Bicycle Bill, call your Senator

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Sue U
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Joined: Thu Apr 15, 2010 4:59 pm
Location: Eastern Megalopolis, North America (Midtown)

Bicycle Bill, call your Senator

Post by Sue U »

and demand his resignation.

Ron Johnson was up to his eyeballs in the plot to use phony electors to prevent certification of Biden's win, so that congressional Republicans could then install Trump for a second term. He is clearly unfit for office. KICK HIM OUT!!!

(Also, the video of him pretending to be on the phone while reporters try to ask him questions, aside from being hilarious, shows him to be the lying sack of shit he always has been.)
Insurrection Fallout
Ron Johnson tried to hand fake elector info to Mike Pence on Jan. 6, panel reveals

A top aide said the Wisconsin Republican senator wanted to give Pence the list of pro-Trump electors as he prepared to certify the 2020 election.

By Nicholas Wu and Kyle Cheney

06/21/2022 04:30 AM EDT
Updated: 06/21/2022 06:20 PM EDT

A top aide to Sen. Ron Johnson attempted to arrange a handoff of false, pro-Trump electors from the senator to Mike Pence just minutes before the then-vice president began to count electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021.

The aide, Sean Riley, told Pence’s legislative director Chris Hodgson that Johnson wanted to hand Pence lists of the fake electors from Michigan and Wisconsin for Pence to introduce during the counting of electoral votes that certified Joe Biden’s win. The attempt was revealed in text messages obtained by the Jan. 6 select committee during its fourth public hearing on Tuesday.

“Do not give that to him,” Hodgson replied.

The attempted handoff shows just how much former President Donald Trump and his allies tried to lean on Pence to introduce false slates of electors that could have thrown the 2020 election from Biden to Donald Trump. The committee laid out an intense pressure campaign, led primarily by Trump and his attorney Rudy Giuliani, to push state legislatures to appoint pro-Trump electors and override the will of voters in their states.

***

Under Trump’s plan, Pence would be presented with competing slates of electors — the official results certified by the governors and those certified by state legislators — and he would assert the extraordinary power to choose which slates to count. But no state legislature responded to Trump’s demand, and Pence, without any genuine controversy, rejected the scheme as illegal.

***

The senator said he was “aware” that his office had received a package but had “no idea” who delivered it. Nevertheless, he said his office attempted to facilitate the delivery of the package from Johnson to Pence, but ultimately did not after Pence’s team rejected it.

“I was aware that we got this package and that somebody wanted us to deliver to the vice president,” Johnson said. “We reached out. They didn’t want it, we didn’t deliver it.”

Johnson said his chief of staff “did the right thing” by attempting to arrange the delivery, adding that it all “took place in a span of a few minutes.”

Notably, Johnson held his own hearing on purported election fraud in mid-December 2020 and was accused by Democrats of spreading misinformation.

Trump-aligned lawyers concocted the effort, leaning on fringe constitutional theory and the guidance of Eastman. He acknowledged in emails obtained by the select committee that the Pence plan would be “dead on arrival” without the backing of state legislatures — yet he pushed ahead anyway, suggesting that the confusion around alternate electors would give Pence enough cover to act.

Trump’s own White House counsel’s office also raised doubts about the plan, according to testimony released by the select panel in court filings. And in the days before Jan. 6, Pence’s chief counsel Greg Jacob engaged in an intense debate with Eastman, contending that not a single justice of the Supreme Court would back his plan — a point he said Eastman reluctantly conceded.

***

The goal was ultimately to present Pence with an apparent controversy: competing slates of electors certified by different government bodies — governors and legislators. Jacob, Pence’s chief counsel, told the vice president at the time that had any state legislatures certified an alternative slate the outcome might’ve been different.

“A reasonable argument might further be made that when resolving a dispute between competing electoral slates, Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution places a firm thumb on the scale on the side of the State legislature,” he wrote in a memo obtained by POLITICO.

Even as rioters swarmed the Capitol on Jan. 6 and sent Pence, Jacob and lawmakers into hiding, Eastman leaned on Pence to single-handedly delay the count of electoral votes, citing the possibility that the Pennsylvania legislature would reconvene and adopt an alternative slate. But Pence and his team came to view the delay as a violation of the law that governs the transfer of power and the counting of electoral votes.

***
Source: Politico
GAH!

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