“T. saw these people as… sympathetic to the idea that the election was stolen.”– Lindsey Graham. Steve Scalise implies election was really stolen.

Just when you thought the election was over and Biden won fair and square, along comes Steve Scalise who refuses to admit that he didn’t steal the election. During an interview last week, Scalise refused to say: (via Huffpost)

“There were a few states that did not follow their state laws,” Scalise said. “That’s really the dispute that you’ve seen continue on.”

“At the end of the day, when you look at where we are in this country, either we’re going to address the problems that happened with the election that people are still ― millions of people ― are still concerned about,” he added. “The Constitution says state legislatures set the rules for elections. That didn’t happen in a few states.”

The problem with his argument is that this very question was put to the courts, and they disagreed. The courts all said that constitutional rules were followed. Pro-Republican lawyers filed over 60 lawsuits, and they all failed. So the judicial branch of government has decided that Biden didn’t “steal” the election– he won by getting 81 million votes to “the former guy” getting 74 million votes. No matter what Scalise thinks, he can’t go around saying that the Constitution wasn’t followed, because the Courts say it was.

It was T who told everyone the election was going to be “rigged”, and afterwards he insisted that it was “stolen”– the Big Lie. He started it, spread it, insisted on it, and refused to back down when the Courts decided otherwise.

The rioters who breached the Capitol on January 6 were shown live on television and the president was watching with sympathy for his allies who believed the election was stolen. He wasn’t thinking about stopping the riot until he was reminded by his staff.

Somewhere in that delusional journey. Somehow he has won the election, except he didn’t.

So he gets together a mob that he has been carefully preparing for at least the last year, keeping them in conspiracy rabbit-holes. He’s studied the chokepoints in the Constitutional procedure for endorsing elections and he plans to apply pressure to the Congress at their weakest point in the process: the normally formulaic opening and counting of the Electoral College ballots by the Senate.

Electoral counting ceremony is presided over by the Vice President. It has a reputation for being painful to perform when the party of the Vice President loses the election. Nonetheless, Vice Presidents have followed protocol to the letter every time. This time Vice President Pence fully intended to do the same, despite heavy pressure from the president.

Except that the president was giving a speech to a crowd of supporters who immediately marched a mile and a half to the Capitol. The speech was timed to finish before Vice President Pence was due to start counting.

A mob broke into the Capitol building shortly after the president’s speech and forced the Secret Service to rush the Vice President to a secure location. House and Senate members were also sent to secure locations in the basement.

There was a significant delay in calling up the National Guard to help the Capitol Police recover from the assault. The President didn’t order them up; the Vice President was the one who did that. They weren’t called up for over two hours after the breach.

As a result, the outnumbered forces had to push the mob out of the building instead of arresting anyone.

The former president has returned to his private club in Florida, a safe space where he can vent about all the “unfair” treatment he’s received.

Somehow he’s still fuming about his psychotic fraud allegations and all the traitors who have betrayed him. Meanwhile, Joe Biden is issuing real executive orders and getting ready to pass through Congress a $1.9 trillion cash infusion into the federal budget. The only way to justify this is that it is an emergency, and it is.

Meanwhile, the infection numbers are gradually going down, apparently because people are following isolation rules more carefully– although no-one knows for sure. Hospitalizations have dropped, and even the death rate is subsiding. That sounds like good news, but the economy won’t recover just because the pandemic is receding.

The Republican moderates who met with Joe Biden offered $618 billion. This is not enough. There is a chance that even $1.9 trillion will not be enough. Just hope that the vaccines work. (PS: I got my first shot, by Pfizer, last week.)

(photo courtesy of pixabay.com and Erika Wittlieb)