January 3rd Is THE Day To Watch After Trump Loses
Republicans have every intention of stealing the election when Trump loses but they only have but so many ways to do it.
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]January 6th, 2025 looms very large in the minds of the American public as we head into this year’s election. As well it should. There is an extremely good chance that Donald Trump will lose in November and it is all but guaranteed Republicans will stage another coup when he does.
After all, while over one thousand foot soldiers and useful idiots were eventually arrested for their attack on the United States that day in 2021, very few of the people who orchestrated that attack have been held accountable. Worse, we can all see how corrupt judges and a broken system are working to protect the creature at the center of the entire plot: Donald Trump. He shouldn’t even be allowed to run but he still is and that means he’s going to try to overthrow the results of the election again because why wouldn’t he?
Don’t forget, January 6th was just the last of Trump’s plots. The final desperate attempt when everything else failed.
That’s why January 6th is not the most important date this time. It’s January 3rd.
Here’s what Republicans originally tried to do: The fake elector scheme was designed to send two sets of electors from states that Trump lost. Once both sets are presented to Congress, Republicans, who were in control of the House at the time, would reject both under the premise that, “Gee whiz! We can’t really say which one is real!”
Now those votes do not get counted. Do it with just the right state or combination of states, and Biden’s electoral vote count drops to under 270, the number required to win.
After that, the vote goes to the House, where every state gets a single vote. Republicans currently control more states and, amazing! Trump wins! It’s all constitutional and legal! Except for the completely fabricated nature of it all.
It was a cartoonishly fraudulent idea but Republicans knew if they could get it in front of the Republican-controlled Supreme Court, they could steal the election just like they did in 2000.
Now, laws have been passed since 2020 that will make it much harder to try the fake elector scheme again. At the same time, dozens of the fake electors are being brought up on state and federal charges that can see them in prison for decades. It took a very long time for these investigations to start, but they’re rolling now and a hypothetical President Trump can’t pardon them all.
That might tamp down the enthusiasm for being a fake elector come January of next year. The next time, the investigations will be much quicker and the penalties much harsher. You only get to play the “We thought we were doing the right thing!” card once.
However, Republicans do not actually need fake electors to reject a state’s electoral votes. Thom Hartmann went into this a while ago:
Elise Stefanik, the number 3 person in House Republican leadership, has already refused to say whether she’d vote to certify the presidential election results this November.
Others, like Kentucky Republican Congressman Thomas Massie, are repeatedly mentioning their belief that the House gets to decide who’s president, not the people or even the Electoral College. As Massie posted on X:
“Maine, Colorado, and other states that might try to bureaucratically deny ballot access to any Republican nominee should remember the U.S. House of Representatives is the ultimate arbiter of whether to certify electors from those states.”
In response, Elon Musk posted a one-word comment: “Interesting.”
Then, regardless of how many votes Biden won by, electoral or popular, the House simply refuses to certify the electoral college votes of enough states that the minimum of 270 isn’t reached.
That’s when the House votes to make Trump president for life and America dies.
So, why is January 3rd the date we need to pay attention to and not January 6th, when this coup would actually take place?
January 6th is the day the electoral votes are certified. That’s why Trump had his mob attack in 2021, with the specific intent of disrupting that count.
But January 3rd is when the new members of Congress are sworn in. If Trump is facing an uphill battle and Republicans in the Senate are facing an increasingly difficult task of retaking the upper chamber, House Republicans are the dinosaurs facing a Hakeem Jefferies-shaped asteroid coming to wipe them out. If Mike Johnson “only” loses 25 seats in November, that would be a victory for him.
Come January 3rd, Democrats will be the majority and Hakeem Jefferies will be the Speaker. That means all of Trump and the GOP’s plans will come to naught. No rejection of electors. No throwing the election to the House. No having the Supreme Court pretend everything is nice and tidy and legal as they install America’s first dictator.
Unless Mike Johnson refuses to seat the newly-elected Democratic majority.
If Johnson refuses to swear them in, Democrats will not have the majority and Republicans will still be in control on January 6th. The courts might be able to compel Johnson to do his constitutional duty but if they’re Republican judges? They could just as easily slow walk it until after the 6th. And then it won’t matter anymore.
Or maybe the courts will move quickly and order Johnson to stop trying to steal the election but then Republicans appeal to the Supreme Court who then says they’ll take up this very important issue in a few months. It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve delayed to help the GOP. Then Republicans get to pick Trump as president and it doesn’t matter anymore.
Would Mike Johnson be this brazen? I don’t know. I’ve believed from the beginning of his speakership that his one and only job was to help Trump steal the election. He was one of the people in the House most involved with trying to overturn the results “legally” in 2020.
But sometimes being put in a position of immense power has a way of altering your perspective. Johnson has been uncharacteristically (for a Republican) non-antagonistic towards Democrats. Not what you would expect from someone preparing to stage a coup in a few months.
Regardless, if I were the Democrats, I would not trust Johnson as far as I could throw him with concrete blocks tied to his feet. At the end of the day, he’s a Republican and no Republican can be trusted to do the right thing when it comes to democracy and the rule of law.
There’s a lot of Republican scumbaggery we have to watch for between now and the day Joe Biden is sworn back in as president. Voter suppression. Election rigging. Domestic terrorism. Coups, both violent and not. But one of the last shots, and biggest ones, Republicans will have will be on January 3rd, 2025.
If we can get past everything they throw at us before then and make it through the day, democracy will survive yet again.
There are 175 days until the 2024 election. Vote blue like your life depends on it.
You are right. MAGA Mike can’t be trusted. He goes to Mar a Lago, trump tells him to pass the Ukraine deal to lull the Dems into a false sense of security. In exchange, Johnson refuses to swear in any duly elected Dems in January. I don’t know why Dems decided to save Johnson. Guaranteed there will be fuckery by him, all the way down to the state level, even if Biden wins in a landslide.
Thank you for this perspective. I haven’t seen anyone else talking about this and while it’s a terrifying scenario, it’s also a very plausible one. So, what are our next best steps?