As we have drawn closer to the January 6th Joint Session of Congress, conservative sites and news sources have had no short supply of opinions and methods that could be used to secure a Trump victory. We at Ignite Liberty have chosen to remain mostly silent on the issue. It’s not because we don’t have an opinion, but the last thing we felt was needed was yet another conservative voice adding their legal opinion to an already confusing situation.
The truth is that nobody knows exactly how this election is going to play out because there is very little precedent to look to for guidance. So rather than engage in endless speculation, we chose to wait until closer to January 6th to see which paths begin to emerge as likely routes to a Trump victory. Over the last 24-48 hours, two such paths have come into focus. We will discuss those below.
Before we do that, there was an important event that took place over the weekend which gives us more context as to the overall landscape of Trump’s strategy. The Washington Times released a transcript of a call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger. Initially, they just released a redacted portion which painted the President in a bad light. After pressure from the President’s team and others, they released the entire transcript.
We won’t go into the details of the entire call here. If you want to read it for yourself, you can do so here. The overall call could be summarized as Trump playing “bad cop/good cop” all by himself. Trump essentially let Raffensperger know that they had much more evidence than he was aware of, evidence that looked “very bad” for the Georgia Secretary of State, potentially even criminal. Trump, then, gave him the opportunity to come clean, admit to voter fraud that would be sufficient to give Trump the victory in Georgia (which he won by over 400K votes), and be spared criminal prosecution.
Instead, Raffensperger refused and chose to leak a partial recording of the call to the Washington Times. As we’ve learned from the Impeachment hoax, President Trump has the National Intelligence Agency record all of his phone calls. So Raffensperger’s attempt to frame the President fell woefully short. Then this morning the White House announced that the Secret Service would be opening and investigation into Raffensperger according to the Espionage Act (likely due to his known connections with the CCP).
What this represented was a brilliant piece of strategy by the President that give us a clue into his overall approach. Great chess players, like Trump, know that you don’t put your opponent in check until checkmate is certain. Putting your opponent in check serves as a warning to him that defeat is imminent. Great chess players only do that when their opponent’s only way out of check is to walk directly into a checkmate trap.
That seems to be exactly what is happening here. As Trump told Raffensperger, he has evidence of widespread fraud that nobody has ever seen. The President is literally holding all of the cards, and only a select few people know to full breadth of evidence that he has. As we move forward, he will likely give the Left the opportunity to come clean and concede (some sources are saying that Biden is even preparing to capitulate), as he did with Raffensperger. If they do not, as they likely won’t, they will meet the same end of criminal prosecution to the fullest extent of the law. Regardless of whether they concede or not, it still ends with Trump being sworn in on January 20th.
One thing we know for sure, based on the President’s and VP’s own statements, is that Trump is going to use these next two weeks to fully state his case before the world and expose the full length and breadth of the evil that he has been fighting against. In order for that evil to be defeated, it had to be this way…it always had to be this way.
The Cruz Committee
The first of two likely routes to a Trump victory was proposed by Texas Senator Ted Cruz. In keeping with the solution to the contested election of 1877, Sen Cruz has proposed creating an Emergency Election Fraud Committee to hold 10 days of hearings where the President’s team could submit their evidence of voter fraud in each of the 6 swing states.
In 1877, Congress created a 15-person committee with 5 Senators, 5 Congressmen, and 5 Supreme Court Justices. After 2 weeks of deliberation, the committee voted 8-7 along straight party-lines to hand the election to the Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes. The concession that was used to get Congress to abide by the decision of the committee was to completely remove federal troops from the South, where many had still remained some 12 years after the Civil War.
It is unclear at this point exactly how Sen Cruz’s proposal would work. In 1877, Congress agreed to be bound by the decision of the committee. Whether this Congress would agree to be bound by such terms, or to simply take the committee’s findings under advisement, is yet to be seen. Such an agreement would be in keeping with precedent, which is why this proposal is good one.
However, in 1877, the Chinese Communist Party didn’t have large portions of Congress under their direct influence, which would raise serious concerns of criminal prosecution for those compromised Congressmen and Senators should Trump prove victorious. In no uncertain terms, they are literally fighting for their lives and freedom over ours, which would make any assumption that they would do whatever it took to ensure a fair and honest election a spurious one at best…regardless of the cost to the Republic.
The Pence Plan
The second path, and perhaps cleanest, was proposed today by Jenna Ellis, lead Counsel for the Trump Campaign. She stated in an appearance on Just The News network’s The Water Cooler with David Brody, that the Vice President would have the ability to send the dueling slates of electors back to the states in question prior to opening the slates of electors during the Joint Session on the 6th:
“What Mike Pence could do, and what he should do, in fact, is to direct a question back to the state legislatures when there are two competing slates of delegates from these six states, he can ask that question to the states and say, ‘well, state legislators, you know, I have an oath to the Constitution to uphold the Constitution as written in Article II Section 1.2 which says the state legislatures direct the manner in which electoral delegates are selected. So you tell me which of these two slates was selected in the manner that your state general assembly has designated.
And that’s a fair question. That’s not exercising discretion. That’s not setting up any sort of bad precedent. That’s actually returning the authority to the constitutionally vested entity and just simply directing that question I think would then require a response from these very timid, to put it lightly, state legislators that haven’t been willing to act, and it would in fact then give a very clean outcome to this election,”
The genius part of this strategy is that the Democrats would be powerless to stop it. Pence would be fully authorized to use his plenary power to force the State legislatures to do their job. Important to note is that legislators from Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona have already made it known that they wish to decertify the Democrat electors. Indeed, some of them may do that before the 6th. So Pence kicking the issue back to the States would allow those legislatures to use their plenary power to officially correct their slate of electors.
This strategy would solve the main problem of securing President Trump’s re-election, and leave the criminal prosecution fallout for after the inauguration.
The Role of the Georgia Runoff
Should the Democrat’s win the Georgia Senate runoff elections on the 5th, it is unclear whether the new Senators would be seated in time for the Joint Session on the 6th. Of course the Democrat’s would do everything possible to ensure their participation, assuming there was a clear winner on the 5th, which is unlikely due to the absolute refusal of Raffensperger to address the voter fraud issues stemming from the November 3rd election. It will likely take weeks to determine the real winners of the runoffs.
It is quite possible that Pence’s decision on whether to kick the dueling slates of electors back tot he States would hinge entirely on the Georgia runoff. Should it not go in favor of the GOP, he would be more inclined to act. If Perdue and Loeffler do win their runoffs, he might be more inclined to allow the Cruz plan to come to a vote. If that vote fails, or appears to fail, he could then send the electoral slates back to the States.
The Role of the 12th Amendment
Should the Pence plan be enacted, it will likely come with a deadline 2-3 days before inauguration. Should the States fail to meet that deadline, their electors would not be counted. That leaves one of 2 possibilities: 1) the winner is determined by whoever has a majority of the available electors from all the states that verified their slates, or 2) the winner is determined by a contingent vote in Congress, as per the 12th Amendment.
Which of these possibilities would be used would hinge on defining what the Constitution meant by requiring the winner to have a majority of the “available electors.” Does it mean all available electors, regardless of whether the States certify the correct slate or not? If so, then failure of the States to meet Pence’s deadline would mean it would be impossible for either candidate to reach the 270 votes needed to secure the Presidency. That would then trigger the State contingent votes in Congress under the 12th Amendment, where the House of Representatives would vote by State for the President and the Senate would vote for the Vice President. In that case, Trump would secure the Presidency and Pence would presumably secure the Vice Presidency.
If, however, it is determined that the Constitution requires a majority of the legally allowable electors, then Trump/Pence would would easily win.
The Odds
Given everything above, the likelihood of President Trump securing another 4 years is quite high. It seems like the path that makes the most sense is the Pence plan. It allows for the least amount of Democrat interference while insulating both the President and Vice President from claims that they violated the will of the people and “stole” the election from Biden. Of course, the Democrats will still claim that regardless of what happens, but at least the truth would be on the side of the President.
Most importantly, it emphasizes the Rule of Law. Trump has stated repeatedly throughout his presidency that he believes in letting the States decide as many issues as possible. Given that the Constitution vests the sole power for choosing electors in the States, this would be the most constitutionally consistent method of solving this crisis.
UPDATE:
During the writing of this article, the Epoch Times released an article stating that 12 Georgia State Senators are sending a letter to VP Pence tomorrow asking him to delay the counting of electoral votes for “10-12 days.” This would be in keeping with the “Pence Plan” as mention above.
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