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Kristi Noem vows to send ‘hundreds’ more agents to Minneapolis as protests erupt across US
(www.theguardian.com)
It's all about escalation and blame between now and November. It's going to get wild.
He can't afford to have a Midterm election. If the Dems get the House Majority, they control investigative committees with subpoena and arrest powers, and none of the MAGAs want that.
It's shaping up to be a traditional Midterm shellacking, probably even a bloodbath, which happens occasionally (like 2010). It's impossible to rig over 400 Congressional districts, so they had to game the system through gerrymandering, and that backfired when the courts didn't really back them, while California managed to legally re-gerrymander their state.
Because of resignations, deaths, and illnesses, MAGA only has a one or two vote lead, and a record number of MAGA reps have already decided to retire, and there will probably be more. If a couple more decide to leave immediately, the House could flip to the Democrats without a vote. Surely MAGA leadership is begging and promising these outgoing MAGA reps anything they want as long as they ride out the bullshit until November.
So now their best strategy looks like suspending the election, which has never happened in the history of America, not even during the Civil War. So they will amp up the action, timing it to really explode somewhere around October, when he can impose Martial Law, and suspend elections close enough to Election Day that the courts couldn't really respond properly.
And what if he does suspend the election? What if Blue states decide to defy him hold their elections anyway? Some Red states may even balk at having their election authority taken away, and hold elections anyway. What if that bloodbath happens anyway, and a whole new crop of Freshmen Democratic congressmen show up to take over as the new House Majority? It's not just a matter of Mike Johnson swearing them in, he will have to step down, with Trump claiming that the election is illegitimate, and demanding he stay in office.
We hear the term "Constitutional Crisis" so much that it has become empty rhetoric, but this would be a true, authentic Constitutional Crisis.
If Dems are smart, they'll whisper to a few of these outgoing MAGA reps, and see what it would take to get them to resign early, and flip the House without the election. Then Trump will have to have an election, in the hopes that MAGA can get the House back, but it will probably only deepen the Democratic majority.
That's what MAGA would do, and probably successfully, too, but Dems are too polite, and won't play Hard Ball, even with American Democracy on the line.