We the People... Address 2020 Now, Otherwise Our Constitution is Just Another Crumbling Piece of Paper

A solid majority of Americans know that the 2020 election was fraudulent. That’s a big problem for a country with a representative government, one in which the leaders are supposed to represent the will of the people. We’re a nation of laws ostensibly flowing from a Constitution that sets out explicit limitations on the federal government’s powers and protects a variety of citizens’ rights upon which said government cannot infringe. To the degree that a significant majority of citizens feel that the leader of this government was not constitutionally elected, that’s a problem.

For all its importance, our Constitution is nothing more than a piece of paper. It doesn’t make laws. It doesn’t have an army. It’s not the police. It’s just words on paper. It functions because Americans have confidence in its words as the foundation for the laws of our country and the guideposts governing the actions of those who actually control the army and the police and write the laws.

When that confidence is shaken, society’s foundation is shaken. While the fraudulent election of 2020 is not the first example of that shaken confidence in government, it’s easily the most important. From the economic upheavals wrought by the Industrial Revolution to widespread hopelessness during the Depression to the perceived fecklessness during the Vietnam War and economic malaise of the 60s and 70s, confidence in government has been shaken before but never before has the government’s legitimacy been in widespread doubt.

That changed with the 2020 election. Americans watched as the fraud played out in real-time, right in front of them. With violent riots in the streets that went unrestrained in the months leading up to the election, with courts inexplicably ignoring countless unconstitutional changes to voting laws, and with the media and social media censoring true stories that harmed Democrat chances, it started to seem as if the scales were tipped to one side. On election night and during the following weeks it became clear that this was indeed the case.

When almost 60% of the American people feel as if the man who is both the leader of the country and the head of the federal government is illegitimate, what are they supposed to do?

There’s nothing to be done we’re told… Not true. The election can be overturned. Not that I imagine there’s sufficient internal fortitude among Republicans to do so but, ideally, they should make the attempt. But how?

The Constitution doesn’t address anything remotely close to reversing a fraudulently achieved election. That’s true, but then it also says nothing about the right to abortion, the government providing welfare payments to citizens (or non-citizens), government control of healthcare, the imposition of CAFÉ standards, or collective bargaining rules. Indeed, there is much that goes on in government that is not in the Constitution. In 1803, Thomas Jefferson worried that the Constitution did not give him the power to make the Louisiana Purchase, but today all or part of 15 states exist because of it.

Like John Marshall’s judicial review doctrine, which you won’t find anywhere in the Constitution, things don’t exist until they do. In this case, in states where fraud is proven or where voting laws were enacted unconstitutionally, the legislatures should withdraw their Electoral College votes and recast them based on accurate and lawful counting of the votes.

It’s true there’s no existing Constitutional mechanism to facilitate that remedy, and the likelihood of a Democrat-controlled Congress doing anything to further it is less likely than a healthy college student dying of COVID, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. It should, and it should be driven by those states where fraud so clearly occurred and tipped the election; essentially ground zero for the coup: Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, all five of which have nominally GOP legislatures.

Many will say that this is extra-constitutional, and that may indeed be true. But what is beyond debate is the fact that the 2020 election itself was extra-constitutional. The Constitution states that elections are to be run according to rules set by state legislatures. That didn’t happen across the country.

If one is going to have an election run beyond the explicit parameters of the Constitution, I’d prefer to have it hew as close as possible to what the document actually says, rather than what some hack Secretaries of State or uber partisan jurists say that it is. Our Founding Fathers gave the power to craft election rules to state legislatures and that is where it should reside.

Now, assuming that the legislatures of these five states—and others as they choose—take seriously their duty to address the fraud of the 2020 election, Congress will have a decision to make. Congress can either engage with the states to address the issue or simply ignore them. Currently, there is zero chance of action, but after the 2022 midterms Congress will likely look different and the opportunity to address the issue can be revisited.  Although with spineless weasels Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy leading the GOP in Congress the outcome would likely be exactly the same as one led by Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.  Nonetheless…

This may sound like spinning wheels, but it’s not. On the contrary, affirmatively excising the demons of the 2020 election should force all politicians or candidates to make their positions known. They either admit that the 2020 election was fraudulent and are willing to do something about it or they don’t, won’t, and should be primaried if GOP or defeated if Democrat. There can be no in between. If the flaws of 2020 are not admitted and addressed, then 2024 is gone before the campaign even begins, and almost every American understands that.

Why this matters is simple: The nation is changing, rapidly and not in a good or constitutional way. From vaccine mandates to CRT seemingly everywhere to locales providing COVID medicines based on race to transgender men competing in women’s sports to mayors and governors essentially giving their communities over to the homeless and violent criminals, America in 2022 is not one someone from even a decade ago would recognize. It’s changing, rapidly, and in most cases against the wishes of large majorities of the American population.

Importantly, though, we’re not a democracy, and the Constitution is built to rein in the passions of the majorities. It’s not a suicide pact. American citizens with confidence in their election system are willing to wait for the next election cycle to direct a change of course. Those same citizens, however, if they feel that the system is fraudulent and if they know the game is rigged against them, will find alternative means to stop the evisceration of the nation so many of them cherish. When the majority—and a growing majority, at that—of a population believe their leaders are illegitimate, bad things tend to happen.

Illegitimate regimes can stay in power for decades, but only with an army of stormtroopers and Gestapo to suppress a cowed population. The United States is not Germany in the early 1930s nor China today and Americans are not yet cowed. Indeed, they have 1^st Amendment, a 2^nd Amendment and a 250-year-old legacy of freedom most are wont to give up. This Democrat fascism will eventually come to an end. The question is how. The ideal solution is to be found at a ballot box, with all Americans confident their votes will be counted fairly. Let’s hope our leaders can find the courage to lead us down that path. 

Rigged and More: A Chronicle of The Most Successful Coup d'état in Human History... Or At Least American History

The debate is over. After a year investigating claims of election fraud the media has determined that any fraud in the 2020 election was far too small to have changed the outcome and Joe Biden legitimately won.  Now we can get back to our normal lives, or whatever passes for normal now… Except it’s fiction.   

In 44 BC Julius Caesar was murdered by Roman senators who claimed to be acting to protect the Republic but were in fact, simply seeking power. Their coup d'état put the final nail in the coffin of a Republic that had been dead in deed if not name for decades. 

Coup d'états differ from revolutions in that they’re generally orchestrated by or include people within government who seize power – often with a narrow use of or threat of violence – that results in a rapid transition of power. Revolutions are often longer affairs that include much of a country’s population and exponentially more bloodshed. 

A common goal of a coup is to keep much of the society and government apparatus intact, but change who’s in charge.  This illusion of continuity is intended to gain the acquiescence of the population so they don’t think they’ve been plunged into a civil war.

And that’s exactly what we got. While Donald Trump does not lay in a bloody toga on the floor of the Senate, America witnessed a coup d’état equally as viscous. Many will deny one took place because their guy won, but make no mistake, virtually every American knows one did, even if only 56% admit it.

The moment the coup began to reveal itself Americans knew something was amiss.  Many went to bed November 3^rd believing Trump won, leading in enough states to secure an electoral victory, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, and Wisconsin.  Strangely however, while much of America slept, densely populated Democrat counties like Fulton in Georgia (Atlanta) and Allegheny in Pennsylvania (Pittsburg) “stopped counting” votes only to “restart” later with Joe Biden having a sufficient number of votes to swing the state blue. Similarly Philadelphia stopped “reporting” at 1 AM and later reported Biden numbers sufficient to take the state.    

The morning of the 4th, as cries of fraud came from red areas across the country, the side that had spent years crying “election fraud” suddenly fell silent.  Apparently 2020 had become the “most legitimate election in American history”.

Joseph Stalin who said “Those who vote decide nothing.  Those who count the vote decide everything.”  That’s exactly how we went from being a Constitutional Republic to a banana republic, but rather than the United Fruit Company or the CIA running the coup, it was Mark Zuckerberg, Democrats, the FBI and the media.

Just after Biden was sworn into office Molly Ball of TIME Magazine wrote a glowing paean to the coup:  “Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction.”

And as with any good coup, violence was threatened:  “The nation was braced for chaos. Liberal groups had vowed to take to the streets, planning hundreds of protests across the country.”  In this context “protests” is a metaphor for Democrat approved violence unleashed by BLM and Antifa across the country.  Ball points out that following Biden’s victory the threatened violence was called off. “There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs.”

While Ball’s homage may be insightful, the definitive account of the coup comes from Mollie Hemingway in “Rigged”.  Unlike Ball, who couches everything about the coup in the fiction of patriots seeking to “protect” America from the fascist Donald Trump, Hemingway exposes exactly how the leftist cabal set the table for the coup, and upon its execution unleashed a propaganda machine to pretend the coup never happened.

Hemingway showcases incompetent GOP functionaries like Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger empowering Democrats led by the treacherous Marc Elias and Stacy Abrams to make unconstitutional voting rule changes. From corrupt jurists ignoring legislation and others explicitly ignoring the Constitution and allowing arbitrary election rulemaking that favored Democrats to the FBI and the media spending years attacking Trump, Hemingway exposes the coup step by step.  She demonstrates how Mark Zuckerberg wrote a $400 million check and financed the coup d'état that undermined our Republic.  

In perhaps the single most telling line in Rigged, on page 221 Hemingway quotes a reporter for the Wisconsin Spotlight:  “The City of Green Bay literally gave the keys to the election to a Democrat Party operative from New York.” Similar dynamics played out across the country.

The model was simple. Red counties in half a dozen states gave their counts while blue counties stopped counting or reporting.  Once the red totals were in Democrats knew exactly how many votes they needed to “produce” and those numbers magically started coming in. Fulton County (Atlanta) gave Biden a 250,000 margin of victory, enough to win the state by 12,000 votes of 5 million cast. Allegheny Pennsylvania (Pittsburg) gave Biden a 150,000 vote margin, enough to take Pennsylvania by 80,000 votes out of 6.8 million. 

When the dust settled, Biden was declared the 46^th President with “81 million votes” to Trump’s 74 million.  But Presidential elections come down to the Electoral College.  Joe Biden won there because of three states and 103,000 votes:  Pennsylvania, 20 Electors, by 80,000 votes, Georgia, 16 by 12,000, and Arizona, 11 by 11,000 votes. 

After two months of being caricatured and called conspiracy nuts or white nationalists, almost a million frustrated Trump voters went to Washington on January 6^th to demand Congress investigate the election.  After a rally where President Trump explicitly said to “peacefullyand patriotically make your voices heard” a riot with a few thousand people broke out at the Capital and suddenly an “Insurrection” worse than anything “since the Civil War” occurred, and anyone questioning the election was a guilty participant.  That riot, which may have been planned or empowered by the FBI suddenly changed the national conversation from investigating November’s coup to the impeachment of Trump for "incitement of insurrection".  And that was it. End of debate. Biden won and Trump tried to incite a coup and any ideas to the contrary were verboten…

But of course Americans know a lie when they see it and the debate isn’t really over.  When the propagandists say there was no way fraud could have impacted an election with 150 million voters, that’s a red herring.  The cabal behind the coup didn’t have to impact 150 million votes.  All they had to do was impact (or create) 100,000 well placed votes, which is exactly what they did, with the help a a Covid driven hysteria and a "bit" of money.  Mark Zuckerberg funded Democrats in a few states merely had to wait until the red areas reported their totals and then magically produce more votes from their stopped or paused machines. And that’s how it’s done, a real life enactment of Stalin’s adage, and it’s just another day at the office for Democrats. 

Mark Anthony could only eulogize Caesar after the Ides of March, but Donald Trump is still very much with us. We still have an opportunity to reverse this treachery and avert the disaster that naturally follows when the Rule of Man subverts the Rule of Law.  But will we seize it before it’s too late?