I want to revisit the "forged" electoral certificate
I blogged about recently.
I pointed out that other states (Nevada and Wisconsin, for instance) started
their documents with this:
WE, THE UNDERSIGNED, being the duly elected and qualified Electors for
President and Vice President of the United States of America from the State of
Wisconsin, do hereby certify the following...
Whereas the document from Pennsylvania started this way:
WE, THE UNDERSIGNED,
on the understanding that if, as a result of a final non-appealable Court
Order or other proceeding prescribed by law, we are ultimately recognized
as being
the duly elected and qualified Electors for President and Vice President of
the United States of America from the State of Pennsylvania, hereby certify
the following...[Emphasis added.]
And I wondered why they put in the phrase that offered them some political
cover. Was it because they sensed how fishy the original text was?
Then something
else occurred to me. The text references a couple of would-be triggers for their elevation to real electors:
- "a non-appealable Court Order"
- "other proceeding prescribed by law"
And what would those have been for our fake-electors from Pennsylvania?
Let's start at the end and work our way back.
Was there any legislation working its way through the GOP controlled
legislature in Harrisburg?
The PA House
concluded its business on November 20, 2020 and was scheduled to reconvene
on January 24, 2021.
The PA Senate
also concluded its business on November 20, 2020 but was scheduled to
reconvene (unless called back early by the Senate Pres, Pro Temp) on January
14, 2020.
While there was legislation proposed in each chamber in the intervening days,
none of it had anything to do with 2020 election, as far as I could tell.
So it looks like there was little, if any, legislative relief from Harrisburg
to trigger these fake-electors into being real electors.
Please
check my work and correct me if I am mistaken.
How about court cases?
Well, one would think that a "non-appealable Court Order" would have to come
from a non-appealable court - namely the US Supreme Court. So what was
bubbling up at the time (remember they drafted this on December 14, 2020) on
its way, presumably, to SCOTUS?
One might think it was Kelly v Pennsylvania - the lawsuit filed to declare the mail-in balloting outlined in
Act 77 to be unconstitutional. However The Washington Post reported,
on December 8, 2020, that:
The Supreme Court on Tuesday denied a last-minute attempt by
President Trump’s allies to overturn the election results in
Pennsylvania, a blow to the president’s continuing efforts to
reverse his loss to Democrat Joe Biden.
The court’s
brief order
denying a requested injunction provided no reasoning, nor did it
note any dissenting votes. It was the first request to delay or
overturn the results of last month’s presidential election to reach
the court, and it appears that Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s
latest nominee, took part in the case.
This was six days before those fake electors in Pennsylvania
signed that fake electoral certification.
Perhaps it was
Texas v Pennsylvania, filed on December 8. As reported by
The Hill:
Texas announced on Tuesday that it would be filing a lawsuit in the
Supreme Court against four battleground states in an effort to halt
presidential electors from finalizing
President-elect Joe Biden's victory.
Texas argued that electors from Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and
Wisconsin should not be allowed to cast their votes in part because
those states unconstitutionally changed their voting procedures during
the coronavirus pandemic to allow for increased mail-in ballots. Biden
won all four states.
Texas Attorney General
Ken Paxton
(R) alleges that the new voting processes in the battleground states
skewed the presidential election results and asked the Supreme Court to
delay Monday's deadline for the Electoral College to make Biden's
victory official.
"Their failure to abide by the rule of law casts a dark shadow of doubt
over the outcome of the entire election," Paxton said in a statement.
"We now ask that the Supreme Court step in to correct this egregious
error.”
However,
on December 11:
The Supreme Court on Friday
rejected
a bid launched by Texas and backed by President
Donald Trump that
sought to undo President-elect
Joe Biden’s wins in the
key swing states of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The ruling dealt a death blow to Trump’s desperate and unsuccessful
efforts to reverse Biden’s projected Electoral College victory.
This was three days before the fake certificate was
signed.
So what could they have been thinking of?
Well, there's
Trump v Broockvar
- filed on December 20, only six days after the signing of
the fake electoral certificates.
This is how The Philadelphia Inquirer
characterized the suit:
[I]t challenges three Pennsylvania Supreme Court decisions on mail
ballots and says the state court overstepped its constitutional role.
Those opinions, which resolved multiple cases, prohibited counties from
comparing mail ballot signatures to those on file; said campaigns and
political parties can’t challenge ballots as they are being processed
and counted; allowed limitations on observers to the vote count in
Philadelphia; and allowed ballots to count even if voters had forgotten
to fill out the address or date on the envelope.
In making those decisions, the campaign argues, the Pennsylvania Supreme
Court violated the Constitution by taking the state legislature’s power
to determine how federal elections are run, similar to an existing
argument
Pennsylvania Republicans are making in a separate set of
challenges. The campaign also says the state court violated the Constitution’s
due process clause and equal protection guarantees.
“Collectively, these three decisions resulted in counting approximately
2.6 million mail ballots in violation of the law as enacted by the
Pennsylvania Legislature,” reads the petition for a writ of certiorari,
the document which asks the Supreme Court to take up the case. If the
state Supreme Court erred, the campaign said, that would mean “over
110,000 invalid ballots were illegally counted — more than enough to
have affected the outcome of the election, where the margin between the
two principal candidates for President currently stands at 80,558.”
So is this it? If SCOTUS ruled in favor of Trump that case, was that the trigger making the fake electors real-life honest-to-goodness true-blue Trump electors?
In reality however, The Supremes were not cooperative:
The latest
Trump
campaign
appeal to the
Supreme Court
won't see any action from the justices until after the inauguration.
The justices this week set a reply deadline for
Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar and the other
respondents named in the case of Jan. 22. The campaign had asked
for the Supreme Court to order those on the other side of the litigation
to respond by Wednesday and have reply briefs from the Trump campaign
submitted by Thursday. It also asked the court to rule by Jan. 6.
But the court did not oblige.
This means that by the time Boockvar and the others the Trump
campaign is seeking to take to the Supreme Court even respond to the
petition, President-elect Joe Biden will already be sworn in.
One thing to point out about Trump v Broockvar. It was written (or
co-written to be more precise) by John Eastman, counsel for the Trump
Campaign who also wrote the Emerson Memo.
CNN described it thusly:
John Eastman, a conservative lawyer working with then-President Donald
Trump's legal team,
outlined in a two-page memo a scheme
to try to persuade then-Vice President Mike Pence to subvert the
Constitution and throw out the 2020 election results on January 6.
The memo contains a six-part scenario for Trump's overthrow of the
Constitution.
Some highlights:
3. At the end, [VP Pence] announces that because of the ongoing disputes in the 7 States, there are no electors that can be deemed validly appointed in those States. That means the total number of “electors appointed” – the language of the 12th Amendment -- is 454. This reading of the 12th Amendment has also been advanced by Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe (here). A “majority of the electors appointed” would therefore be 228. There are at this point 232 votes for Trump, 222 votes for Biden. Pence then gavels President Trump as re-elected.
4. Howls, of course, from the Democrats, who now claim, contrary to Tribe’s prior position, that 270 is required. So Pence says, fine. Pursuant to the 12th Amendment, no candidate has achieved the necessary majority. That sends the matter to the House, where the “the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote . . . .” Republicans currently control 26 of the state delegations, the bare majority needed to win that vote. President Trump is re-elected there as well.
The memo was presented to VP Pence on January 4 (twenty-one days after the Pennsylvania fake certificate was signed) but the plan seems to have been put in place.
However again I have to ask, why did the Pennsylvania fake-electors insert the phrase that both gave them political cover and also seemed to very closely align to John Eastman's scenario to overturn Biden's win?Did they know the substance of Trump v Broockvar before it was filed? Were they privy to the substance of Eastman's memo 3 weeks before it was presented to the Veep? How much of the big picture did they know?
Can someone ask them? Please?
