It's getting on to Christmas, and you know what that means -- more Trumpkin fever dreams of deliverance from the judgment of their fellow citizens! Santa, they pray, please bring us a fascist dictatorship -- or at least let us believe one is imminent!
I already wrote about one recent effulgence of their mania, in which Congress is alleged to have sneaked a codicil into the Stimulus Bill that would erase the Insurrection Act -- which Trump needs to keep, I guess, so he can kill enough Democrats to stay in office. Neither the Stimulus Bill, nor the Defense Appropriations Bill that wingnuts have taken to claiming is where it actually is, contain any such language.
Anyway now mainstream sources have gotten around to debunking this bit of nonsense, and Tubby's pretense of interest in $2,000 stimulus payments -- something AOC and other progressives have been demanding since March -- has cooled the brethren's ardor and they've moved on. Now they're talking about the "Pence Card." You can see it as a popular hashtag on Twitter -- at least for the moment. Here's some site called "Newswars" (gee, wonder what audience they're going for) explaining, or rather EXPLAINING:
SOURCES IN THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION CONFIRMED TO NATIONAL FILE THAT PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP’S MOST VOCAL ADVOCATES WITHIN THE WHITE HOUSE HAVE DETERMINED THAT BOTH U.S. CODE AND THE CONSTITUTION CONTAIN LANGUAGE THAT REQUIRES VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE TO REJECT UNLAWFUL ELECTORAL COLLEGE CERTIFICATES, BUT PENCE MUST ACT BY NO LATER THAN WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 23.
They later purport to quote (in sentence case, fortunately) a memo allegedly circulated at the White House that claims support for this scenario in parts of the constitution and federal law, ranging from the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment to 3 U.S. Code § 7. Needless to say there is nothing in there that supports this idea (though I'm sure some operative somewhere is going "Not that 3 USC 7, stupid libtard, this super-secret edition of which I produce a screenshot, checkmate!"), but nonetheless conservative elected officials and Twitter trolls are pushing the idea:
I invite commenters to tell us what's next when this one flops -- a Christmas Kraken, when Trump dressed as Santa rides his sleigh to all Democratic electors' homes and kills them? Or maybe something a little more Trilateral Commission-y?
UPDATE. Snopes breaks it down:
This provision does not give the vice president the authority to reject votes certified by the states. It only says that the vice president shall attempt to expedite the process if states fail to deliver their certification of votes on time.
Furthermore, this provision states that the vice president can only get involved in this process by the “fourth Wednesday in December” if the president of the Senate or the archivist of the United States does not receive a state’s certificate of votes. The archivist of the United States, however, has already received certifications of votes from all 50 states and Washington, D.C, for the 2020 general election.
If brains were dynamite, these people couldn't blow a fart.
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