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sofa king

(10,857 posts)
8. This is really important!
Sat Apr 9, 2016, 10:46 AM
Apr 2016

We saw the sneak-up-from-the-right move take out Eric Cantor in the primaries, so we know it can work. But this time it's for all the marbles.

For a couple of months now, I've been pointing out that Republican movement at the top seems to be in the direction of a far different kind of election theft than that to which we have already seen... often.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=7696342

The short version is this:

1) Steal the nomination from Trump or find a powerful third-party candidate to run against him; either way they need two powerful candidates running against the Democratic nominee;

2) Use unlimited funding and vote-theft mechanisms to disperse electoral votes so that NOBODY wins a majority of EVs. In a tight enough race it could be a simple matter of pushing Ohio over to Kasich, for example;

3) With no electoral vote majority, the election gets tossed into Congress, where Republican majorities will prevail at least through the end of this Congress (up to about January 3, 2017);

4) To protect themselves against the vicious backlash that will result from stealing the election, the Republicans will not hold a vote on selecting the next President, which means the real election for President will come when the next Speaker of the House is chosen by the House a couple of days after January 3;

5) The Speaker of the House will therefore become the next President on January 20, by default and without a single vote.

The better part of two decades of gerrymandering guarantees that the Republicans will control the House of Representatives after this election. But if you sneak up on Paul Ryan and kick him out, all of a sudden there is a frightening new wrinkle to the election theft problem. Without Ryan and the support of the vast majority of Republicans in the House of Representatives, suddenly the race for President becomes another clown-fight, this time in Congress in January, as the 115th Congress selects its leadership. Whichever Republican wins the internal election for Speaker becomes President by default.

One of the best ways to ensure this can't happen is through an all-out assault on the House of Representatives, ideally by running a Democrat in every district but also by threatening House leadership through primary challenges. The Republican Party has relied upon extra-legal tactics to control Congress for this entire century so far; they don't have a hell of a lot of actual talent in their staves, and if leadership is holding on to their talent to fight off internal dissent then it is far more difficult for Republicans to make additional gains in the House and the Senate.

This move against Ryan may in fact be the beginning of a well-orchestrated 50-state plan to take Congress away from the Republicans (or thin their margin of control) before they can steal the White House from the American people, again. They're not backing whatever yahoo is running against Paul Ryan, but we probably did our best to smooth the way for him, you know?


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