Thursday Reads
Posted: November 5, 2020 Filed under: just because, morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: 2020 presidential election results, American divided, counting votes, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Pennsylvania, SCOTUS, Senator Bob Casey 56 Comments
Birch Grove, Isaac Levitan, 1885-89
Good Morning!!
My brain is mush this morning. I stayed up all night on Tuesday, fell asleep very early yesterday, and woke up this morning at 3:00. I’m too old for this. I wonder when we’ll know something definitive about the election results. At least we know that Biden is the winner; we just don’t know which state will put him over the top.
The best outcome would be for Pennsylvania to be called for Biden. Here’s Senator Bob Casey explaining where vote counting stands in his state as of this morning:
John Wagner has live election updates on the state of the race at The Washington Post: Biden closes in on electoral college victory; race narrows in Arizona, Georgia.
The latest …
Trump is supposedly filing lawsuits to stop vote counting in states that look bad for him, but it seems unlikely his efforts will come to anything.
Claude Monet – (1840 – 1926) Ulivi nel giardino Moreno 1884
The New York Times: With His Path to Re-election Narrowing, Trump Turns to the Courts.
With his political path narrowing, President Trump turned to the courts and procedural maneuvers on Wednesday in a last-ditch effort to stave off defeat in the handful of states that will decide the outcome of the bitterly fought election.
The president’s campaign intervened at the Supreme Court in a case challenging Pennsylvania’s plan to count ballots received for up to three days after Election Day. The campaign said it would also file suit in Michigan to halt the counting there while it pursues its demands for better access for the observers it sent to monitor elections boards for signs of malfeasance in tallying ballots, modeled on a similar suit it was pursuing in Nevada.
On Wednesday evening, Mr. Trump’s team added Georgia to its list of legal targets, seeking a court order enforcing strict deadlines in Chatham County in the wake of allegations by a Republican poll observer that a small number of ineligible ballots might be counted in one location.
In Wisconsin, which along with Michigan was called on Wednesday for his Democratic opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr., the president’s campaign announced it would request a recount.
I think the best outcome we can hope for today is that Pennsylvania will get enough votes counted for the state to be called for Biden. That would put him over 270, and make Trump’s claims in other states irrelevant. Here’s Senator Bob Casey explaining where the Pennsylvania vote counting stands this morning.
The moves signaled Mr. Trump’s determination to make good on his longstanding threats to carry out an aggressive post-Election Day campaign to upend any result not in his favor and pursue his baseless allegations that the outcome was rigged.
But it was not clear how much effect any of his efforts would have. In Georgia, the suit is about 53 ballots, and another case in Pennsylvania is about fewer than 100.
The Road Under the Trees, Maurice de Vlaminck
The Biden camp is ready to fight back, according to Politico: Biden campaign gears up for legal warfare as he nears 270.
In a Zoom call with donors Wednesday, the aides told the group that Joe Biden was on pace to reach 270 electoral votes in short order, beaming over victories in the Midwestern states that Donald Trump flipped four years ago….
The campaign had good reason to project confidence: On Wednesday evening, Biden was on the cusp of clinching 270 electoral votes and the presidency after Michigan and Wisconsin were called in his favor.
At the same time, President Donald Trump was making specious claims of victory, cranking up unfounded grievances about stolen votes and filing lawsuits to challenge vote counts. Biden advisers moved to reassure anxious supporters as Trump declared himself the winner in states such as Pennsylvania, where hundreds of thousands of votes had yet to be tallied.
Biden’s team activated teams of attorneys in Nevada, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan in preparation for court battles, and blasted out requests for donations to combat myriad legal challenges.
The problem for Trump is that he would have to provide actual evidence of the “fraud” he is claiming. ProPublica: If Trump Tries to Sue His Way to Election Victory, Here’s What Happens.
A hearing on Wednesday in an election case captured in miniature the challenge for the Trump campaign as it gears up for what could become an all-out legal assault on presidential election results in key swing states: It’s easy enough to file a lawsuit claiming improprieties — in this case, that Pennsylvania had violated the law by allowing voters whose mail-in ballots were defective to correct them — but a lot harder to provide evidence of wrongdoing or a convincing legal argument. “I don’t understand how the integrity of the election was affected,” said U.S. District Judge Timothy Savage, something he repeated several times during the hearing. (However the judge rules, the case is unlikely to have a significant effect; only 93 ballots are at issue, a county election official said.)
“A lawsuit without provable facts showing a statutory or constitutional violation is just a tweet with a filing fee,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
Levitt said judges by and large have ignored the noise of the race and the bluster of President Donald Trump’s Twitter feed. “They’ve actually demanded facts and haven’t been ruling on all-caps claims of fraud or suppression,” Levitt said. “They haven’t confused public relations with the predicate for litigation, and I would expect that to continue.”
If Levitt is right, that may augur poorly for the legal challenges to the presidential election. Either way, the number of cases is starting to rapidly increase. But lawsuits will do little good unless, as in the 2000 presidential election, the race winds up being so close that it comes down to a very thin margin of votes in one or more must-win states.
Read the rest at ProPublica.
Lane at alchamps, Arles, Paul Gaugin, 1888
Trump seems to think that he can just call on “his” Supreme Court justices to overturn the results of the election. But he can’t actually do that. Zoe Tillman at Buzzfeed News: Supreme Court To Fight Election Results. Here’s What Would Need To Happen To End Up There.
In the early hours of Wednesday, with many states still going through the lawful process of tallying votes, President Donald Trump declared: “We will be going to the Supreme Court.”
That’s not how the courts work, though. With rare exceptions that don’t apply to the election, no one can simply bring a case to the US Supreme Court. Trump’s rhetoric created an appearance of legal uncertainty around the election results that doesn’t exist yet — by Wednesday evening, there were a handful of lawsuits pending, but none involved the kind of consequential fights over final vote tallies that would decide the outcome of the race.
That could change, of course. Trump’s campaign said they’ll seek a recount in Wisconsin after former vice president Joe Biden was declared the winner, and could try to go to court to challenge the results if he still lost after that. Decision Desk HQ called Wisconsin for Biden outright on Wednesday.
There’s already a case pending before the Supreme Court about whether Pennsylvania can count absentee ballots that arrive between Nov. 4 and Nov. 6, but that would only be a vehicle for deciding the election if the race came down to Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes — and if those as-yet-unknown number of post–Election Day ballots would change the outcome.
Regardless of whether the Trump campaign’s lawsuits succeed in stopping any ballots from being counted, they’ve underscored Trump and his campaign’s efforts to falsely question the lawfulness of ballot counting that extends beyond Election Day — something that happens in every election.
A few more articles on the legal issues:
The Daily Beast: Trump Orders Advisers to ‘Go Down Fighting’
The Los Angeles Times: Legal experts cast doubt on Trump’s bid to involve Supreme Court in Election Results.
Edward B. Foley at The Washington Post: Trump wants the courts to stop the counting. He’s going to be disappointed.
I’ll leave you with two think pieces on the election, both at The Atlantic:
Tom Nichols: A Large Portion of the Electorate Chose the Sociopath.
Les Alpilles, Mountain Landscape near South-Reme, Vincent Van Gogh,
The moment every Donald Trump opponent has been waiting for is at hand: Joe Biden seems to be taking the lead. So why am I not happy?
I am certainly relieved. A Biden victory would be an infinitely better result than a Trump win. If Trump were to maintain power, our child-king would be unfettered by bothersome laws and institutions. The United States would begin its last days as a democracy, finally stepping over the ledge into authoritarianism.
A win for Biden would forestall that terrible possibility.
But no matter how this election concludes, America is now a different country. Nearly half of the voters have seen Trump in all of his splendor—his infantile tirades, his disastrous and lethal policies, his contempt for democracy in all its forms—and they decided that they wanted more of it. His voters can no longer hide behind excuses about the corruption of Hillary Clinton or their willingness to take a chance on an unproven political novice. They cannot feign ignorance about how Trump would rule. They know, and they have embraced him.
Sadly, the voters who said in 2016 that they chose Trump because they thought he was “just like them” turned out to be right. Now, by picking him again, those voters are showing that they are just like him: angry, spoiled, racially resentful, aggrieved, and willing to die rather than ever admit that they were wrong.
George Packer: Face the Bitter Truth. We are two countries, and neither of them is going to be conquered or disappear anytime soon.
We don’t yet know the outcome of the election, but its meaning is already clear. We are two countries, and neither of them is going to be conquered or disappear anytime soon. The outcome of the 2016 election was not a historical fluke or result of foreign subversion, but a pretty accurate reflection of the American electorate. The much-discussed Democratic majority that’s been emerging since the turn of the millennium is still in a state of emergence and probably will keep on emerging for years to come. The will of the majority is indeed blocked by undemocratic rules and unscrupulous politicians, but it’s a bare majority without enough numbers to govern. When America finally becomes the promised land dominated by tech-savvy Millennials, its political values will be far from certain.
Nightfall, by Guillermo Gómez Gil, 1900
Tens of millions of Americans love MAGA more than they love democracy. After four years of lawbreaking and norm-busting, there can be no illusions about President Donald Trump. His first term culminated in an open effort to sabotage the legitimacy of the election and prevent Americans from voting. His rallies in the final week of the campaign were red-drenched festivals of mass hate, autocratic self-absorption, and boredom, without a glimmer of a better future on offer—and they might have put Trump over the top in Florida and elsewhere. Even as “freedom-loving people” came out in unprecedented millions to vote, their readiness to throw away their republican institutions along with their dignity and grasp of facts suggests that many Americans have lost the basic qualities that the Founders believed essential to self-government. There is no obvious way to reverse this decline, which shows signs of infecting elements of the other side as well.
But the composition of Trump’s followers, with a large minority of Latino voters and a nontrivial number of Black voters, makes their motivations more various and complicated than the single, somehow reassuring cause that progressives settled on after 2016: racism. There turn out to be many different reasons different kinds of people want to fling themselves at the feet of a con man. The votes show that progressives’ habit of seeing Americans as molecules dissolved in vast and undifferentiated ethnic and racial solutions without individual agency is both analytically misleading and politically self-defeating, doing actual harm to the cause of equality.
peej
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JJ Lopez aka Minkoff Minx
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Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
The paintings are supposed to be relaxing–I hope they help. Take care today everyone. We are nearing the end of our long national nightmare.
They are — I especially like the luminous fall Gaugin, also the birch grove. I’ll imagine myself there.
They’re gorgeous. Exactly what we need, BB.
My sleep pattern is so messed up. I continue to have very weird dreams. The lovely paintings are much nicer than dreamland!
I’ve been having really lucid dreams and they’re really odd. Just completely out of my usual anxiety dreams but definitely anxiety dreams
I was just thinking about that exact same word when I saw they. They’re so relaxing! You did good!!
Thanks!
I want to see justice in this case.
We cannot let other concerns distract us from that.
Just and accountability is what the protests were always about.
I hope that trying all the murderers together will help prevent the tactic of each police officer trying to escape by blaming it on another.
Counting halted in Philadelphia.
What is that about?
I’m not seeing that reported at this time on MSNBC. PA and GA are just agonizing. This whole drip drip drip is agonizing.
Oh wait Allegheny county had some defective ballots they had to mail back to voters to replace??? GAAAAAAAAH
And Matt Schlapp and a group of maggats including a former DNI are caravanning around NV trying to disrupt the count. That idiot needs to be in jail.
Resumed. Sigh of relief.
I thuink GA is out of reach, we need PA very badly.
Same here – although Perdue just slipped below 50% so we may have two runoffs for Senate. I don’t see us gaining those seats. It will be galling to see two grafting criminals like Perdue and Loeffler get elected.
Grifters – autocorrect wont let me type what I want.
Also I’m almost always wrong about elections so there is that.
Totally agree.
If we get just Nevada and Arizona, we will be at 270.
I have great doubt about Nevada and Arizona.
I think that PA is the most likely path.
The surprise red state that goes blue feels like fools gold.
I hope I am wrong. I hope Biden wins all three.
Plus, AZ got called for Biden. So who knows what the rest will do
Arizona is called for Biden. Never been happier to be wrong.
That is great news.
Biden’s lead in NV has grown to more than 11,000.
Biden will be POTUS. We just need to be patient.
Great post BB…thank you.
I have gotten tired of my cozy mysteries.
Book recommendations, Sky Dancers? Something interesting but not too dark to read while waiting for ballots to be counted?
I’m a bit weird but I sometimes like to read cookbooks. Hahahaha
Nothing weird about that. I sometimes like to read dictionaries.
Have you tried Anne Cleeves’ Shetland mysteries?
I have. They are very good. I think I’ve read the entire series.
Two entirely different mystery series, Louise Penney’s Gamache books and Alexander McCall Smith’s Ladies Detective Agency books, always leave me feeling happy and positive.
Never read them but the Number One Ladies Detective Agency was awesome on HBO.
I hesitate to suggest my own stuff (so this is late 😆 ) but I’ve written several stories that are, well, cozy I think might be a good way to describe them. Not highbrow. I think they’re fun and interesting, but that could easily be just me. Thieves of Sorrow, for instance. They’re also on Amazon but they cost $1 there because when I posted them mere individuals weren’t allowed to post free ones. They might be easier to download there though.
Good idea.
He may be annoying at times but Steve Kornacki knows his stuff.
Biden just now leads Trump in Georgia by more than 900 votes!! If it holds its over!!!
I am shocked but pleased. I hope I continue to be proven wrong. 🙂
“I hope I’m wrong, I hope I’m wrong, I hope I’m wrong, I hope I’m wrong, I hope I’m wrong…”
Wow that was intense. I had no idea Clayton County was so blue.
Still think we’ll lose those two Senate seats in the runoffs.
Perhaps.but my happy a$$ will be at the polls and digging deep to support both DEM candidates.
I wish I could hug Stacy Abrams in person!!!
She’s an inspiration. Biden owes her big – we all do. Can’t wait to see what the future holds for Stacey!
She’s brilliant.
To be cheated out of an election, to turn around and start a vote participation organization, to register some 800,000 voters in a few years, and
/drumroll/
save the country.
A giant standing on the shoulders of giants.
Biden has taken the lead in PA!
Happy Friday, Sky Dancers!
Hallelujah! So annoying watching these pundits moan and groan how we didn’t have a complete blowout. They were the only reason we thought it might happen in the first place.
So true.
A win is a win. We’ll take it.
All I have to say is
Oh ye of little belief in something for which there is no proof. That was me.
Georgia had to show me.
Now we have to keep the bad guys from throwing out any legal ballots.
And endure two more months of Ossoff/Perdue ads. At least the Warnock ads are watchable. Loeffler is entertaining for her ridiculousness and I don’t see many of her ads.
I just hope we can muster the troops for another round in January.
The funny thing about the Perdue ads is that they claim Ossoff is lying about Perdue, but they never claim that Perdue is not a sleazy profitterring bastard, just that his fellow politicians gave him a pass.
I am offended that he took insder information about the plague and profitted. Who cares is the sleazeballs in the swamp signed off on it.
Biden campaign.
Whoa! Don’t mess with Joe and don’t mess with the Constitution!
Time to take out the trash and dump it in the waste bin of history.
HAPPINESS!!!
And immense relief!
“LOCK HIM UP!” Preferably in a padded cell for now and later after his court sentences in prison for a long time.
Catchy tune. Unofficial theme song for FDR 1932 win.
A woman Vice President of the US!!! Another gigantic crack in that ceiling. Thinking of HRC today and can’t wait to hear what she will have to say!