An Eyebrow-raising View of the Jan 6 Capitol Invasion

by Mary W Maxwell, PhD, LLB

I have a new angle to submit in the mystery of the January 6, 2021 event in Washington DC. It has to do only with the counting of Electoral ballots in Congress that day. I think you will be surprised.

Let me say firmly that I am not here to exonerate Trump or to condemn him. And I was not at the Capitol, so cannot report what happened there. Just hear me out, please, as regards the little-known Twelfth Amendment.

But first, to Article II. At the Philadelphia Convention at which the Constitution was written, we know that the Framers in 1787 were not big on having a powerful president. One delegate suggested a triumvirate; another recommended a quickly revolving position, maybe for a year. Eventually, in part to please the smaller states, Article II called for -- pay attention, this is relevant to January 6, 2021 -- a states-based choice of president.

Each election year, the members of each state's little Electoral College meet. The number of Electors is proportionate to the population: Wyoming has 3 Electors, California has 53. All up, there are 538 Electors. Half of that, plus one vote, is 270, the magic number to obtain the presidency.

How does an Elector get to be an Elector? Each state is entitled to its own method. I live in NH and did not see any names of Electors on the ballot, but in some states you vote for the Electors to go do the job for you.

Do all 538 Electors have freedom to choose a candidate who was not a winner at the November 3rd polls or the national Party conventions? Again, it's up to each state to legislate on that matter. There are 22 "creative" states. Their Electors could conjure up someone who had not even run for office (as long as he/she be native born and 35 or older). Rarely, though does any Elector get creative.

In 28 states, the rule is "No creativity, please." The Elector must copy what happened at the polls in November.

All 50 Electoral Colleges must meet in December. Then they mail their signed ballots to the US Senate so as to arrive before D-day, January 6, addressed to the president of the Senate who is always the Vice President of the US.

In this case it was Mike Pence. Both houses of Congress are to assemble together in one chamber while "tellers" open the ballots. "May I have the envelope please..."

The Twelfth Amendment

OK. Now we come to Amendment XII, dated 1804. It was ratified after Thomas Jefferson had a bit if an election issue. If you need to see the implementation of the Twelfth, it's codified at 3 USC 15.

Once the January 6th ceremony begins, if any senator or representative wants to disagree, on any grounds, with the ballot count of any state, he can interrupt the count and announce his case.

Then (providing at least one member of the other house will sign that objection), the VP must ask the senators to skip back to their chamber so each chamber can debate it privately. They have a maximum of two hours to do so (per item).

On January 5, 2021, the day before the Electoral vote count, a whopping 139 members of the House of Representatives stated that they intended to challenge the ballots.

The opening of the envelopes from the states is done in alphabetical order. On January 6, we heard Alabama and Alaska called. Those ballots passed muster. Then Arizona was called -- this was the first state for which a challenge had been promised.

A majority vote of both the Senate and House of Reps is needed for the rejection of any Elector's ballot. If the result is "Reject!," that ballot must get dropped from the count. And it's not appealable. (The Constitution makes sense, you know. The choosing of a president is not a floating crap game.)

Conceivably, this paring down of the ballots could mean that the candidate who had been considered as having won the required minimum of 270 votes to become president (Biden had 302), would find himself having less than that number.

So the January 6th proceedings would presumably be quite exciting in 2021 -- six states' Electoral ballots were potentially at risk: AZ, GA, MI, NV, PA, and WI.

The "Timely" Invasion

It was (I believe) exactly at the moment when Arizona was called -- the first "at risk" state -- that the "invaders" broke into the chamber. The Congresspersons scattered to their offices for safety, and it was not until 8pm that they resumed business.

That is a whole year ago and you may have forgotten the high tension about a stolen election. So, at 8pm, who challenged what? Nobody challenged anything. The 139 Representatives went quiet. (I am not sure if any senators had promised to challenge: I think Senator Tommy Tuberville of AL gave some indication of it in the previous week.)

Most likely the invasion trauma had snuffed out the desire for controversy. It was, after all, a frightening day. So at 8pm the count went smoothly. Joe Biden got his 302 votes.

Conclusion: THE INVASION HELPED THE DEMOCRATS. That is my interpretation of it from afar. I have not seen any acknowledgement of this oddity in the press.

Note: I don't claim that a big raft of objections would have brought Biden's number to under 270. No one knows, since it did not happen. A good guess is that Biden would still have got 302, thanks to the Party make-up of each chamber. The House was majority-Democrat, and the Senate had just become majority-Democrat also, with the new folks who arrived on January 3.

So the debate-and-vote technique may not have led to a Trump win. But it was his only chance. I think he'd have been crazy to blow that chance by sending his followers to make mayhem.

Trump's Guilt?

I have no knowledge of whether President Trump was in on any plans for a violent hit on the Capitol building. I'd be amazed if he was. As I just said, it wouldn't have been "strategic" for him to do such a thing. Also, it's just too yucky, isn't it?

I doubt that Republican Party members were asked to come to Washington to make trouble. I get lots of mail and emails from the RNC, but no such invitation came to me. The Republicans whom I know personally are definitely not the type to storm a building as a way of sorting an election crisis.

Most likely it was organized by ... whomever. Ten dollars says it was a multi-purpose psy-op. We seem to be a nation of psyops. (See my new book, "Unreality", about Sandy Hook).

My guess about the November 3, 2020 election is that it was stolen. Probably most elections have been tampered with. In 1992, Jim Collier published his excellent book Votescam. It blames AT&T for hacking into voting machines to achieve the desired result (for either side!). It also hints that the League of Women Voters played a part.

On January 2, 2002 -- a year after the fracas, Rep Liz Cheney was interviewed, saying that Trump had watched the Invasion on TV from the Oval Office. She says she knows this from firsthand sources. That means she is a second-hand source and I have no reason to trust second-hand sources.

I have no reason at all to trust Donald Trump. He had four years to prove himself and failed. Joe Biden has had one year and failed. Perhaps all presidents get led by the nose. It's a disgraceful sight. But that's not the issue for this article.

The Non-Sorting of the January 6 Violence Issue

Anyone watching the January 6 invasion, live on TV, could see that the first three security guards inside the building let the invaders in without even a reprimand. From that point on, we did not have an all-seeing eye to explore who did what to whom, but the "iconic clues" such as the broken glass, and the wall-climbers outside, looked "scripted" right away.

Undoubtedly there's a way for our ultra-modern law enforcement to determine what happened. Surely both the DoJ and the courts can help us, and indeed could have got stuck into the "voter fraud" issue before the January 6. And surely we don't have to put up with the censoring or platforming by social media of government officials. Puh-leeze.

Again, I want to say that I am not being partisan here, nor do I represent anyone but my dear old self. I am dyed-in-the-wool American and I know for sure that we have good laws that can be applied to egregious power grabs. Instead, we see law-work being done in a wrong-headed (and sometimes puerile) way.

At this point, it is known that many of the people who entered the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021 have been arrested. But did the DoJ then use the opportunity to get to the bottom of it? Of course not. The DoJ is extremely corrupt. In many cases they saw to it that people who were not guilty came off as being guilty.

How so? By an underhanded plea bargain. The DoJ put the person in jail without bail, in bad conditions, for more than six months. Then it offered a deal. "Sign here with a guilty plea and we'll let you go home with 'time served' as your punishment." Most people would sign. (I think I would sign -- who wants to sit in the Gulag indefinitely?)

Meanwhile the media shouts "So-and-So Has Pleaded Guilty of Capitol Hill Violence," causing the average reader to assume that the truth had come out.

No, It Would Not Call for Civil War

I need to make another point, and please correct me if I'm wrong. In the weeks after the Invasion, many people who considered Biden to have obtained office unlawfully were speaking of redressing it. Whether the rumor of a military takeover is true or not, I don't know, but I claim such a move would be insupportable.

Why? Because the Twelfth Amendment was available and was not invoked. I'd like to believe that the citizens of the swing states who complained, such as Michigan, would have roped their Congresspersons and senators, prior to January 6th, into rejecting the Electors' ballots if appropriate.

Granted, January 6th was a terrible day, but the tool was there for debate and no one used it. I say "The law was followed." Thus Biden became the lawful president. Congress, constitutionally, had the authority. No one else did or does.

Oops, I mean the Electors also had authority, up through the day of their December 14, 2020 meeting. They need to take their responsibility seriously. A revolution is not a dinner party, as someone once said, and an Electoral College meeting is not a coffee klatch.

The courts, too, had authority to render a judgment, upon request by states. Texas filed for help before January 6th and its case was joined by many states. The US Supreme Court has a method in place for taking cases on an emergency basis.

Personally, I think SCOTUS was wrong to refuse Texas's plea -- as the people needed to SEE AND HEAR something lawful being done, to calm their fears of a coup, or of civil war, or of American society unraveling. (You may recall that SCOTUS did intervene in the 2000 election in Gore v Bush, in a shockingly partisan way.)

It was also possible, and still is, for any offending party to be prosecuted for harming the November 3, 2020 election. "From the dog catcher all the way down to president," government officials are indictable for crime.

That said, it is also possible for Congress to impeach a president or vice-president, or any federal judge including SCOTUS judges. You may think judges are immune -- yes, they're immune from lawsuits for rulings they issue, but they sure as hell ain't immune if they commit crime.

Note: If Congress finds that a member of either of its chamber did not obtain his/her seat by proper means, it can, by majority vote, refuse to accept him/her. Per Article I, section 5 "Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns, and Qualifications of its own Members...." (Also, "with Concurrence of two-thirds [they can] expel a Member.")

Bottom line as to redressing any wrongs of the 2020 election: It's too late to undo the win by Biden. Still, for posterity's sake, the particulars should be smoked out. I just googled for that subject matter, only to be told that the Associated Press has done the investigation! Fathom it -- the MSM is our go-to authority. Fathom it.

Mr Garland, Please Stop Evading the Question

What a pleasure it was to see the US Attorney General, Merrick Garland, getting grilled in Congress recently. Rep Greg Steube of Florida held up a photo of left-wingers storming a federal building, over "woke" issues, and asked Garland to compare it to similar photo of January 6th. Garland said he did not know of the later incident.

Steube said "It blows my mind that you don't know." Anyway, the audience got the message -- the DoJ is acting on Party lines or ideological lines, besmirching the parchment as usual. You can watch it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOrwI84ZpYo

For the record: Mary Maxwell was a candidate for the Republican nomination in the 2020 presidential primary in New Hampshire.