong lesson from the street gatherings. For many, the argument is that if liberals are able to gather then everyone should be able to gather and we should get back to normal. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Many Republicans told me that COVID would disappear after the election. Well, it’s after the election and we are setting repeated daily records for Coronavirus case counts. On Friday, the US reported more than 130,000 new cases and the curve shows no signs of flattening. Deaths are starting to tick upwards again as well. Almost every day last week, more than 1,000 Americans died from COVID-19. The virus has not disappeared or been beaten and we should not pretend that it has.

A better response to the demonstrations is to remind people that a deadly pandemic is underway. Whether they are happy or unhappy with the election results, they have a responsibility to mask up and social distance to protect the health and lives of their friends, neighbors, and family. It would be helpful for President-elect Biden and other prominent Democrats to call for people to temper their enthusiasm.

Having said that, there are some positive sides to the gatherings. First, they are outside. Open air is believed to help disperse the virus as opposed to being in a closed room. Second, many of the celebrants are wearing masks. Masks are beneficial but they definitely don’t make the wearer invulnerable.

Shifting gears, the street celebrations undercut another Republican argument that I’ve seen a lot of on social media for the past few weeks, namely that Biden couldn’t win legitimately because he could not fill rallies. The meme typically shows a Biden event superimposed with a phrase like “Common sense people are never going to believe that this guy,” and then a second photo of Trump rally is superimposed with the last part of the sentence, “beat this guy.”

The problem with the meme is that it is a false equivalence. The two campaigns pursued different strategies. The Trump campaign took the traditional route of mass rallies and knocking on doors while the Biden campaign held very few public events and didn’t try to hold mass rallies. To be more accurate, the Biden campaign actively tried not to hold mass rallies. The meme was an apples and oranges comparison.

Late in the campaign, Joe Biden came to my town in Georgia and the event was totally closed to the public. By chance, my wife and I were on hand at the airport when Biden’s motorcade returned to his chartered jet but his departure was not announced, he made no remarks, and few people were on hand to watch. (The video is on my Facebook page.)

But Biden could draw crowds when he wanted. The day after I caught a glimpse of the candidate, he held his largest event of the campaign in Atlanta. the socially distant drive-up rally drew more than 700 people and 300 cars. It was smaller than Trump’s rallies in Georgia but, as now seems apparent, rally size does not directly translate into more votes, especially in a pandemic election year.

Trump supporters have a point that the spontaneous pro-Biden demonstrations are not a good idea in a pandemic, but they should also consider that the people dancing in the streets are the same people who would have filled Biden rallies… if he had held them.

Originally published on The First TV

The miracle of the 2020 election

 The election is semi-officially over. The Associated Press, CNN, and even Fox News have called Pennsylvania for Joe Biden, which blocks President Trump’s path to re-election. In the end, the decision of the American people in this year’s election seems almost miraculously equitable.

Right now, the focus of the country is on Joe Biden’s presidential victory, but, when the smoke clears, it will be apparent that Republicans did pretty well except for the presidential race. (Those of us who think that Donald Trump was a net negative for the party would argue that the presidential results were good for Republicans as well.) The Senate currently stands at a 48-48 tie with two races in Alaska and North Carolina that will probably be called for Republicans. There are also two Senate races in Georgia that will almost certainly be held by Republicans after runoff elections in January. In the end, Democrats will have gained only one seat despite the possibility of a blue wave in 10 vulnerable seats only a few short weeks ago. Likewise, Republicans gained at least five seats in the House of Representatives where it seemed likely that the Democratic majority would increase.

It is difficult to imagine a better election result for the country. Both parties have reasons to celebrate and both parties have reasons to complain. An outcome where nobody is totally happy often indicates a fair outcome and that seems to be the case here.

This year, voters rejected some of the worst aspects of both sides. They rejected the corruption, incompetence, and divisiveness of Donald Trump while simultaneously repudiating the radical progressive agenda. The balance seems almost miraculous. We won’t have Donald Trump’s illegal acts and constant trolling, but we also won’t have court-packing, gun bans, tax increases, or state-run healthcare. The filibuster also gets a new lease on life.

The message from voters to both parties is that they don’t like radicals or trolls. Voters want the two parties to act like adults and work together on the jobs that they were sent to Washington to do. The election results are summed up in a meme that I created that shows the two parties as children in a “get-along” shirt. Republicans and Democrats are tied together whether they like it or not.

Joe Biden seems to understand this. Unlike Presidents Trump and Obama, Biden spent years in the Senate. He knows how the legislative process works and, perhaps even more importantly, he knows that Republicans are in a position to block his agenda if he doesn’t reach across the aisle. Biden has every reason to be congenial, but whether Republicans will accept his extended hand remains to be seen and will likely depend on the issue.

I wrote earlier this week that the close outcome of the election might have been an indication that we were under divine judgment. I’m still not sure that isn’t true. There is still the potential for violence, especially given President Trump’s unsupported claims of fraud and election tampering. The Constitution stipulates that Trump will leave office in January, but he could do a lot to damage the country until then (and afterward as a private citizen). Biden could also play a role in divine judgment as well. We’ll have to test this theory by looking backward in a few years. Ultimately, America needs to come to repentance for rebelling against God.

But, for right now, I think the collective wisdom of the American people has given the country a chance at detente and unity. For the next four years, the parties are going to have to work together to get anything done. If they persist in demonizing and trolling each other, the result will be stalemate and spiraling anger. Instead of picking the scabs of our differences, we should find areas of common agreement.

To do that, we are going to have to leave our respective bubbles and actually talk to people with different opinions. We have to admit that Americans of the opposite party are still Americans and (at least for the most part) want what is best for the country. We need to turn off the anger porn that is being pushed by the Rachel Maddows, Sean Hannitys, Don Lemons, Laura Ingrahams, and others. We need to fact-check those social media posts before we share them and stop trying to play the victim when our own bad behavior gets us sent to Facebook jail or Twitmo.

The election of 2020 is a chance to grow up and be adults that are worthy of the legacy that we have inherited from previous generations of Americans. That legacy includes working with people with whom we disagree to find peaceful compromise. That, rather than finding loopholes to enable one-party rule, is what the Founders intended.

Originally published on The First TV