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So here's a thing I've been kind of mulling over. It's been a while now since the result of the election has been beyond reasonable dispute. Has been now a pretty long time since any realistic remaining legal or other process could plausibly change the top line outcome.
The president has not conceded, and is at this point obviously not going to, and is actively trying to overturn the result, just in a way that is laughably incompetent.
But the problem is the laughable incompetence and utter lack of plausible paths to success kind of mask just how precarious of a place the US is in.
Folks who know me know I usually dislike words like "coup" and "treason" and "constitutional crisis", because most of the time those words are being used casually to mean "emphatically bad" (or "emphatically out of the norm"), and it devalues them to misuse them
But here we are, with the president now overtly planning to outright reject the democratic outcome of a vote he lost by subverting the ministerial functions of state certification of Electors. That's their plan.
Certification, and frankly the EC itself, is a ceremonial role. In other countries you have other ceremonial roles, like the Queen inviting the winner of an election to form a government.
The queen's role in that process is ceremonial. Nobody objects to it because it's obviously not real. It just forms part of the ceremony and pomp associated with what is actually a democratic power transfer.
To subvert the ministerial functions of power transfer is to supplant the ceremonial for the core organ of power transfer in a democratic society, which is the vote itself.
Which I guess is a long way of saying if this is the plan of the losing party, the US is functionally now in a democratic emergency, regardless of whether or not they lose.
