by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I don’t really know enough to give you any sort of realistic, detailed counterfactual on what might have happend had Vice President Mike Pence gone along with Trump’s January 6th coup attempt, but let’s do some thinking about it.
The key thing we have to contemplate is how close we came to a civil war on January 6th, 2021. Given what we know of what the coup plotters wanted to do once they got Pence to punt on the certification of Electoral votes….oh boy. It seems as though they believed they wanted to use the extra time to get state Republicans to approve rival Electors that they could use the muddy the waters.
And, remember, there would have been a ticking clock to all of this — January 20th would be just days away. And the moment January 20th rolled around and we STILL didn’t know who POTUS is — especially in the context of the Insurrection Act having been invoked — then, well, it seems clear the country probably would have devolved into chaos.
At this point, it’s possible that the U.S. Military might have stepped in to sort things out. But the point is — Pence bought us all time by destroying his political career and we’ve squandered it.
Now, we’re careening towards a disaster just as big, if not bigger.
