Amy Klobuchar is one of those normal decent people.
Others - manipulative, self-dealing assholes like John Eastman and Marjorie Trailer Park Greene - see those glitches in the law as opportunities to dive into SmarmSpace and exploit the loopholes in furtherance of their own narrow interests.
IMHO, the glitches are there, and haven't been addressed, because the whole thing has worked pretty well on the honor system. ie: People of honor see and recognize that doing some shitty thing may be technically "legal", but it's not an honorable thing to do.
And yes, the SmarmSpace rangers know they're doing shitty things.
Honorable people don't do shitty things.
It's not honorable to make a move to monopolize power under a constitution so obviously constructed to prevent someone monopolizing power.
The GOP seems to have flopped all the way over to "If it's not specifically prohibited, then it's both peachy and dandy - let's knock this shit out."
Opinion
It turns out our political system might prove capable of defending itself against future subversion after all.
In a big step forward for protecting democracy, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced Tuesday that he expects action in the lame-duck session on reform of the arcane law that Donald Trump exploited during his attempted 2021 coup.
“I expect an omnibus will contain priorities both sides want to see passed into law, including more funding for Ukraine and the Electoral Count Act,” Schumer said, in a reference to an end-of-year spending bill the two parties are negotiating.
Speaking about reform of the ECA, the 1887 law that governs how presidential electors are counted in Congress, Schumer added: “It will be great to get that done.”
This is welcome news. The Senate version of ECA reform would clarify the vice president’s role in counting electors as purely ceremonial, make it harder for Congress to invalidate legitimate electors and make corruption of the appointment of electors at the state level much harder.
All these points would make a rerun of Trump’s 2020 effort less likely, in part because they would patch up ECA vulnerabilities that invited him to attempt it. He pressured his vice president to halt the electoral count, got Republican members of Congress to vote to cast out Joe Biden’s electors and pressed state legislatures to appoint sham electors for him instead.
Because of this, ECA reform has long risked being seen as “anti-Trump.” That might have rendered it unlikely that 10 GOP senators would support it and make it possible to circumvent a filibuster.
But Schumer’s announcement is cause for real optimism. That’s because it’s unlikely Schumer would have made it if Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) hadn’t quietly indicated support for attaching reform to the omnibus.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), a longtime proponent of ECA reform, says she’s optimistic that Republicans will remain behind this endgame. Klobuchar notes that McConnell voted for ECA reform in the Rules Committee, and it’s supported by well over a dozen other GOP senators.
“It’s clearly a top priority,” Klobuchar told me, speaking of how ECA reform is seen by McConnell and its Republican supporters. Klobuchar noted that negotiations over it have been a “strong bipartisan effort” and reform boasts some “very conservative members supporting it.”
“This law is just crying out for updating,” Klobuchar said. While some House lawmakers want new tweaks to the Senate bill, a person familiar with the situation says the Senate version is the one that will move forward.
In a twist, the prospects for passage might be improved by attaching it to the omnibus. As this column recently noted, holding a stand-alone Senate vote on ECA reform might subject it to more attacks from MAGA-loyal forces in Congress and in right wing media, making it harder for GOP senators to support it. Schumer’s plan allows McConnell to move it forward a bit more quietly.
New developments this week forcefully underscored the need for reform. In a widely noted speech, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) openly declared that had she been in charge of Trump’s insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, it would have been “armed.”
And text messages from House Republicans to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, unearthed by Talking Points Memo, show members of Congress scheming in the run-up to Jan. 6 to overturn Trump’s loss in all kinds of ways, with one even calling for Trump to declare martial law.
What all this means is that the insurrectionist spirit will run strong in next year’s GOP-controlled House, which would be likely to try to help with any effort by Trump — or an imitator — to subvert the 2024 presidential election. Under current law, if a GOP-controlled state legislature appointed electors for the Republican nominee in defiance of the state’s popular vote, the GOP House could count those electors, leading to a stolen election or constitutional crisis.
Reform of the ECA would make that much harder to pull off. It would require governors to certify lawful electors, create new pathways for legal challenges to corruptly appointed electors and require Congress to count the electors validated by the courts.
“The clock is ticking towards midnight,” Matthew Seligman, a legal scholar and ECA expert, told me. “Congress seems poised to pull us back from the brink, at a moment when the extreme wing of the GOP House seems more eager than ever to trigger a crisis.”
Passage of these fixes, especially along with this cycle’s defeat of numerous gubernatorial candidates who were essentially running on a vow to subvert future elections, would amount to major action in defense of democracy and self-rule. As the unabashed and continuing insurrectionism of Greene and other House Republicans demonstrates, it’s poised to come not a moment too soon.
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