It has now been 12 days since he lost the election, and the lunatic in the White House still refuses to concede. It is now becoming more than just a running joke and an embarrassment for him, it is starting to become a very serious national security issue as well.
With the COVID-19 pandemic raging out of control, the current administration is refusing to participate in a smooth transition of power to Joe Biden and his team. This is something that would make fighting the pandemic so much easier. But we have known from day one that Mr. trump and his minions do not care about fighting this pandemic.
We are sadly now learning that he has not attended a COVID-19 task force meeting in over five months. And how could he? He has been spending his days since getting his ass handed to him, golfing, tweeting lies and far-fetched conspiracy theories, and basically making a fool of himself on twitter by admitting defeat and then denying it.
At some point the people around him who supposedly care about him are going to have to have a serious intervention with him and demand that he steps down and accept defeat. All the shouting in the world from the right-wing echo chamber won't change the results of the 2020 election: 77 million people voted for Joe Biden and 72 million people voted for him. Joe Biden got 306 electoral votes and he got 232. That's it. I can't say this enough: It's over for him!
John Yoo, Mr. Torture himself, and a prominent conservative lawyer, sees a very dim future for Mr. trump when it comes to these elections.
"He has the right to mount legal challenges, but we should be clear that these are Hail Mary passes we might think of in American football," Yoo, a former legal advisor to the George W. Bush administration, told CNBC's Capital Connection on Thursday.....
...None of these cases really look like they have a very high probability of winning," Yoo said. "On the other hand, I think that Trump has every right to and demand that all the states be sure about the votes, so that we all have confidence in the election. But I'll say, looking at past cases, these are very hard cases to prove and generally they don't result in changes in the votes totals on the order by which President Trump lost to Joe Biden."
Yoo is not typically a Trump critic: a renowned constitutional law scholar and currently a law professor at Berkeley, he is known as a strong advocate of executive power and has previously advised the Trump administration on how to bypass Congress to enact its own policies.
Yoo has authored works including the Torture Memos, which in the early 2000s gave legal justification for former President George W. Bush's use of torture on detainees following the 9/11 attacks. Members of Bush's own Justice Department later repudiated Yoo's arguments. His "unitary executive" theory argued that presidents have the authority to assert their power over independent government agencies.
But there is no argument that enables the president to sidestep the Constitution once his term has ended as decided by the states' electoral votes, Yoo said.
He then offered an answer to the question many have been asking: What if Trump refuses to ever concede?
"He may never concede; he doesn't have to concede," Yoo said. "The thing about the American Constitution is that it doesn't actually require the sitting president to do anything one way or the other. On January 20th, Donald Trump's term ends and Joe Biden's, I believe, will begin."
According to the Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution, the candidate with the most electoral votes becomes president at 12:00 p.m. on January 20. The current president's term is therefore over on that day, just before noon."
If only Four Seasons Landscaping had a moving company.
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