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发帖数: 1709 | 1 As 'safe harbor' day arrives, reality sets in for Trump supporters
David Knowles ·Editor
Mon, December 7, 2020, 4:09 PM EST
As the lumbering process of American democracy moves forward, any lingering
illusions that Donald Trump has a chance of a second term as president are
about to evaporate, and many of his own staffers and supporters are
beginning to acknowledge it.
Tuesday marks the arrival of “safe harbor” day, the deadline set by
federal law for states to resolve challenges to election results, locking in
the 538 electors who will meet in their state capitols to vote on Dec. 14.
All of the battleground states contested by the Trump campaign —
Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia — have
certified results showing Joe Biden as the winner.
The final step before Biden is inaugurated on Jan. 20 is for Congress to
meet on Jan. 6 to receive the Electoral College votes and declare a winner.
Although Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., has said he plans to challenge Biden’s
victory, the process is basically a formality.
In a long-shot effort to persuade Republican state lawmakers to ignore the
poll results and appoint electors who would support Trump anyway, the
president’s campaign mounted a multistate search for evidence that the
election results were tainted by fraud and errors. But pretty much all it
turned up were conspiracy theories and hearsay accounts by poll workers and
voters who seemed not to understand what they claimed to have seen.
While Trump’s legal team presented its accusations of fraud to panels of
Republican state lawmakers, it largely steered clear of making such claims
in actual courtrooms, where there are consequences for raising false or bad-
faith arguments. The cases that have been argued in court haven’t gone well
for the president and his allies. On Monday, two more federal judges ruled
against Trump loyalist Sidney (“The Kraken”) Powell, who sought to have
the certification of votes in Michigan and Georgia tossed out. The legal
strategy has proved a redundant and futile bid to convince judges to simply
overturn the will of the voters.
Even in the face of more than 40 courtroom defeats, Trump continued on
Monday to insist he had actually defeated Biden.But with Trump’s lead
lawyer Rudy Giuliani hospitalized after testing positive for COVID-19 and
the courtroom losses continuing to pile up, it is clear that “safe harbor”
day will provide nothing of the sort for the 45th president.
Even some members of the Trump administration have begun to acknowledge the
inevitable. On Monday, Larry Kudlow, Trump’s chief economic adviser,
praised Biden’s pick of Janet Yellen to lead the Federal Reserve.
“She has very sensible views on the economy,” Kudlow told the Washington
Post’s Robert Costa.
Kudlow also sent a post-election note of congratulations to Biden economic
adviser Jared Bernstein. |
