Scott Gurvey's Public Offerings

(January 6 – Georgia and the Senate)

Pinch me.

Awww…. Not so hard.

We will not know for sure until the official certification. But as of this writing, it looks as if the people of Georgia have come through and elected two Democrats to the United States Senate. That would make the Senate evenly divided, 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans. And in case of a tie vote, the tie is broken by the President of the Senate. “The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided” (U.S. Constitution, Article I, section 3). And the President of the Senate is, drum-roll please, the Vice-President of the United States. And the Vice-President of the United States is, rim-shot here, Democrat Kamala Harris!

What does this mean? First and foremost, it means Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell will get a new title. Minority Leader. And as minority leader, he will be able to control, insert cymbal crash here, absolutely nothing. With the election results still unofficial I am afraid of jinxing something. But I would love to be able to get into McConnell’s face and congratulate him on his new found impotence.

(January 5 – U.S.D.C. Court)

They are battening down the hatches at the White House. But before we get to that, we have another extraordinary court decision to contemplate.

Yesterday the United States District Court for the District of Columbia denied still another request for an injunction seeking to stop Congress from counting the Electoral College ballots declaring Joe Biden the 46th President when it meets tomorrow. The opinion handed down by Judge James E. Boasberg pulls no punches in describing the scope of the plaintiffs’ complaint:

Plaintiffs’ aims in this election challenge are bold indeed: they ask this Court to declare unconstitutional several decades-old federal statutes governing the appointment of electors and the counting of electoral votes for President of the United States; to invalidate multiple state statutes regulating the certification of Presidential votes; to ignore certain Supreme Court decisions; and, the coup de grace, to enjoin the U.S. Congress from counting the electoral votes on January 6, 2021, and declaring Joseph R. Biden the next President.

(January 4 – The Georgia Telephone Call)

No sooner had I posted the first installment of this series of columns when events overran its contents. Yesterday the Washington Post released the audio recording of a sixty-plus minute telephone conversation Donald Trump had the day before with the Secretary of State of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger. Raffensperger, a Republican, and Trump have been at odds for weeks. Trump insisting that he won the vote in Georgia but was the victim of massive vote fraud and Raffensperger, noting that he supported and voted for Trump, certifying that Biden was the victor by a margin of 11,779 votes.

Please, listen to the audio and read the transcript and make up your own mind.

When I heard it, my thoughts immediately turned to the first time I heard Richard Nixon’s voice on a recording discussing the Watergate break-in. He was considering having the CIA block the FBI from investigating the connection between the burglars of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee and the Nixon reelection committee.

(January 3)

Two months since the election and only today do I write about the outcome. That is because, unbelievably, the outcome is still not 100% certain. I had prepared the graphic within days of November 3, 2020. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, two leaders-elect. And an empty room representing the loser, Donald Trump, who refused to concede and sulked off into retreat. The two leaders are the unquestionable victors receiving 81 million votes. The most of any presidential ticket in history. And 306 electoral college votes, the same number as Trump received in 2016.

In all this time, Trump has refused to admit defeat. Trump and his acolytes continue to maintain a fantasy that he really won, and won it “bigly.” They have fought the battle to validate their alternate reality by whatever means available. Trump got 74 million votes, they argue. More than he got in 2016. How could he have lost? Easy. Biden got 7 million votes more. And flipped five states Trump won in his 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton.