Yes - It's A Big Fuckin' Deal

It'd please me to no end if I was using that to describe Biden's BBB plan getting over the hurdles and finding its way into law.

But unfortunately, we'll have to wait for President Manchin to get the fuck outa the way before we can pop the cork on that one.

What I'm talking about here is the growing evidence of just how close we came to losing the republic on Jan6. (and make no mistake, we're still in a very precarious position - the jury is still out on that one)

But let's take a closer look at what Mike Pence was (and still is) up to - cuz it's a big fuckin' deal.

WaPo: (pay wall)

It has become a ubiquitous question in our politics: How close did Donald Trump come to pulling off an actual coup?

Efforts to grapple with this have been trapped largely in the zone of wild speculation. But guess what: We may actually get a real answer to it soon enough.

Key to this is the figure who has been portrayed as a hero of this sordid tale, because he refused to use his position as vice president to interrupt the count of electors in Congress: Mike Pence.

This remains poorly understood, but the Jan. 6 select committee is not just looking at the mob attack. It will also create a detailed account of how close we came to the unthinkable — to the procedural overthrow of a legitimately elected incoming government.

The true contours of this emerge from a New York Times excavation of the role of John Eastman, the lawyer who wrote the Trump coup memo. It outlined how Pence supposedly could exercise unilateral power (that he did not have) over the process to refuse to count President-elect Joe Biden’s electors, throwing the election to Trump.

Buried in that piece is an important revelation: Pence apparently went further than previously known in probing whether he could execute a version of Eastman’s scheme.

The select committee will be fleshing this out, Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the committee, suggested in an interview.

“It’s an important part of the historical record to determine how close Trump actually came to achieving his scheme of getting Pence to declare unilateral power to reject electoral college votes,” Raskin told me.

The meeting

Eastman met with Pence and Trump a few days before Jan. 6, the Times reports. Eastman tells the Times he suggested to Pence and his chief counsel, Greg Jacob that Pence could merely delay counting the electors.

This would kick things back to the states, where GOP legislators could send rogue electors for Trump in defiance of the popular vote and Pence could then refuse to count the real electors, triggering a contingent election in the House decided for Trump by state delegations.

Some of this is known from the new book by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa of The Post. But the Times adds new texture from Eastman. He says although Pence appeared resistant to the idea, he and Jacob did take it seriously:

Mr. Eastman recalled getting in touch with Mr. Pence’s legal counsel Mr. Jacob the next day about whether Mr. Pence could delay the certification.

“I think Jacob was looking for a way for he and Pence to be convinced to take the action that we were requesting, and so I think he continued to meet with me and push back on the arguments and hear my counters, what have you, to try and see whether they could reconcile themselves to what the president had asked,” Mr. Eastman said.

Pence ultimately declared that he did not have this unilateral power. But the point is that, if Eastman is correct, Pence and Jacob sought to be convinced otherwise. It’s possible Pence simply went through these motions to placate Trump. But the Jan. 6 committee will have to find out the full truth.

Indeed, note that the committee’s August demand for documents from executive branch agencies includes a demand for any and all documents and communications relating to Jacob, including ones concerning “the constitutional process for certifying the electoral vote.”

That very well may illuminate just how far Pence was willing to go in entertaining the coup scheme. As Kyle Cheney notes, any day now Trump will likely announce legal efforts to block the release of such documents. These new revelations illustrate the stakes there as well.

All of this bodes badly for what’s to come.

We badly need reform

As Raskin points out, whatever Pence’s intentions, we have already learned from the Eastman memo, and from other ways Trump tried to subvert the count of electors, that this process is full of serious vulnerabilities that could well be exploited by future bad actors who are willing to go through with it.

And it’s becoming clearer that other Republicans might indeed be willing. Among other bad signs, many GOP candidates are running on an open vow to subvert future losses, and Trump and his loyalists are working to purge Republicans who stood up against his schemes.

“We know that there are now huge numbers of Republican politicians,” Raskin told me, who would “do precisely what Trump was asking Pence to do.” Raskin points out that many Republicans did urge Pence to go through with it.

And so, the news that Pence may have seriously probed whether he could execute this plot can be seen as a harbinger of more to come. Illuminating this could help build the case for reform.

“The structural weaknesses exposed by this episode are a looming danger for the republic,” Raskin said. “We need to act within the electoral college paradigm to do whatever we can to make sure the vice-presidential role remains an administrative and ministerial one.”

That would require reform of the Electoral Count Act. And so, it’s likely the committee will recommend that and other reforms to cut off the path to such schemes in the future. But whatever reforms it does recommend, nailing down how close we came to the worst can only build public support for them.

Mike Pence is a good little Nazi. He does all kinds of shitty things - always willing to consider doing even shittier things - while always trying to make sure it's all "legal".

He's the worst kind of political viper. He was looking hard at becoming Trump's Martin Bormann.