We can thank the nation’s founders tonight for a federal judicial ruling that puts an end to a loony lawsuit filed by a loony member of Congress, Rep. Louie Gohmert, an East Texas Republican.
Gohmert wanted Vice President Mike Pence to preside over a joint session of Congress next week … and then take it upon himself to throw out the Electoral College certification that Joe Biden was elected president of the United States.
What did the founders get right? They created an independent federal judiciary! Tonight, U.S. District Judge Jeremy Kernodle tossed Gohmert’s lawsuit into the trash barrel.
I should say right here that Judge Kernodle, of Texas, is a Trump appointee. Yep, the man who would benefit directly from Gohmert’s idiocy selected this jurist, who then followed his oath of office directly and cleanly. As The Hill reported: The judge found that Gohmert suffered no legally recognizable injury.
One of them has surfaced in recent days. For instance, I did not know that the House of Representatives contained so many insurrectionists, people who are willing to contest a fundamental concept of the government they took an oath to defend and protect.
These are the idiots who have said they intend to contest the election of President-elect Joe Biden. They’ll get the chance to have their undemocratic voices heard next Wednesday when the House and Senate meet to ratify the results of the Electoral College certification of Biden and Kamala Harris’s victory over Donald Trump and Mike Pence.
At last count, 140 House members — all Republicans — say they intend to contest the results. They will join the Missouri moron in the Senate, Republican Josh Hawley, in contesting a result that on Nov. 3 produced a clear, decisive and legal victory by the Biden-Harris ticket over the Trump-Pence ticket. I am happy to report that my congressman, Republican Van Taylor of Plano, did not join the loony bin crowd; he remains loyal to the oath he took.
This, of course, is a disgraceful perversion of the democratic process. These dipsh**s continue to insist there was “widespread voter fraud.” There was none. The U.S. attorney general has said there was none. More than 50 courts across the land have ruled there was none. Donald Trump’s handpicked steward over the election process — whom Trump later fired for speaking the truth — said the election was the most “secure in U.S. history.”
Will that deter this cabal of kooks? No. They’re going to proceed with the clown show egged on by their guy, Trump.
I am somewhat heartened by the apparent refusal of Vice President Pence to play along with this idiocy. I say “somewhat” because Pence has remained silent for too damn long while Trump has continued his moronic claim of being “robbed” of a victory.
All of this sheer nonsense will end where it should. Congress will ratify the Electoral College result. VP Pence will gavel the results into the record and will declare that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have been elected president and vice president.
And Trump and Pence more than likely will never speak to each other ever again. That’s fine with me … as long as they take their estrangement with them out the door and into oblivion.
U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Nut House, is filing suit to demand that Vice President Mike Pence toss out the electoral votes that Joe Biden won in the presidential election and cast them instead for Donald Trump.
I do not believe Gohmert’s lawsuit will see the light of day. Nor do I believe that even if it did that Pence would follow the advice that the East Texas lunatic is suggesting.
On Jan. 6, the combined U.S. House and Senate will meet to ratify the Electoral College vote that has determined that Biden is the president-elect of the United States.
Gohmert is actually making a treasonous proposal by filing the lawsuit. It is astonishing, reprehensible, despicable, disgraceful and patently dangerous for Congress to even consider doing what Gohmert is demanding of the lame-duck vice president, and yet Gohmert has some fellow nut-job colleagues on the Republican side of the aisle who are willing to join him in this final act of idiocy.
To think, moreover, that the good folks of Gohmert’s East Texas congressional district continue to stand behind this goofball. They keep re-electing him every two years. Go … figure.
I’ll say it once more to VP Pence: Just do your job as the presiding officer of the joint congressional session, Mr. Vice President, and make the inevitable declaration that Joe Biden is the new president and that Kamala Harris is the new vice president.
Let’s then get back to actual governance and political sanity.
Vice President Mike Pence has one more critical job awaiting him before he leaves office.
He is scheduled — but not required — to preside over a joint session of Congress which on Jan. 6 is going to receive the Electoral College certified tally of the presidential election. It will tally up the votes cast by the electors and then Pence, according to custom, will declare that Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris have been elected president and vice president of the United States of America.
What does the VP do?
That’s easy from my vantage point. He presides over the outcome and makes the declaration on behalf of Congress and the Electoral College.
He is likely, though, to wonder if that’s the correct choice. Of course it is! However, he is likely then to incur the wrath of the man Biden defeated, Donald J. Trump, who continues to bully fellow Republicans to continue resisting the obvious outcome of the election. Trump is seeking to cling to power.
He has lined up a number of GOP loony birds who have swallowed the swill he is serving, that he actually won. To their great credit, some Rs in Congress are urging Trump to give up the fight.
One prominent Republican happens to be Mike Pence, who on Jan. 6 had better do what he must do. If he cannot make the declaration we all intend to hear, he should stand down, step aside and let the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, make the call.
A small, but growing, part of me believes that VP Mike Pence will be AWOL when the moment arrives.
Vice President Mike Pence has announced that members of the newly created U.S. Space Force will be called “guardians.”
That’s right. They will be called guardians the way the Army refers to soldiers, the Navy has its sailors, the Air Force has airmen, the Marines have, um, Marines and the Coast Guard has Coast Guardsmen.
The Space Force deploys guardians to defend us against … what? Extraterrestrials such as Martians or the Man in the Moon?
As Politico reports: “It is my honor on behalf of the president of the United States to announce that henceforth the men and women of the United States Space Force will be known as guardians,” Pence told an audience at the White House.
Look, I wasn’t high on the formation of a Space Force anyway. The Air Force already has a Space Command and was doing a stellar job of protecting us from missiles launched by hostile nations, let alone invaders from deep space.
I’m waiting for the first president of the United States say during a speech how he or she will honor the service of our “soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, Coast Guardsmen and guardians.”
A lot of political eyes are set to turn toward someone who’s been stone-cold silent while Donald Trump has ranted about alleged “corruption” in the process that elected Joe Biden as president of the United States.
That someone is Vice President Mike Pence.
The Electoral College has voted to certify President-elect Biden’s election. Now we get to watch Congress ratify it on Jan. 6. There might be a Trumpster in the crowd of House members and senators who will object. The individual who could preside over it all is VP Pence. It’s been customary for the vice president to declare the election of the next president and vice president.
Donald Trump remains adamant that he — not Biden — won the election. What does the VP think? I am left to wonder whether Pence will follow Trump’s reprehensible behavior and refuse to show up.
I will harken back to 2001. We had just completed an election that ended up being decided in the Supreme Court, which voted 5 to 4 to end the counting of ballots in Florida. When the count ended, Texas Gov. George W. Bush led Vice President Al Gore by 537 votes, out of more than 5 million cast. Bush won Florida’s electoral votes, giving him 271 of them to be elected president. Was the then-VP angry? Uh, yeah. He was.
However, he conceded to the new president and when Congress convened to ratify the Electoral College tally, Vice President Gore was present to preside over the event and declared that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney would take office as president and vice president, respectively.
That was the statesmanlike behavior we have come to expect in our nation’s top political leadership. We have seen nothing approaching it from Donald Trump. I hope with all sincerity that Mike Pence is a better man than the president.
If that first Joe Biden-Donald Trump brawl turned out to be an unwatchable fiasco, we got something a whole lot more civil tonight.
That’s about it.
Vice-presidential nominees Kamala Harris and Mike Pence chided each other. They refused to answer direct questions. All told, though, it was much more of what we think of as a “debate,” given that they were able to answer each other’s accusatory rhetoric.
I suppose one takeaway was how Vice President Pence talked over Sen. Harris’s answers, to which she would scold him, “I am talking, Mr. Vice President.”
To her credit, Harris didn’t interrupt Pence … except perhaps for a time or two.
I remain committed to supporting the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris ticket. Based on what I witnessed tonight, Pence did nothing to persuade me to even think about supporting his side.
He didn’t answer questions related to the pandemic and his role as leader of the White House response team; Pence sought to pivot at times from a direct question to speak about an unrelated issue.
As for Harris, I just wish she would have answered the question about whether she supports adding to the Supreme Court if the Senate confirms Amy Coney Barrett as the next justice. She danced away from it.
Still, I declare Kamala Harris the winner by a split decision.
The Biden-Harris ticket remains in the lead. I just hope now that they can hold onto it through the end of this most unusual campaign.
Vice-presidential political debates always should be deemed critical to a campaign, given that the principals involved are vying to be next in line to the presidency of the United States.
Tonight’s encounter with Sen. Kamala Harris and Vice President Mike Pence has taken on new urgency. I’ll state the obvious reason first: the age of the president and his Democratic Party challenger.
Donald Trump is 74; former VP Joe Biden is 77. I am not being ghoulish in determining that the age of the presidential candidates is a critical part of the VP debate. We need to assess whether either Sen. Harris or VP Pence is ready to become president at a moment’s notice.
We also have this COVID-19 matter. Perhaps you’ve heard, but Donald Trump is infected with a potentially fatal virus. He spent three days in the hospital. He returned to the White House and is continuing to pose an immediate threat to those around him by, um, refusing to wear a mask or observe “social distancing.”
This brings me to an essential question that Harris — or perhaps moderator Susan Page — needs to pose to Pence.
The VP heads the White House coronavirus response task force. Pence needs to answer this question: If you are seeking to stay in office, how is it that you not only have failed to protect Americans — more than 200,000 of whom have died from this disease — but you also failed to protect the president of the United States?
A host of related questions can arise from that. Why haven’t you insisted at Donald Trump observe medical experts’ warnings? Are you leading by example? Is the task force performing a worthwhile function if POTUS is ignoring your advice? How can you defend the president’s conduct when he jeopardizes the health of those around him?
I believe Pence’s record as head of the response task force needs careful examination in tonight’s encounter.
I won’t describe the recent Joe Biden-Donald Trump bitch-fest as a “debate,” and to be candid I am now a bit leery of what we might get when the parties’ vice-presidential nominees square off next week at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
However, we’re going to watch Democratic Party VP nominee Sen. Kamala Harris square off against Vice President Mike Pence. I will sit in front of my TV just as I did when Biden and Trump squabbled earlier this week.
Here is what I hope happens …
I hope Harris cleans and dresses Pence. I also hope — and I have modest expectations that it will happen — that the vice president will not follow his hero’s lead and take their encounter down the same trail that Trump did with Biden.
Pence, to his credit, doesn’t seem like the kind of boorish hooligan that Trump revealed himself to be Tuesday night.
He has a record that is difficult to defend. He has led the coronavirus task force charged with coordinating our national response to the COVID-19 pandemic. He, um, hasn’t done well … at all! Harris will exploit those shortcomings. I don’t expect Pence to stand silently while Harris pummels him.
Nor do I expect Pence to unleash a string of hideous lies while Harris is speaking.
So there you have it. I have set modest expectations for what we might get when Sen. Harris and VP Pence square off. I mean, after watching the sh** show put on by Donald Trump, there is nowhere to go but straight up.
New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt has just published a book, “Donald Trump v. The United States.” He writes in the book that on Nov. 16, 2019, Trump was taken to Walter Reed Military Hospital for an unscheduled visit. The White House informed Vice President Pence to stand by in case the president would be incapacitated by heavy sedation.
Schmidt writes that Pence never assumed the presidency in a temporary fashion. He writes only that Trump was treated for a “mystery” ailment.
What, then, is up with this Twitter message from Trump. He denied in a tweet that he suffered any “mini-strokes” or a “stroke.”
Hey, wait a second! No one reported a thing about mini-strokes! Donald Trump today broke that bit of news all by himself, without prompting, without any reason on Earth to issue a denial!
Has the president just opened the door to open speculation about his physical health?
