The Texas lawsuit is the real Kraken

Why is it always retiring GOP leaders who have the balls to tell their career seeking junior lawmakers they’re screwing up? Retiring Rep Paul Mitchell by the way, is among the richest seated.

Mr. Kevin McCarthy
Republican Leader
U.S. House of Representatives
U.S. Capitol
Washington, DC 20515

Dear Chairwoman McDaniel and Leader McCarthy:

The weeks since the 2020 General Election have been traumatic for many in our nation, both voters and those of us who took an oath to serve this nation.
As you well know, my voting record in Congress over the past two terms has been in line with President Trump and the administration’s policies more than 95 percent of the time. Further, I voted for President Trump in the 2020 General Election despite some reservations about four more years under his leadership. I felt that many policies achieved during the Trump administration had been positive for our nation, whereas the policies espoused by the Democratic Party were too radical and did not reflect my principles.

I have also worked hard to support each of you and your efforts. Ronna, you may recall that I spoke with you several times as you considered undertaking the role of RNC Chair. It was my strong belief that you could help lead our party and support its core principles, and I encouraged you to undertake the position. Kevin, I worked diligently with you as part of the Republican Leadership Team for both the 115th and 116th Congresses. I fervently whipped votes for our policies during both terms on some tough issues.

As an active supporter of the national GOP, the state GOP, the NRCC and individual candidates, I raised almost $800k in just 2 1/2 years for the NRCC to support Republican candidates supported by leadership. I have contributed personal funds, not simply PAC funds, to innumerable candidates at the Federal and state levels.

I agree that there have been some disconcerting aspects to this election. With more than 155 million people voting, both administrative errors and even some fraudulent voting likely occurred. Steps must be taken, by each state, to audit election results, validate ballots and process and report findings to ensure that every legal vote counts. Michigan clearly needs to do that, not just Wayne County. However, the president and his legal team have failed to provide substantive evidence of fraud or administrative failure on a scale large enough to impact the outcome of the election.

Ronna, you know Michigan politics well. President Trump did not lose Michigan because of Wayne County, but rather he lost because of dwindling support in areas including Kent and Oakland County, both previous Republican strongholds. In the 2020 election, President Trump lost Michigan by 154,000 votes, compared to 2016 when his margin of victory was slightly more than 10,700 votes.
I have stated publicly numerous times that when entering the political arena, a person must be willing to accept winning and losing with grace and maturity. Having personally experienced both winning and losing, the latter can be brutal.
Any candidate, including the president, is entitled to request recounts and pursue legal challenges they believe are appropriate if they possess evidence of wrongdoing. President Trump has undertaken or supported both of these options. Recounts have failed to significantly alter the vote outcome in any state and dozens of court cases have been summarily dismissed in both state and Federal courts across our nation.

It is unacceptable for political candidates to treat our election system as though we are a third- world nation and incite distrust of something so basic as the sanctity of our vote. Further, it is unacceptable for the president to attack the Supreme Court of the United States because its judges, both liberal and conservative, did not rule with his side or that “the Court failed him.” It was our Founding Fathers’ objective to insulate the Supreme Court from such blatant political motivations.

If Republican leaders collectively sit back and tolerate unfounded conspiracy theories and “stop the steal” rallies without speaking out for our electoral process, which the Department of Homeland Security said was “the most secure in American history,” our nation will be damaged. I have spoken out clearly and forcefully in opposition to these messages. However, with the leadership of the Republican Party and our Republican Conference in the House actively participating in at least some of those efforts, I fear long-term harm to our democracy.

The stability and strength of our democracy has been an ongoing concern for me. I expressed strong concerns about the president’s response to Charlottesville, the anti-immigrant “send them back” rhetoric, and even the racist comments of my own colleagues in the House.

I believe that raw political considerations, not constitutional or voting integrity concerns, motivate many in party leadership to support the “stop the steal” efforts, which is extremely disappointing to me. As elected members of Congress, we take an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States,” not to preserve and protect the political interests of any individual, be it the president or anyone else, to the detriment of our cherished nation.

As a result, I am writing to advise you both that I am withdrawing from my engagement and association with the Republican Party at both the national and state level. I will support,

contribute to, and fundraise for individual candidates who reflect the principles I hold dear. Further, by copy of this letter I am also advising Ms. Laura Cox, Chair of the Michigan GOP of this decision.

I am also requesting that the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives change my party affiliation to Independent for the remainder of my term in office. While admittedly symbolic, we all know that symbols matter.

Sincerely,
Paul Mitchell
Member of Congress
—
CC Laura Cox, Chair, Michigan Republican Party
Cheryl L. Johnson, Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives

@kitt:

Who cares if Mitchell changes parties? Hell, the guy missed almost more votes than anyone else. And he’s out of office in January anyway.

But Ward/AJ thought he has something really going there. No cigar.

@kitt:

Trump lost. He lost Nov 3rd, he lost to countless courts including the Supremes on Friday, and he lost to the electoral votes today. He will undoubtedly lose to both the House and Senate Jan 6. The Supremes have already said loud and clear they aren’t going to save his sorry losing ass.

In the real world, Joe Biden will be sworn in on Jan 20th. Perhaps sore losers win in Trumpland. We’re not in Trumpland anymore.

@Ronald J. Ward: Trumps team has only filed 6 or 7 I know if its more than on one hand you get confused, hint to count to 20 take off yer shoes if you own a pair.
There are several suits on the docket of the SCOTUS.
Just because you rob a bank and get back to your house doesnt mean you get to keep the money. This isnt over, yet. Lots of evidence tons of evidence. We just have to say the dominion machine refused to bake a gay cake and they will hear it 3 times.

@kitt: This will be like the “revelations” about the Biden crime family that was kept from so many. The digging, investigations, revelations and suits will continue and when the truth whacks these ignorant dupes over the head (combined with more Democrat failure), they’ll be saying, “Gosh, if only we had known…”

But the damage will be done.

@Deplorable Me: https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/wisconsin-supreme-court-rules-state-erred-giving-blanket-exemption-voter
Victory in court!

@Deplorable Me: All the contested states sent alternate electors for Jan 6th
Oh boy there will be some crying in 3 2 ….

@Deplorable Me: lol that exactly who our SC blamed.

@Ronald J. Ward:

Its far from over but sit in your Mockingbird alternate reality never look beyond your foggy bubble.
The fight continues for a fair election rooting out illegalities, fraud and foreign interference in this shit show.
YUGE WIN IN WISCONSIN FOR TRUMP. Biden did not win by skirting our ID laws.
Biden wont win in PA by skirting their mail in and counting deadline laws.
Biden wont win in MI
Biden wont win in GA
Biden wont win in AZ
Biden will not be confirmed winner on Jan 6th hold that cork on your 30 dime for 2.99 bubbly hillbilly.

@kitt:

a) You’re missing the entire point that it doesn’t matter if there was fraud or not, the basket is clearly on a mission to save their hero because of their hatred of the other side. Rigged elections is an excuse.

b) It’s unclear what planet you are living on because here on earth, all 50 states acknowledged Biden as the president-elect,. Even Mitch McConnel has finally accepted it.

Part of the problem with the basket of gulibles is they’ve been instructed to not venture outside their bubble, not to allow what they’ve been gaslighted into believing if fake news. This keeps them ill-informed of reality and only capable of believing the propaganda that their masters have perfected.

Take the New York Times for example. You’ve been indoctrinated into viewing them in about the same way a vampire’s burns their eyes when gazing at a cross. And this total rejection forbids you to gain knowledge or even consideration of, as the con man was outed on 60 Minutes, any negative reporting of that con man.

The NYT’s explained that a bit today. I doubt that any of the vampires here are physically able to read it and most certainly accept it but it does reflect at least a big argument of the political world today:

But inside the sprawling and self-reinforcing network of websites, podcasts and video news that has fed some of the most reckless and unrealistic claims about the election, the myth of Mr. Trump’s political survival endures.

The lead story on the Gateway Pundit, which researchers have identified as one of the major sources pro-Trump misinformation online, floated the idea of a “BOMBSHELL” ruling in a case on Monday that the site teased as a possible game-changer: “Will a Small County in Northern Michigan Be the Key to Overturning the Nation’s Election Results?”

On a podcast hosted by Mr. Trump’s former White House chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, a conservative activist vowed to file a new lawsuit seeking to reverse the electors’ vote — adding to the dozens of suits so far, nearly all of which have been dismissed. “Intimidation and fear is not something that works in a democracy,” said Phill Kline, the director of the conservative Amistad Project, vowing to continue the fight.

The podcast was one of at least six on the list of Apple’s 100 most popular podcasts that are hosted by someone who has been vocally supportive of Mr. Trump’s attack on the nation’s electoral system.

The world seems to have recognized what the Electoral College affirmed on Monday: Mr. Trump will be leaving office whether he wants to accept his fate or not. The Supreme Court refused to second-guess this reality on Friday when it rejected a legally dubious, last-minute maneuver by the State of Texas. Numerous world leaders have accepted it by congratulating Mr. Biden. Even Mr. Trump’s own administration eventually bowed and agreed to formally begin the transition process.

Yet six weeks after his defeat, the aggressive campaign by Mr. Trump and his media boosters to insist with each new setback that the election is far from settled isn’t letting up.

Inside this bubble, the president’s allies present virtually impossible outcomes as completely plausible. They raise expectations of victory in unwinnable lawsuits and battles over electors that state legislators are unwilling to have. They bolster the credibility of questionable witnesses and advocates whose most important qualification is an unequivocal conviction that Mr. Trump won in November, despite all available evidence’

And then when they don’t meet the bar they set, they move it.

This is what the president’s senior adviser, Stephen Miller, demonstrated on Monday when he insisted in an interview on “Fox & Friends” that the Electoral College vote was largely irrelevant because all that truly mattered was Inauguration Day, Jan. 20.

“So we have more than enough time to right the wrong of this fraudulent election result and certify Donald Trump as the winner,” Mr. Miller said, resetting the calendar to another scheme to invalidate the votes of millions of Americans, because the previous one had flopped.

Some allies of Mr. Trump had hoped the Electoral College vote would end with a different outcome: that Republican legislators in six battleground states would name slates of electors favorable to Mr. Trump. Late last week, a coalition of leaders affiliated with the Tea Party, conservative political organizations and social conservative groups wrote an open letter urging activists to “begin mobilizing immediately to contact their state legislators, as well as their representatives in the House and Senate, to demand that clean slates of electors be appointed.”

The upheaval failed to materialize and the electors cast their votes on Monday without incident. The few instances of resistance by Republicans were muted and entirely symbolic.

All along, Trump-friendly media personalities like Mark Levin, who hosts one of the most popular talk radio shows in the country, have led their audiences to believe that it was possible to pressure state lawmakers to reject Mr. Biden’s victory. They have often based their confidence on the wild accusations of people with political motives and diminished credibility.

Mr. Levin, along with Rush Limbaugh and Mr. Bannon, was one of the first to give a national platform to the conspiracy theories of the lawyers Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, whose various claims of fraud involve a multinational network of saboteurs and domestic enemies of the president both dead (Hugo Chávez of Venezuela) and alive (“Never Trump” Republican officials).

In an interview with Mr. Levin on Nov. 10, for instance, Mr. Wood called for the Biden electors to be replaced in a special session of Georgia’s legislature “so they can elect the electors to vote for Donald Trump.” He then falsely claimed that Mr. Trump not only won the state by “a landslide” but also won the national popular vote with 70 percent support.

On their own, comments as outlandish as these might not rise to become as widely accepted as they are now among Mr. Trump’s base. But the hosts validated them beyond just giving them a platform. They vouched for the professional credibility of the lawyers.

Speaking to his audience the next day, Mr. Limbaugh cited Mr. Wood’s remarks and said, “I’m telling you that if you listen to Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, they continue to make it sound like it’s a slam dunk.” Mr. Limbaugh offered his assurances that the lawyers would not put their careers on the line if they weren’t serious.

“They’ve Paul Bunyan-ized them,” said Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters, a left-leaning group. “And now they’re invested in maintaining this story.”

Though Ms. Powell’s list of conspirators and crimes committed against the president grew too bizarre even for the Trump campaign — it disavowed her in a statement on Nov. 22 — the pro-Trump media continued to give her a friendly platform.

On Monday, with Mr. Biden’s victory about to be ratified by the electors, the Gateway Pundit posted an item about an interview she had done with The Epoch Times, another major purveyor of pro-Trump misinformation. Ms. Powell claimed in passing that “one of our experts” discovered how Dominion voting machines had manufactured tallies that led to “5 percent higher votes for Biden across the board, everywhere.”

Ms. Powell has also appeared recently on other more mainstream pro-Trump new outlets like Fox Business, where Lou Dobbs interviewed her last week.

Far-fetched tales of vast, subversive networks of infiltrators have a long history in the Republican Party. Ms. Powell’s claims that Cuba, Venezuela and China are behind a plot to install rigged voting machines in the United States have echoes of the anti-communist paranoia that was promoted in the 1960s by the John Birch Society and Phyllis Schlafly, considered by many to be the matriarch of the conservative movement.

Yochai Benkler, a professor at Harvard Law School who helped write “Network Propaganda,” a study on the right-wing media’s influence on politics, said the difference between the days of the John Birch Society and today was a matter of scale. “What you didn’t get then was the same market exposure,” he said. “You didn’t have tens of millions of voters exposed.”

And the fringe never, of course, enjoyed the support of the sitting president.

Now, there is little incentive for right-wing media to provide anything other than validation of Mr. Trump’s most outrageous claims. And those who try to correct the record are punished, as Tucker Carlson of Fox News learned when he questioned Ms. Powell’s credibility and faced a backlash.

“We’re in this feedback loop where the media give the audience weapons and tools with which to deny reality,” Mr. Benkler said. “And the audience disciplines the media by threatening to go somewhere even wackier if they don’t toe the line.”

When Mr. Trump’s allies filed a lawsuit with the Supreme Court last week that legal experts said had a scant chance of success, there was little mention of its flaws in the media most loyal to him. Most talk instead focused on the president’s framing of the lawsuit as “the big one.” Mr. Limbaugh noted there was support for the case among 18 Republican attorneys general and others in the House of Representatives. Then he asked about those still sitting on the sidelines.

“Where are the other Republicans?” he asked. “Don’t they realize, if the Democrats are allowed to get away with stealing the White House, they’re never going to stop stealing elections?”

@Deplorable Me: about to begin https://blogdogcicle.blogspot.com/2020/12/live-dominion-voting-ceo-testimony-at.html

@retire05: Glad to see you join I am watching the Mi hearing with dominions CEO. as of now it seems he is saying they dont run the election and it human manipulation or errors.
Ward really doesnt understand every elector vote is under seal and no one has counted them . There are also alternative elector votes that are in play but also under seal until the 6th of January.
The illusion of a Biden win is still being played out on his boob tube so the poor inbred hillbillys only source. A willing MK ultra/mockingbird victim but so many are undoing Barrys allowance of propaganda broadcasting should be the next Trump administrations goals, tons on the plate to save the republic.
Viva le republic!

@Ronald J. Ward:

I’ve never said that Bozo the Clown or Peewee Hermon were good material for the presidency but I have stated I’d vote for either of them over Donald Trump.

Would you vote for Hitler, Stalin, Castro or Mussolini over Trump?

Even Mitch McConnell has now acknowledged that Joe Biden is President Elect. The ceremonial opening and tallying of electoral ballots on January 6th will provide Trump loyalists in Congress with a final opportunity to publicly renounce the results of our nation’s constitutional election process, however. The point of uselessly inflicting more damage on the nation is beyond me.

Electoral College is last long-shot chance for Trump allies to challenge election results

@Greg: Doesn’t detract from the fact that, without massive fraud, Biden would have lost by 15 million votes.

@Greg:

Even Mitch McConnell has now acknowledged that Joe Biden is President Elect. The ceremonial opening and tallying of electoral ballots on January 6th will provide Trump loyalists in Congress with a final opportunity to publicly renounce the results of our nation’s constitutional election process, however. The point of uselessly inflicting more damage on the nation is beyond me.

Mitch is rich very very rich on his servants salary. His little reward of a Chinese wife from the CCP, her sister just got a big promotion 10 days after the election she was named to board of Bank of China. His election donations from Dominion lobbyists then blocking Bi-Partisan Election Security Reform .
Dont think we do not watch the vipers Brother, this is scorched earth to save the Republic, All traitors big and and small Red or Blue if they have betrayed the country let them all burn, Mitch isnt the only slithering snake.Cocaian Mitch Chinas Bitch.

@Ronald J. Ward:

Obama is worshiped by sycophantic, groveling Obama-butt-smoochers as rating around 12th to 13th as most prettiest president ever. I agree.

There. Historically correct that for you.

Obama, your most beloved boyfriend, took a recession and made it live on for 8 years. Trump took, admittedly, fertile ground for improvement (begging the question of why Obama/Biden couldn’t do it) and improved the economy in EVERY MEASURE. Only the Chinese virus slowed it down. Even then, all it takes is to open the economy back up for it to go right back to growing (grew 33.3% in one quarter). This is why Democrats are so attracted to shutdowns.

I’ve shown numerous times how racist YOUR candidate Biden is while you have NEVER, not ONCE, provided an example of Trump being racist. Like everything else in the Democrat world, everything you criticize about Trump is not only a lie, but exists within your own party and leaders in massive quantities. Why, just this week, Biden told those naïve Civil Rights leaders to stop bitching, shut up and get back on the plantation. They’ve gotten all they are getting out of the Democrat party, so just like and keep voting (part of the reason Trump cut a huge hunk out of their black voting bloc).

Your ass must be getting pretty bruised, getting it kicked so much and so regularly here. But, it is fun to do. Biden is a corrupt fraud, an idiot, pedophile, rapist and racist. THAT’S the kind of candidate you like. Would you vote for Hitler, Stalin, Castro or Mussolini over Trump?

@Greg: Waaa. I guess that’s what you get when you traffic in election fraud. NOW, let’s see all the evidence IN COURT.

You can’t defame a crook.