The View from Right Field

The Great January 6 “What-If”

The House of Representatives’ January 6 Committee¹ has issued its report.  I’m not going to go into its conclusions.  What Donald Trump did on January 6, and what he did not do that he should have done,  was appalling, but then I knew that on January 6.  As I have said before,² the only question after January 6 was: what was the best way to make sure then-President, now former President, Trump went away and never came back again.  But that is not the question for this post. 

Rather, the “what-if” question for this post is this: What if the Capitol had had better security on January 6?  What if there had been enough police officers, and national guard personnel, etc., so that the protestors, aka rioters (aka insurrectionists or whatever you want to call them), had not been able to break into the U.S. Capitol building that day?  In one way, things would have been the same.  Then-President Trump would have still tried to convince Mike Pence to put off the counting of the electoral votes (or whatever other cockamamie scheme then-President Trump was pushing).  Some idiot Republicans would have objected to the counting of the electoral votes.³  And Vice President Pence would have told them all to, in effect, “pound sand.” 

Georgia On My Mind

With Georgia having a primary election on Tuesday, a couple of thoughts.  First, it will be interesting to see what the turnout is.  The left has said that the new election laws Georgia passed last year were designed to reduce minority turnout.  Among other things, Atlanta lost the All-Star Game because of it.  Let’s see whether turnout really is reduced.  Reports so far indicate turnout may actually be up.  If so, will MLB apologize?  How about the Democrats?

Second, I find it bizarre that former U.S. Senator David Perdue is running against Governor Brian Kemp in the Republican primary on a pro-Trump stolen election platform.  Regardless of whether you think Donald Trump was cheated out of Georgia’s electoral votes in 2020 (I don’t), there can be little doubt that former President Trump’s tactics and campaigning in the two Georgia run-off elections in early January of 2021 cost Republicans control of the U.S. Senate – and David Perdue his Senate seat.¹
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¹ See “The Great Georgia 2021 Senate ‘What If?’” here.

The Great Georgia 2021 Senate “What If?”

November of 2020, there were 50 Republican senators and 48 Democrats.  But there were two races in Georgia where there had to be run-off elections because no candidate had gotten 50%+1 of the votes cast on election day (as required by Georgia law).  In both races, the Republican candidate got more votes than the Democratic candidate on election day, but the Republican had not gotten 50%+1.  So there were going to be two run-off elections on January 5, 2021.  The Democrats won run-offs, thus giving the Democrats a 50-50 “majority” in the Senate because of Vice President Kamala Harris.

But what if Donald Trump, instead of going down to Georgia in December of 2020 in a snit and complaining he had been cheated out of the election and saying there was no way any Republican would be allowed to win anywhere, even in Georgia¹; what if President Trump had gone to Georgia in December of 2020 and tried to rally Republicans to vote for the Republican Senate candidates, telling his supporters that they needed to get out and vote so we could keep the Democrats from controlling the Senate?²  And what if, therefore, even one of the Republicans had won?  The Republicans would have controlled the Senate.  But what more might have happened?

The Republican Party’s Got Trouble

To paraphrase (poorly) Robert Preston singing Meredith Willson’s song “Ya Got Trouble” in “The Music Man”:  

“[The Republican Party’s] got trouble!
Right here in River City
Trouble with a capital "T"
And that rhymes with "P" and that stands for … former President Trump.”

Donald Trump is going around telling everybody that the 2020 election was stolen from him.  He calls it the “Presidential Election Fraud of 2020.”  Except the election was not stolen from him.  He lost because Joe Biden won a majority in the Electoral College.¹  But former President Trump can’t seem to handle that fact.  He wrote a long letter to the editor in The Wall Street Journal on Thursday listing all kinds of problems with the vote count in Pennsylvania.  The WSJ listed just some of the errors in former President Trump’s list in an editorial on Friday, but it is impossible to respond to all of his claims.  But that doesn’t mean they’re right.  He just says things.  Trying to respond to them all is a fool’s errand.

Liz Cheney, Donald Trump, 2020, and the Republican Party

Liz Cheney was ousted as head of the House Republican Conference last week, mostly (entirely-?) because she wouldn’t sign up for former President Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen.  The decision to remove her was taken by a voice vote.  Which was either because almost everybody agreed or because, if one wants to be cynical (which I often find is the best way to look at things, especially politics), people didn’t want to go on the record. 

In any case, here are a few comments on Donald Trump, the 2020 election, and the future of the Republican Party:

Retaking Congress – Or Not

Karl Rove wrote in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal about how the left may be damaging the Democrats’ chances of keeping control of Congress in November, 2022.  While Mr. Rove made some good points about how the “left-wing loonies” could hurt the Democrats, he doesn’t mention what the “right-wing crazies” could do to the Republicans. 

After all, Democrats control the Senate because of Donald Trump.  Instead of going to Georgia and urging Republicans and independents to vote for Republicans David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, so the Democrats wouldn’t control the Senate, former President Trump spent his time in Georgia doing his normal “it’s all about me” thing, complaining about how the election was stolen from him and the Republican governor and secretary of state in Georgia didn’t care.  Not surprisingly, turnout in Republican areas in the special senate run-off election went down; why vote, if the election will get stolen and your vote won’t count.  And so, Mitch McConnell is Senate Minority Leader, instead of Senate Majority Leader.  If President Trump had cared more about the cause than himself, that might not have happened.

“Grifting” for a Cause

Last year the Lincoln Project was a big deal in the mainstream media: a group of Republicans running ads against Donald Trump.  It was big news.  It made the mainstream media feel good.  It was a story they could throw in Trump supporters’ faces. 

Except now, we are finding out there were problems with the Lincoln Project.  Last week, the Associated Press reported on at least ten allegations of harassment (I think sexual harassment) by one of the co-founders of the group.¹  Interestingly, it appears the members of the group’s leadership (or at least some of them) were told about this in June of last year, but the AP only reported it last week.  I guess the AP was busy.

On Convicting Donald Trump

Even though I think the better constitutional argument is that it is constitutional to impeach and try former President Trump (he was, after all, impeached while he was still in office), I probably wouldn’t have impeached him (for the reasons stated here).  However, once he was impeached, given what he did, I couldn’t not convict him. 

As I said here, I don’t know if he “incited” an “insurrection” in the legal meaning of those words, but what he did was wrong.  A president doesn’t have to be guilty of a crime to be impeached and convicted (and a president doesn’t always get impeached and convicted just because he committed a crime – see, for example, Bill Clinton).  What former President Trump did was sufficiently wrong that, as I said above, I couldn’t not convict him.  Unfortunately, it appears that not enough Republicans agree with me.

Impeachment Jeopardy: The Only Senator to Vote to Convict a President of His Own Party

Who is Mitt Romney?
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UPDATE (2/13/21 5:30 pm): The answer should be changed to: “The Only Senators to Vote to Convict a President of Their Own Party.”
The question should be changed to: “Who are Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Ben Sasse, Paul Toomey, Richard Burr, and Bill Cassidy?”

On President Biden’s First Week

I have not posted since Joe Biden was inaugurated last Wednesday, so maybe I will now.  I thought President Biden’s inaugural address was pretty decent.  It did not get into details, but it hit a lot of things I believe in.¹  Whether he is going to be able to do those things, who knows.  It depends on him, his team, and the other team(s)².

I don’t agree with some (a lot-?) of the executive orders, etc., that President Biden has issued/signed, but I have not commented because, well, it is early.  Also, the way Donald Trump left the presidency, especially since the Electoral College met in December, has bothered me so much that it is hard to criticize what President Biden is doing.  I don’t know if President Trump “incited an insurrection” on January 6 in the legal meaning of those words, but what he said was not, in my opinion, acceptable.³