Remember the olden days of 2016, when it was okay to mess with electors?
Back when it was the Democrats doing it against the dreaded Trump, they considered it a virtuous activity.
It seems as though there have been so many rapid-fire events starting with Trump’s 2016 election that it’s easy to forget many of the details. But I think it’s very instructive to take a little stroll down memory lane from time to time. The article is from 12/17/16 [my emphasis]:
On Monday, members of the Electoral College will cast their historic votes for the next president of the United States. In the meantime, they are under siege.
The nation’s 538 presidential electors have been thrust into the political foreground like never before in American history. In the aftermath of a uniquely polarizing presidential contest, the once-anonymous electors are squarely in the spotlight, targeted by death threats, harassing phone calls and reams of hate mail. One Texas Republican elector said he’s been bombarded with more than 200,000 emails.
Trump had been elected, but it seems it was perfectly okay to try to harass his electors and even to threaten them, in order to get them to vote for Hillary Clinton. Perhaps the perpetrators should have been tracked down and charged with obstructing an official proceeding (or at least attempting to do so)? After all, that has been one of the most common charges against the J6 demonstrators of 2021, including peaceful ones. But back in 2016 Republican lawyers were nowhere near as creative as Democrat lawyers became in twisting statutes into something they never were meant to be, in order to charge the opposition with crimes.
More [my emphasis, and my remarks in brackets]:
In recent decades, the Electoral College had become such a reliable rubber stamp of Election Day results that it was viewed as an afterthought.
But with many Democrats desperate to block the all-but-certain ascension of Donald Trump to the White House, this long-neglected body has been gripped by turmoil, and its members have been subjected to pleas to upend centuries of tradition by casting their votes for someone other than the president-elect.
There have been ad campaigns targeting electors and op-eds assailing their role. One Democratic member of Congress has called to delay the vote for president while an investigation of Russian involvement in the election is underway [isn’t that very similar to requests from Trump supporters in 2020?]. Two others have pleaded with electors to consider Russia’s role when deciding how to vote. Progressive groups are preparing protests across the country at sites where electors will meet to cast their ballots [sounds like a planned “insurrection” to me]. Personal contact information for many electors has been posted publicly — and it’s been used to bury them with massive email campaigns.
There were indeed demonstrations, although they were pretty tame. But the people involved certainly tried to obstruct an official proceeding. For example, in Wisconsin:
There were demonstrations in other states, too, and of course this happened in Congress:
The irony is that after all the Democrat efforts to get Trump electors to defect in 2016 more Clinton electors defected than Trump electors that year.
The foreshadowing is that other Clinton electors also planned to defect (and vote for Sanders or Kasich) but were “replaced” with more docile alternate electors.
When I recall the Gore attempt to change the national election result with selective “recounts” in precincts favorable to him, and the shenanigans of the Democrats in 2016, Trump’s activities in 2020 don’t look bad in comparison. Dems will never admit that if Trump’s efforts were illegal, then so also were theirs, and then some.
When political opponents repeatedly ‘overturn the chess board’, they have demonstrated that they will no longer act within the rules and have essentially declared war upon the former civil order. They are actively “cutting down all the laws”.
To insist upon continuing to play by the former rules of political discourse is to essentially declare that the Constitution is indeed a suicide pact.
You can’t win a gunfight with a knife.