These are dangerous times for our democracy. I am concerned that too many Americans are not educated and active enough in regards to their civic responsibilities.
For this thread the question is.
In regards to the events of January 6th, 2021, how are you exercising your civic responsibilities? Please post examples or explanations.January 10, 2021
Dear Senator Blackburn,
As a resident of Tennessee and longtime resident in your previous Congressional district, I am writing to express my extreme disappointment in your actions in regards to the presidential election of 2020.
A central unifying concept in this country is that the consent of the governed transmits the popular sovereignty of we the people to the local, state, and federal governments. Your statement in regards to your reasoning for challenging the legitimacy of the election results of 2020 is filled with hasty generalizations and equivocations. Simply put you were undermining faith in American democracy by asserting you were defending it. And the result was that you were clearly part of the chain of events that led to the violence at your place of business on January 6th, 2021. Finally your actions were an overreach of Congressional power trespassing on duties that were delegated to and carried out by state governments and state and federal courtrooms.
Your statement used equivocation to baselessly assert that the federal election results were tainted and that they were not free, fair, or transparent. Yet this was an election that took place in the public eye, with open access to observation. There was a period of a month between the election and the placing of votes in states by electors in which concerns could be and were aired in courtrooms across America. The substance of these cases was available for public consumption. Again and again the standard of courtroom evidence was not met to support the claims in any of the states you sought to challenge. In addition to assaulting the democratic foundation of the United States, your actions needlessly over-reached the power of Congress.
Neither your brief statement nor any other public statement I have read by you during the period between the election and the day in which the electoral votes were to be counted in a joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021 contained credible evidence in support of your claim of a tainted electoral results.It should be a very lofty standard of evidence for you to assert from Tennessee or Washington D.C., that officials carrying out their sworn duty in other multiple states and courtrooms had subverted democracy. Instead you picked up the banner of a flood of misinformation and deception and asserted you were on the side of truth and justice.
The individuals and agencies in charge of the election, protecting it from fraud, and investigating allegations of fraud after the election have confirmed that it was legitimate. Key among them is the person in charge of the efforts of the Trump administration to secure the 2020 election from electronic fraud. This person is
Christopher Krebs, now the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency known as CISA. He was fired not long after
asserting “The 2020 election was, as I’ve called it, the most secure election certainly in modern history. I have no question about the security of the systems, the process, of the vote, of the count, {or} of the certification.” The United State Attorney General William Barr of the United States reviewed the existing allegations about the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election and
concluded on December 1, 2002 that, “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.” (the AP used the word effected instead of affected in their article on this story) Attorney General Barr resigned his post shortly thereafter. Finally a j
oint statement of election officials affirmed the legitimacy of the 2020 elections. This has been a widely assessed election and the results are in. They were confirmed as free, fair, and legitimate elections, yet you were asserting from afar and without merit the opposite.
I very much agree with your assertion that “protecting the integrity of the electoral process is paramount to preserving trust and legitimacy of the final outcome.” However I disagree that the integrity of the election process has been shown in nearly any way to have lacked complete integrity. Yet your actions have done great damage in using baseless assertions to undermine trust and the belief of legitimacy of a completed, challenged, upheld, and certified election. Your words heightened the distrust of a legitimate process, baselessly encouraged individuals to believe that the electoral results were unfair and secretive, and violated your oath to uphold the constitution and the democratic principles that lay at its foundation.
Instead you wrongly claimed that the Constitution reserves the right to challenge the Electoral College results.
This is what the Constitution says on the matter of voting:
“The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted.”
There is also an 1887 federal law that creates a process for making objections. The law is detailed in this document, but it has no precedent in challenging the results of multiple states. It also is not part of the Constitution.
I write this letter to express that your actions done in the name of representing me were reprehensible. They aimed to undermine the democracy at the core of our national values. They emboldened individuals to use force to disrupt the business of Congress in carrying out a formality in counting the previously certified electoral votes. Instead you joined a chorus of voices repeating the unsubstantiated claim that the election was so tainted that the rightful victor was Donald Trump not Joseph Biden. No more serious charge could be made by an official of the federal government. The only circumstances under which you should have taken this drastic action, would have been if you were in possession of clear and compelling evidence that the election results returned the wrong result, and that this evidence was denied a fair review in a court of law.
Sincerely,
Raymond Blair
Resident of Nashville, Tennessee
Below is the joint statement released by the Senators from Tennessee in regards to their intentions to object to the certification of the votes of unspecified states during the January 6, 2021 joint session of Congress.
Sen. Blackburn & Sen.-elect Hagerty released the following statement:
“On behalf of Tennesseans, we are taking a united stand against the tainted electoral results from the recent Presidential election. American democracy relies on the consent of the governed. Allegations of voter fraud, irregularities, and unconstitutional actions diminish public confidence in what should be a free, fair, and transparent process. Protecting the integrity of the electoral process is paramount to preserving trust and legitimacy in the final outcome.
For critical moments like these, the Constitution reserves the right to challenge the Electoral College results to members of Congress. On January 6, we will vote to oppose certification of the 2020 election results.”
SEN. BLACKBURN & SEN.-ELECT HAGERTY
This post has been edited by Eeyore: Jan 11 2021, 02:25 AM
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Jan 10 2021, 03:41 PM
There are some interesting trade-offs in some of the newer threads and I'm going to have a detailed review on the topic of election fraud/impropriety coming up here in a week or two. I'll be posting that in Eeyore's "2020 Election Audit" thread. It'll contain details that you won't read or hear about on CNN or FOX News. No conspiratorial or extreme right-wing sources, it'll mostly come with some well-established facts, presented in a different light and of course my take on things from a right of center standpoint.
It's run by a *** NOTICE: THIS WORD IS AGAINST THE RULES. FAILURE TO REMOVE IT WILL RESULT IN A STRIKE. *** whom I have no respect or regard for as a debater or even as a human being, and that was before he banned me from his board. It's only slightly less dead than this place is, and they are pretty much down to a half-dozen or so dudes on the moderate side of the political spectrum.