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Inconsequential? I don’t think I ever implied that. Already a major consequence has happened: a clarification of the Constitution in which the vice president’s role in the presidential election has been reduced in power from the novel political theory that Trump put forward as an attempt to return democracy after a bad election.
But keep in mind the great mass of who Trump appeals to: people who believe in the great myth of America and the rule of law, who hate totalitarians and love democracy, who believe in the founding fathers and the great experiment of what used to be known as liberal America before Commies stole “liberal”, a capitalist democratic republic forever at peace within its borders.
These are people who believe that babies are being murdered in most heinous fashion every day, yet refuse to storm the clinics and kill the doctors. These are people who are descended from World War II vets who fought literal Nazis. These are people who despise the quarantine camps of Australia and the government-sanctioned euthanasia of Canada. They can be enticed into riotously entering the Capitol, but absurdly walk peacefully though Statuary Hall. These are people who watch police procedurals on CBS and cheer when the wrongly suspected are confirmed innocent.
The red tribe won’t start a war to end America, nor willingly make it a state more totalitarian than already it is at this point, unless the Commies or the Jihadis do something so stupid and terrible as to make it necessary.
Regrettably, it hasn't. The first Eastman memo said that Pence should declare the Election Count Act unconstitutional and ignore it. The second Eastman memo offered a range of options, including ones where Pence ignored the ECA (and Trump wins, possibly after the election is thrown into the House because the contested states' electoral votes are treated as "spoiled") and ones where Pence tries to follow the ECA (and Trump almost certainly loses).
Various other commentators suggested that Pence could exploit the ambiguous drafting of the old ECA to weasel out a victory, but Eastman wargames those out and concludes that they don't work. So the first choice legal theory for a Pence coup was always that the ECA is unconstitutional (either because the Constitution assigns the authority to count electoral votes to the VP, or because the Constitution requires that all challenges be resolved in joint session without the two houses separating).
In other words, if Gavin Newsome beats VP Ramaswamy in the 2028 presidential election and Trump and Ramaswamy cry foul like they did in 2020, then the most likely scenario is that Ramaswamy gavels in the joint session, announces that he considers the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022 unconstitutional and accordingly that he is obliged to ignore it, and then counts the electoral votes in a way which allows him to declare himself elected.
If Eastman is right (either that the ECA is unconstitutional, or that there is no effective way of challenging a VP who says it is), then the problem requires a constitutional amendment to fix. If Eastman is wrong, then the problem probably never existed in the first place.
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