US Electoral College Ballot Box (1968, mahogany, Senate
Sergeant at Arms Cabinet Shop), containing the
Certificates confirming the Electoral College votes of the
States in the election of the President and Vice
President.
Comrades,
As soon as I saw those boxes containing the votes of the Electoral College in the time-honoured procession on The Hill, I knew the game was up. Everyone knew. There were no secrets after all. It was well known from sea to shining sea that the Electoral College had returned the votes for Uncle Joe and for DJ Trump! and their running mates, and that was that. Then came the ceremonial opening, after the votes were carried in by porters lugging brown boxes and leather briefcases with old fashioned large-key locks to a joint sitting of Congress, where they are emptied and the votes are counted out, state-by-state, by the President of the Senate, (who just so happened to be Mighty Mike Pence! this time around, oh the sweet irony) so the clerk & scribe can emboss the digits on the appropriate scroll and then stamp it with the Great Seal of Anything That Matters, before popping them in the built-for-purpose Mahogany Ballot Box. The magic numbers 306 to 232, so it turns out, were an inescapable fact They might as well - and there's no doubt somebody, somewhere, who does - etch the fookin' numbers into granite. In the final paralysis, the Miracle of Democracy is all about the numbers - that's where it begins and ends - and it's fundamentally based on the concept of political winners & losers duelling over policy in a co-operative society. So when an unruly, rudderless, confused, mystified, clueless rabble turned up and somehow made their way into the Capitol and things got pretty heavy; shots were fired, people got killed and folks were frightened for their lives - it was, as it had been all along - a sideshow. As soon as law enforcement had been prodded into action from their lunchtime slumber and started turning up in numbers, the mob fled - just melted away like all good reactionaries do. They thought they'd gotten away with it and were shocked to find the FBI knocking on their doors later in the week with arrest warrants. If the Trumpists were for real and had any idea what 'insurrection' might mean, they would have gone straight for those Electoral College votes and tried to steal them or ransom them or 'burn after reading' them or something; not just carry away the Speaker's Podium as if it was some kind of lucky find at a garage sale, as you are being beamed live across the wonderful wide world on the lawless webznet Facecrook thingo for gazillions to see. Dumb and dumber, the blind leading the blind, how many more clichés are there? There were so many splinter groups no-one had any idea at all about what to do. The real business at the seat of American Democracy carried on regardless of the provocations of the 45th POTUS and the utterly shameless Ted "The Most Hated Senator in Washington" Cruz & Co. leading the way on the appalling vote objection technical fiasco ----- as the 46th POTUS remarked in his inaugural address "Democracy has prevailed". And so it has.
"The Mob" (good term, given that DJ Trump! always liked to pretend and behave like he was some kind of mafia Boss) never turned up for The Inauguration did they? - anywhere. If they were still a "movement" they would have taken to the streets en masse, and started shootin' in the air while a hollerin' the rebel's yell and picking fights with fucking Liberals. But no. The DJ Trump! demagoguery act was always pretty ordinary, for mine. Four long years of a piss weak impression of a little tin-pot despot that had run out of puffery. No wonder The Donald tried to lick-spittle the boots of real ones like Fatboy Kim, Vlad the Impaler, and Mr Ping of China, hoping some of the shine might rub off on him, much to their amusement.
Never mind that Uncle Joe now undoubtedly has the hardest road to hoe since FDR back in '32, it's a humongous job that will most likely drive him to his grave. In times of plague and depression, the US Presidency is very definitely not for the faint-hearted.
The Miracle of Democracy is what got The Donald
to the White House and it's what's got him ejected from the Oval
Office. It doesn't get much simpler than that, but you'd be
suprised how many simpletons there are out there. You just have
to hope that in time DJ!'s legacy will have about as much clout
as the Tea Party does today. Can't ask for much more without
moving mountains between the polarisations.
You'd have to suppose
the events in DC are a good argument for keeping the Electoral
College, regardless of it being 'unrepresentative swill' (the
numbers will be re-jigged after the 2020 Census, but only with a
vote here, a vote there being re-distributed). No, the College
will remain as a sop to the Slave States as it's always been. To
conduct a simple popular vote winner election, you'd need a
nation-wide Electoral Commission to conduct it, and that's
anathema to most Americans, who consider the act of voting a
very local private affair - conducted by long-standing local
rules; everyone can and does do it differently state-by-state,
and all the many hundreds of counties in the US of A are but one
brick in the democratic wall. All the rules and regulations
might be different - but the goal posts stay right where they
are. That's the way they see it - 'we'll keep our myriad methods
of disenfranchisement, our voter suppression and our voter
intimidation all in-house, thank you very much' - and let's face
it, that's all part and parcel of the Miracle of Democracy as
much as anything else. Even if the Electoral College remains as
the godawful gerrymander that it is, any American being told by
an Australian how to rig their democracy can only point to the
Hare-Clark system of voting, which has done more than anything
else to bring the lunatic fringe into that institution so
rightly despised by PJK - the Australian Senate. The US Senate
currently has but one Independent member, and he's from Vermont.
Still, there is some movement at the station, with eleven states
now committed to giving their Electoral College votes to the
national popular vote winner. That'd give the bloc of
anti-gerrymander states i.e. California, Connecticut, Hawaii,
Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode
Island, Vermont and Washington state, along with the District of
Colombia 172 Electoral College votes between them - no where
near the required 270 to win. Good luck to 'em, but they all
know it's symbolic, and nothing will ever happen.
The real worry is that DJ Trump! mustered about ten million more votes than he did in 2016, and rustled up more votes than any other sitting US President - ever. Fear and Loathing works - that's been clear for yonks. But as the Masters of the Dark arts in conservative politics will tell you, hardly any of those ten million voted "down ballot". They were there for Trump and Trump only, They were of no help to the Republican Party at all. Those millions certainly did not turn out at the two special Senate elections in Georgia, and ipso facto could not give a blue root that the Democrats for all intents and purposes flipped the Senate. Still, to put that ten mill in perspective, about 158M ballots were cast in the denouement (about 100M in the mail), at an exceptional turn-out of 66.20%, not seen since 1960. And now, Hillary's Deplorables find themselves hopelessly fractured with a trumpet-less muzzled leader - the momentum is lost, Donny, face up to it - along with the "movement" - if there ever was one in the first place. Never mind whatever else might happen to the toad-like turd at his 2nd Impeachment trial or in the criminal courts or what he might do about the $US450M in personal loans being called-in this year, or even a foray into the bleeding heart of Fake Meejah, The DJ! would never establish his own political party unless it had the Trump! name in it somewhere - his narcissism would allow for nothing less - but that would be an absolute dream scenario. He could certainly threaten to form a breakaway party - and will - to keep the running dogs scampering. But, if he did pull the pin and took his "base" with him, the Conservative vote would irrevocably split. In that highly unlikely turn of events, The Democratic Party - if it can maintain the rage and the massive turn-out at the ballot box - would never be beaten, ever.
Bravo!
Gerrymander on Gerrymander. Electoral College votes if all states distributed their votes proportionally by number of winners of each Congressional District, as currently done by Maine and Nebraska, 2020 US Presidential Election. Biden 274. Trump 264. Source: 270ToWin.
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