Introduction
Remember when you were a kid, and your sister was going to have a birthday party, and you wanted to help by blowing up balloons? But you weren’t that good at it yet, and so occasionally you would get one up to the requisite size, but then your fingers would slip, and the balloon would spaz out, darting around the room making funny noises? But enough about Lin Wood . . .
Actually, that is not quite enough about Lin Wood. Imagine a huge and ancient cave, the ceiling of which is covered with mammals of the order that scientists call chiroptera, and let us say that the guano on the bottom of that cave is a couple of feet deep. We are talking crazy at those levels.
Lin Wood just covered himself with glory a few days ago by delivering to us the utterance that Mike Pence might well be executed for treason, and this in his purported defense of the claim that the election was stolen from Trump by the Biden forces. In other words, he interrupted his gonzo fight to keep Trump in office to deliver himself of the opinion that the man he was fighting to keep in office as the number two might well be a traitor. Hardly the rallying cry you want, it would seem. I think this might be the first time in American history where someone actually licensed to practice law went from dwarf to supernova in such a short space of time. I mean, geez, Louise.
But Lest You Mistake My Meaning Here
Now I do not say that Lin Wood has slipped a cog because he thinks the election was, as a Spaniard WASP married to Alex Baldwin might say, how do we say it in mi lingwidge . . .? el fraudo. No, no, not at all. Lots of people with plenty of compos mentis lying around their houses in piles think that the election was stolen, swiped, absconded with, pinched, purloined, bagged, and high-jacked. And did I say stolen?
In other words, if ever you are inclined to feel a bit embarrassed by Wood’s antics, just set them alongside the alternative crazy talk that tries to reassure us all that this was quite a normal election, no funny business, nothing suspicious at all, keep moving along, folks, please disperse, nothing to see here. In case you were curious, that is the point of the illustrative gif that I have helpfully included along with this post.
Bracing for January 6
On January 6, which is to say, this coming Wednesday, there will be a joint session of Congress that assembles to ratify the results of the Electoral College vote. This is normally just a formality, but this time it will include ratifying that greasy black cloud hovering over Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Arizona. If at least one representative in the House and one senator object to said ratification, then the two legislative bodies will retire to their respective chambers to debate it for a couple of hours. At present it looks like a significant number of congressmen and senators will object.
Now this is not the end of all our democratic sunshine because Democratic lawmakers have done this kind of thing routinely, and nobody even knew about it. It matters now because something might actually come of it. Perhaps you are wondering what might come of it? Ah.
The difference this time have to do with the fact that the number of senators and congressmen participating looks to be large enough that they cannot be dismissed as mere cranks. In addition, some of them, like Ted Cruz, have the stature to prevent it from descending to Lin Wood levels. And then we are going to see how many show up for the rally outside, the rally that the president has been promoting, and what happens there.
We will also see if anything comes of the (undoubted) efforts that the DNC must be making to try to get Lin Wood a speaking gig at that rally. “I haven’t even gotten to the question of our lizard overlords yet . . .”
The fact that a significant number of congressmen and senators are willing to be associated with this objection to ratification (note especially the senators) means one of two things, and perhaps both. They no doubt are in a position to gauge how much pressure they are getting from their constituencies back home on this thing, and they are also in a position (perhaps) to know something of the nature of the evidence that has been promised. More about what that evidence will have to be in a moment.
Now there is a respectability brigade that runs the establishment GOP, and they never want to do what’s just not done. This ratification battle is one of those things that is just not done, and yet, here we are.
Yup. Here we are.
Trump’s Options
Now the very fact that I think that Trump actually has options will be proof positive to a certain breed of shiny Republican that I have somehow gotten envious of Lin Wood’s “heroic” exploits, and want to do whatever I can to float off into QAnon territory.
But no. There are some very real options, and whether or not anybody really wants to choose them is by this point immaterial. It appears to me that the choices have already largely been made. We don’t know what “it” is yet, but whatever it is, we are in it now. This thing has deteriorated to the level of a cage match, meaning that no matter what happens, somebody is at high risk of going to jail. The fight will therefore continue to the last ditch because of the nature of the skin in the game. Put bluntly, the people involved are no longer fighting for power, or access to power, they are also fighting for survival. That is where a good bit of the intensity is coming from.
I mean, look where we actually are—eighteen days to the inauguration of a new president, and the sitting president hasn’t conceded anything yet. The only way I can read this is that either Trump has some really high-level whoa-Nelly stuff planned or, taking another view, that he is a moron. And whatever else we might want to say, he is not a moron.
So what are Trump’s options here? Here are at least a couple. Remember that I am talking about possibilities, and not talking about what I think likely. Neither am I talking about whether a particular strategy, if pursued, would work or not. These are simply the options on paper, as I see them. The thing I don’t see happening is for it to trail off into a whimper.
So here are some possibilities:
Trump has four aces, and will play them in such a way that he will be inaugurated on the 20th. These cannot be arcane juju legal moves, like Mike Pence simply declaring the winner—even if a water main broke in the Capitol and the place had to be cleared out, and then when everybody came back, Pence announced that Trump had scored a surprising win. That kind of thing only wins the applause of the respectables and moderates if the people doing it are Democrats in the middle of the night. So to qualify as four aces, in my book, they would have to be four aces of the smoking-gun-dead-to-rights brand. If Trump is to be inaugurated a second time, it could only happen in one of two ways, both of them extreme. The first is that he has four aces, which he shows to us and to the world, and everybody sees and acknowledges it. Biden concedes, and we carry on, having all had a really good scare. The other option (again, on paper) is for Trump to do something really drastic (national emergency, insurrection act, martial law, that kind of stuff). But in order for that to happen without blowing the nation to the kind of tiny pieces that lexicographers call smithereens, literally, he would have to show everybody twelve aces from three poker games, all at once. Now I have seen enough already to persuade me that the election was fraudulent, but I haven’t seen twelve aces yet.
And let us be frank. Some of the promised kraken have actually turned out to be the kind of teeny calimari that artsy chefs put on some people’s salads. To be sure, I have seen what I believe to be some actual kraken, but no one should even think about emergency powers for anybody unless we are talking about the kind of kraken who could come up the Chesapeake and eat Baltimore. After this last year of pandemic panic, I have had quite enough of government-decreed emergencies-by-fiat, thank you. You can’t just say you have kraken, any more than you can say you have a pandemic.
The proof-of-kraken would have to be so HUGE that the CDC would be prevented from declaring the kraken to be a “new strain” of COVID, which would then allow them to pronounce the deceased of Baltimore to be the latest victims of this deadly disease. “Do your part. Wear a mask.”
The second option: Trump is planning to leave the White House, but he is going to do so in a way that will leave the Biden administration hog-tied in a political way. By this I mean Trump exercising his powers on the way out in a way that would make life very difficult for Biden/Harris. There are three instruments he has that he could use in this way—pardons, appointments of special prosecutors, and the authority to declassify.
And underneath these three sorts of executive actions would be the brawl that we are going through now. In other words, Biden, already a weak politician, is already going to be assuming office with the opposite of a mandate. His informal title for many of us will be “his illegitimacy.” I will be writing in the future about biblical principles for living under a discredited and illegitimate government—if we come to that. So stay tuned.
Not every one of these actions need be a straight line right to Biden—it would be sufficient simply to create ample chaos of the political variety. Suppose, just for a thought experiment, that Trump pardoned Snowden and Assange, appointed six to eight special prosecutors (one for Ukraine, one for Hunter’s laptop, one for the election in Pennsylvania, etc.) and then topped it all off by declassifying anything that had anything whatever to do with Hillary, Obama, Biden, Hunter, and so on. I am not saying that I would necessarily approve of every aspect of this myself, but the results would be a couple years worth of festivities.
Keep in mind the fact that the Georgia run-off election is January 5, and so we might know by the following day if the Senate is going to remain in Republican hands or not. And the fact that Ted Cruz is leading the senators who are objecting to the Electoral College ratification quite possibly represents a proxy challenge to the leadership position of Mitch McConnell. In other words, we have a lot of things going on. We will have a busy week.
This long and drawn out election drama is going to be over in a few weeks, one way or another. It is kind of like a concrete pour. No matter what happens, after a few hours, you’re all done.
When February 1 rolls around, the White House will not be sitting there empty. Somebody is going to be living there, and it will be Biden or Trump. If it is Biden, we all know how he got there, and we will have to turn to the Scriptures to learn what we are supposed to do about it now. The Bible does not just have directions for dealing with evil rulers, but it also instructs us on what to do with illegitimate rulers. If Trump is the one living there, we do not yet know how he could possibly have pulled that off. That is going to unfold over the next few weeks, if it unfolds. But if anything like that happens, we are going to need to do the same thing—back to the Scriptures. We may well have to be dealing with illegitimacy from the right, or it might be something else again.
Like I said earlier, stay tuned.