‘Sedition Summits’ taking place in the Trump White House

Outgoing President Donald Trump has been hosting former top adviser Michael Flynn and lawyer Sidney Powell at the White House to explore the possibility of seizing voting machines and sending the military into swing states to rerun the elections at the point of a gun. | AP

The news broke Monday that, over the weekend, Donald Trump met at the White House repeatedly with his lawyer Sidney Powell, his former National Security Chief Michael Flynn, Rudy Giuliani, and others to discuss the federal government seizing voting machines across the country and using the military, at the point of their guns, to declare martial law and rerun the elections in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

Last night, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former top aide to Secretary of State Colin Powell, said on national television that the military would court-martial Flynn on charges of inciting insurrection if he were still under their jurisdiction. Wilkerson said he fears what Trump can do in the remaining 30 days he has in office.

Part of the plan explored in the White House involves the appointment of Powell as a Special Counsel to guide the seizure of the nation’s voting machines.

The seditious group meeting at the White House even consulted with Homeland Security to float the feasibility of the seizure of voting machines, the declaration of martial law, and a military-supervised rerun of the elections in the battleground states. It is believed that White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows pushed back against the idea.

The plotting continues at the White House after the weekend with reports that numerous GOP lawmakers are going there to discuss with Trump what they could do to possibly sabotage the Jan. 6 meeting of Congress where the Electoral College votes are to be counted officially.

Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said he opposes challenging the Electoral College vote at that meeting, but it hasn’t deterred some GOP lawmakers from saying they will do it anyway. Cowardly Republicans, McConnell included, have apparently unleashed a Frankenstein monster they cannot control.

Trump has also called for his supporters to storm the Capitol and get “wild” on that day as part of his effort to screw up the Jan. 6 joint meeting of Congress.

No one has done more than Attorney General William Barr to aid Trump in his numerous attacks on democracy, but the latest seditious plotting seems too much even for him. Barr said yesterday that he saw no evidence to suggest that the Justice Department could support the seizure of voting machines.

In addition to plotting sedition, the Trump administration also announced it has filed yet another petition with the Supreme Court to invalidate Pennsylvania’s slate of electors and instead rule in favor of a petition that the Republican-controlled state legislature be given the right to appoint an entirely new slate of electors. The Electoral College met Dec. 14 and confirmed that Joe Biden won its votes overwhelmingly.

Not deterred by that reality, or the fact that Trump has lost almost 60 court appeals, often before judges he appointed, Giuliani is pressing forward with the newest case that challenges the Pennsylvania vote for Biden.

The petition seeks to reverse three Pennsylvania Supreme Court rulings on mail-in ballots and asks SCOTUS to reject voters’ will and allow the Pennsylvania General Assembly to pick its own slate of electors.

In the highly unlikely event that the Supreme Court would throw out the results of a free and fair election based on unfounded charges of voter fraud, it wouldn’t change the outcome. President-elect Joe Biden would still be the winner even without Pennsylvania because of his wide margin of victory in the Electoral College.

Giuliani wants the court to move fast so it can rule before Congress meets on Jan. 6. The problem with that is that the justices are not scheduled to meet again, even privately, until Jan. 8, two days after Congress counts votes.

With so many Republicans refusing to speak up on either the latest sedition attempts or the continuing court challenges, they are helping make both Trump’s coup attempt and his sedition into a normalized event in the United States. The GOP as a whole has placed itself in the camp of undemocratic forces aiming to destroy democracy in this country.

This is the first time in history that a major U.S. political party has given its blessing to the idea that the Election Day vote of the people is not the determining factor in who wins the election. There should be an uproar in the GOP right now about Trump discussing a military takeover to re-install himself as president. The fact that there is none speaks to the fact that, in the future, we can expect similar undemocratic attacks coming from Republicans whenever they regain the White House. It also speaks to the fact that Republicans will have no qualms about discarding democracy whenever doing so helps them gain any political office.

The new Supreme Court case is at least the fourth involving Pennsylvania that Trump’s campaign or Republican allies have filed in their bid to overturn Biden’s victory in the state or at least reverse court decisions involving mail-in balloting. Many more cases were filed in state and federal courts. Roughly 10,000 mail-in ballots that arrived after polls closed but before a state court-ordered deadline remain in limbo, awaiting the highest court’s decision on whether they should be counted.

The Trump campaign’s filing Sunday appears to target three decisions of Pennsylvania’s Democratic-majority state Supreme Court.

In November, the state’s highest court upheld a Philadelphia judge’s ruling that state law only required election officials to allow partisan observers to be able to see mail-in ballots being processed, not stand close enough to election workers to see the writing on individual envelopes.

It also ruled that more than 8,300 mail-in ballots in Philadelphia that had been challenged by the Trump campaign because of minor technical errors—such as a voter’s failure to write their name, address, or date on the outer ballot envelope—should be counted. In October, the court ruled unanimously that counties are prohibited from rejecting mail-in ballots simply because a voter’s signature does not resemble the signature on the person’s voter registration form.

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CONTRIBUTOR

John Wojcik

John Wojcik is Editor-in-Chief of People's World. He joined the staff as Labor Editor in May 2007 after working as a union meat cutter in northern New Jersey. There, he served as a shop steward and a member of a UFCW contract negotiating committee. In the 1970s and '80s, he was a political action reporter for the Daily World, this newspaper's predecessor, and was active in electoral politics in Brooklyn, New York.