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Arizona GOP responds (?) to election board’s defiance to subpoenas

The Arizona Republican Party yesterday announced that in response to the refusal by the Maricopa County election board to obey subpoenas that “the state’s GOP electors will intervene in the case.”

The reason I have put a question mark in the headline is that I really have no idea what this means, or if it is simply another example of failure theater by the Republican Party. Who are these electors? Are they the legislators? Are they the alternative slate of Trump electors chosen by legislature? What power do they have? How is this actrion going to do anything to get those subpoenas obeyed and a real audit of the election in Maricopa County accomplished?

Based on the story at the link, I have no idea, and instead have the impression that it is all for show, and will accomplish nothing. Moreover, for unelected bureaucrats to defy an order by the elected legislature is blatantly unconstitutional, and should have prompted immediate action by law enforcement to secure the audit machines, the ballots, and any evidence. None of this has happened, which suggests to me that our elected officials here in Arizona are impotent and powerless and rule only at the whim of those unelected bureaucrats.

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15 comments

  • Cotour

    All a stalling tactic to, 1. Delay any further evidence to be produced that would help support revealing the fraud leading up to Jan 6th, and 2. A stalling tactic to push everything to the Congress and Senate and hopefully past the drop dead date in an attempt to clean up the mess and ensure the Democrat candidates win.

    No one in any state legislature willingly wants any of their incompetence and possible corruption and fraud to be revealed, why would they participate here?

    They are all going to have to be dragged to it, and so be it.

  • Questioner

    Cotour:

    Here is a good statement/comment found at a youtube video (leftism equals entropy):

    Michelle Catlin: “The idea of leftism as entropy reminds me a lot of Oswald Spengler’s idea of civilizations having a predictable and limited timespan.”

  • jburn

    Steve Turley provides some interesting incites regarding the status of several states. Some embedded advertising is present in the video, afterall the guy has to pay his bills as youtube is demonetizing everything conservative.

    So now we can view it elsewhere….

    https://rumble.com/vc3r4j-breaking-huge-move-to-decertify-election-coming-out-of-georgia.html

  • jburn

    opps … insights not incites; but hopefully the information will move us to action :)

  • Robert Pratt

    The electors are the group that have standing to sue in this case; they are those chosen by the state GOP to vote for the party’s nominee for president should the state carry for Trump.

  • Gary

    In other Georgia news, polls are projecting Democrats adding two senate seats. So, the minions are moving to make sure that this is true…and why not? Anyone sitting in jail for election fraud?

  • Cotour

    I don’t know if I agree with the entropy analogy. Although it is certain that Socialism will without doubt descend into chaos.

    Capitalism and Socialism are eternally linked like ying and yang and either one applied without proper regulation (What ever that means regarding Socialism I do not know) will without doubt result in chaos, social disorder, darkness, abuse of power and an un happy citizenry.

    Capitalism applied within the proper regulating parameters of the Constitution is unbeatable. It frees the most number of people and provides for the empowerment of the individual. There is no contest between the two.

    And so Socialism because there is no objective, constraining rules of operation must cheat and buy off and defraud in order to prevail.

    And we see that plainly in this last presidential election. The Left is counting on there not being enough time for all of their fraud to be properly revealed so as to be relevant to overturning the contest. But I think they will fall short in that estimation.

    The Founders in their amazing wisdom have provided for most all eventualities, and I think we are all eventually tied to entropy in the end. But I do not think its that kind of end at this point in time.

  • Questioner

    Cotour:

    I believe the entropy analogy is very good. The physical quantity entropy is a measure of the extent to which the energy present in a system can be used. The left ideology, when it dominates the state, leads to so many internal frictional losses (= entropy production) that, over time, less and less of the actual available (human) energy production can be used. Communism / socialism dies, because all driving differences (in society) have been leveled.

    Does another positive sign surface? Do you trust Ted Cruz? Many say: No!

    “Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Texas) wrote in a letter to Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) that “I intend to object to the certification of the Electoral College vote submissions on January 6th, and I respectfully ask you to stand with me.” ”

    https://www.theepochtimes.com/more-gop-lawmakers-backing-electoral-college-challenge_3629226.html?utm_source=newsnoe&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking-2020-12-22-4

  • Milt

    Folks, please reread what Robert has written:

    “Moreover, for unelected bureaucrats to defy an order by the elected legislature is blatantly unconstitutional, and should have prompted immediate action by law enforcement to secure the audit machines, the ballots, and any evidence. None of this has happened, which suggests to me that our elected officials here in Arizona are impotent and powerless and rule only at the whim of those unelected bureaucrats.”

    What he is so succinctly describing is INSTITUTIONAL FAILURE, in which our mechanisms of governance no longer work as they were designed to, and in this case it is unelected bureaucrats or appointees who are determining important outcomes that are contrary to both the strictures of the state constitution and the will of the legislature (which is, in turn, supposed to be exercising the will of the electorate).

    The fundamental problem is that no institution is self enforcing, and every one of them depends on committed human beings to make sure that the original intent and purpose of the institutions of government are carried out. Lacking that… Well, lacking that, you have the situation in Arizona and in Georgia.

    As James Howard Kunstler likes to point out, we now live in a culture without consequences — where “anything goes and nothing matters,” as he puts it — and there are no penalties for incompetence or dereliction of duty in government as administered by far too many of today’s self styled conservatives. If officials in Arizona or in Georgia fail to carry out their legal duties, well, heck, we TRIED, but what can you do?

    The left, on the other hand, has created a whole system for enforcing compliance to its agenda, form virtue signaling to the Cancel Culture (with looting and burning as a forcible reminder that they are “serious”) as its method of getting the desired results.

    What Robert is outlining, as usual, is the systemic decline in fundamental American institutions that, sooner or later, is going to effectively kill what’s left of the American Republic. (Just as it is already killing large numbers of Americans under medically unsupported lockdowns and destroying millions of small businesses.) The tragedy is that so many “conservatives” will not even lament the loss.

    Institutions, in the end, are no better (or worse) than the human beings who implement them. We need some better human beings.

  • wayne

    Gangs of New York (2002)
    “Bill the Butcher kills Walter McGinn”
    https://youtu.be/WLKbcrC0krQ
    3:13

    “….that my friends, is the minority vote.”

  • Questioner

    Cotour:

    As an aside: the often repeated equation of entropy with order or high entropy with chaos is wrong and misleading. This video here is one of the best I could find for explaining entropy. No, entropy characterizes how the (internal) energy is distributed or concentrated in a system (number of possible micro-states and their statistical occupation), and what proportion of its internal energy can be converted, for example, into mechanical work that this system is able to do on the environment.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YM-uykVfq_E

  • Andrew M. Winter

    I’ll take a stab at this:

    I have no idea what this issue with “unelected bureaucrats” is all about. This makes no sense. But, it is irrelevant.

    This issue of election fraud and only be dealt with, Constitutionally, on a state by state basis. According to the Constitution, which is fairly clear and succinct on the matter, the appointing of electors is a matter for the State Legislatures to handle. In the case of Arizona, from what I see in that article, you have electors who were appointed to vote for Trump, contesting the release of voting machine data by election officials in Maricopa County. This is as it should be, even if it looks arcane.

    An issue undiscussed here, at least as far as I could see, is whether or not Arizona is a “Winner Take All State”. (Post Script, Maine and Nebraska are the only two states that spilt there electors).

    Some state legislatures have made it procedure that the electors will be appointed proportionally to the popular vote of that state (Maine and Neb.). Some states are even floating the idea that they will appoint electors base on the “fictional” national popular vote. I say “fictional” because there is no such thing as an “official” national popular vote. We need to understand that there are 52 individual presidential elections, one in each of the Sovereign States. There is no “national” popular vote. It does not exist. It is a Fantasy created by The News Media.

    Okay with those things in mind it is indeed up to the political apparatus of Arizona, however arcane that may appear. The outcome in Arizona will be resolved by Arizona. NO ONE else has any Constitutionaly legitimate roll in this process. PERIOD.

    This is the key to survival of The Republic. The People, who live in The Various States, are the ultimate bearers of blame if they allow election fraud in their state. If The People can’t handle that, either with the ballot box, or the bullet box, then The Republic will FALL!

    Everything about the existence of any Republic is totally and completely dependent on the “virtue”, (as in classical definition of this being the ability and willingness of citizens to fulfill their civic duty), of The Citizens in that Republic. No Virtue, No Republic.

    Get ready for it folks. Either Trump bows out, or he pushes the angst of his supporters, (me included), to the breaking point where we will either pull a trigger or close our eyes when we see someone else do it, and maybe leave them some spare ammo from time to time.

    The Republic is in danger, but the only thing that will save it is the virtue of it’s citizens. The Federal Government, It’s President,. it’s Congress, and it’s Judiciary have no say in this matter. The Constitution governs THEM not the other way around.

  • janyuary

    AM Winter: “We need to understand that there are 52 individual presidential elections, one in each of the Sovereign States. There is no “national” popular vote. It does not exist. It is a Fantasy created by The News Media.”

    That is an excellent point. Your whole post is informative, good reading. I take “popular vote” to mean the votes of all American citizens in those states tallied-up, individuals representing all 52 combined. In 2016, 54% of them voted for someone other than Trump, according to reported numbers, and 52% of them voted for someone other than Hillary. Large, clear majorities rejected both Trump and Hillary, and when we remember clearly how many voted for either of them holding their nose, hating their own candidate but hating the other worse, then we have some inkling of how deeply despised both were and still are loathed with good reason. But that’s among real folks, Americans ignored by lowest-common-denominator media and its willing, lazy consumers. If it wasn’t reported and legitimized by New York Times, etc., then it didn’t happen.

    I understand why some folks support Trump; I did enough due diligence early on to make him repulsive to me, and actually when I watched as he pursued and got the nomination, it just confirmed what I already figured … that it had gone past the ballot box a couple of election cycles ago, these are just the last days of rule by law as opposed to rule by edict of government force. I think Trump, Biden, Romney, Obama, Hillary, and the purple goulash that conservative Republicans now peddle, are symptoms.

    Priority must be: Limiting the force of government and removing it from the hands of science (trendy environmentalism) and medicine (nationalized health care and today’s C19 homicide by hysteria), just as we remove it from the hands of any church (imagine if Islamic or Catholic scholars and experts were allowed to wield the force of government in the name of their beliefs, the way doctors and scientists are allowed to do today, and yes either they are beliefs or else doctors and scientists have changed their “facts” about what’s true and what’s false quite a lot over the centuries).

    We’re in some pickle.

  • Edward

    Andrew M. Winter,
    You wrote: “Some states are even floating the idea that they will appoint electors base on the “fictional” national popular vote. I say “fictional” because there is no such thing as an “official” national popular vote.

    What a good way to disenfranchise one’s own citizens.

    This is the key to survival of The Republic.

    I think you meant the survival of the federal system. It is federalism that the states are sovereign. A republic does not necessarily require a vote of those represented.

    The more powerful our central government becomes, the less it is like a federal government and the more it is like a national government.

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