A tale of two last-ditch attempts at a coup

1) Ron Johnson's truly awful "hearing"

A Republican-led Senate panel provided a three-hour platform for allies of President Donald Trump to dispute the results of the 2020 election.

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Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chair Ron Johnson argued the forum was simply to evaluate information.

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Johnson sought to head off criticism at the outset, insisting his hearing was just about seeking “information” and “should not be controversial.”

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GOP-called witnesses, including two Trump campaign lawyers described rampant fraud in Nevada, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, some of which had been considered and scrapped in court, others of which had no basis.

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Johnson insisted without evidence that fraud had undoubtedly occurred at an indeterminable scale.

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The one witness called by Democrats, the Trump administration’s former top election security official Christopher Krebs, served as a counterweight. He urged Americans to put baseless election disputes behind them and warned that false conspiracy claims had fueled violent threats to election officials — including himself.

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Johnson said that he hoped no one would portray the hearing itself as encouraging these types of threats. “Nobody should condone it. Certainly not this committee, certainly not this chairman,” he said.

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The hearing also provided an opportunity for Trump’s Senate allies to stoke the unsupported claims of election irregularities that they said had led to a loss of confidence in the election results, without mentioning Trump’s weeks-long campaign to drive up such distrust. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said the president’s court losses were largely on technical grounds and therefore shouldn’t be viewed as conclusively defusing the fraud claims. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said he’s often asked by Floridians, “How is this different than what Maduro is doing?”

Shortly after the hearing, Trump tweeted in support of Paul's claim that the election was "stolen" and slammed Krebs, who he falsely said had been "excoriated" at the hearing. "Chris Krebs was totally excoriated and proven wrong," Trump tweeted, before listing a litany of baseless fraud allegations.

  

2) GOP calls for a military coup

An 1807 law invoked only in the most violent circumstances is now a rallying cry for the MAGA-ites most committed to the fantasy that Donald Trump will never leave office.

The law, the Insurrection Act, allows the president to deploy troops to suppress domestic uprisings — not to overturn elections.

But that hasn’t stopped the act from becoming a buzzword and cure-all for prominent MAGA figures like Sydney Powell and Lin Wood, two prominent pro-Trump attorneys leading efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and even one North Carolina state lawmaker. Others like Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser who was recently pardoned for lying to the FBI, have made adjacent calls for Trump to impose martial law.

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While scattered theories about a “deep state” arrayed against Trump have long circulated in MAGA circles, calls for troops to stop a democratically elected president from taking office have taken those ideas to a more conspiratorial and militaristic level. It also displays the exalted level to which Trump has been elevated among his most zealous fans as his departure looms.

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Trump ally and convicted political operative Roger Stone brought it up on Infowars as a way for Trump to combat anything from coups to protests to election fraud. “The president's authority is the Insurrection Act and his ability to declare martial law,” he told host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Stone added that Trump could also use the law to arrest anyone from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for election interference, to Democratic power couple Bill and Hillary Clinton — an interpretation that legal experts say strains credulity.

  Politico

Roger Stone strains credulity.

Trump himself seemed keen to the idea, telling Fox News host Jeanine Pirro that he would “put down [anti-Trump protests] very quickly” if they broke out after the election: “Look, it's called insurrection. We just send in and we do it very easy.”

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It seems nearly impossible Trump would actually invoke the law in this manner. But that hasn’t stopped prominent Trump supporters like Wood, one of the lawyers pushing unsubstantiated lawsuits through the courts, from suggesting Trump send the military into Georgia to break up a meeting of the Electoral College.

And over the weekend, after the Supreme Court rejected a Trump-boosted lawsuit from Texas asking to overturn the election results on four other swing states, MAGA supporters took to the street to demand, among other things, that Trump use the Insurrection Act to force an election do-over, or at the very least, stop Biden from taking office.

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The Epoch Times [...] ran an editorial on Monday arguing that it was time for Trump to invoke the act and send in the military to seize thousands of voting machines in order to find fraud: “Our system is in crisis. Trump would act to restore the rule of law.”

Do not be surprised if, after Joe Biden moves into the White House, there are "militias" taking up arms and filling the streets around him.

The Insurrection Act has been rarely invoked since the civil unrest of the 1960s — the last time was to quell violence during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. And when it has been used over that period, it was always at the request of a state governor.

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Only once [has it] been used in the wake of an election — and that was to stop a literal militia from seizing the Louisiana government on behalf of John McEnery, a former Confederate officer who had lost the 1872 governor’s race.

In other words, it would more properly be applied AGAINST Trump.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.