Was the election stolen? Maybe; it depends on what you mean.
Were there clear cases of classic fraud? Sure looks like it--I'm pretty sure that Georgia election official was lying. Were those enough to tip the balance? Nobody knows, and they've been very careful not to find out. Were all the suspicious cases fraud? I very much doubt it. Trump is wildly unpopular in some circles. Was there unprovable chicanery with the mail-in ballots? I'll bet there was. Will even legal mail-in ballots skew in favor of densely populated cities? Obviously. Is this unprecedented? Read about Tammany Hall.
Is this kind of invasive protest going to do anything useful at all? Hardly. Maybe it'll scare a few senators, but I'll bet they're more likely to be vengeful than penitent. And it's very much like complaining about the barn door when the horse got through it half a year before.
Why wasn't the National Guard there, and why did the police let demonstrators through the barricade? Maybe that was after the legistlators were evacuated from the hall? Who did they think they were letting through? When I was there, the capitol police took the inner sanctum pretty seriously.
Without a tried finding to the contrary, Pence et al have to presume that the election results were valid. Imagine if that weren't true and elections could be blocked on suspicion. It's bad enough right now, with automatic impeachment proceedings as a precedent (chatter started even before Trump was sworn in--though Biden is probably immunized against impeachment).
UPDATE: I see. The perimeter had already been breached elsewhere, so the cops were retreating to regroup.
No comments:
Post a Comment