T. Belman. Dershowitz must have said these things before Giuliani and Powell announced on the weekend that they had the requisite evidence and intend to switch all battleground states.
BY November 15, 2020
Legal counsel for President Donald Trump, Alan Dershowitz speaks during impeachment proceedings against U.S. President Donald Trump in the Senate at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 27, 2020. (Senate Television via Getty Images)
Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz predicted that President Donald Trump will attempt to settle the election in a way not seen since the 19th century.
In an interview with Newsmax, the longtime legal expert said Trump no longer is attempting to reach 270 Electoral College votes but will instead focus on denying Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s chances of getting 270 votes.
“Let’s look at the big picture: The big picture now has shifted,” Dershowitz told the website. “I do not believe that President Trump is now trying to get to 270 electoral votes. I think he thinks that’s out of the question.”
Trump hasn’t signaled in public about his chances of securing 270 votes due to several legal challenges.
“What he’s trying to do is to deny Joe Biden 270 votes, by challenging in Pennsylvania, Georgia, in Nevada, in Michigan, in Arizona,” Dershowitz said, adding that not allowing Biden to reach 270 out of 538 votes would eventually force House state delegations to vote, where Republicans have an advantage over Democrats. Currently, the GOP has a 26-23-1 state delegation majority in the House of Representatives.
“If he can keep the Biden count below 270, then the matter goes to the House of Representatives, where, of course, there is a Republican majority among the delegations of states, and you vote by state if it goes to the House,” Dershowitz said. “He’s trying to follow the playbook of three elections of the 19th century.”
Dershowitz noted that a number of things would have to align perfectly for Trump to win under that circumstance.
“You need a perfect storm for it to work,” he said. “You need to get enough states, enough state attorneys general, or state departments, or whoever, secretaries of state or governors that are Republican that legitimately refuse to certify the results because they’re under challenge on the day the Electoral College meets by statute.”
“If on that day, Biden doesn’t have 270 votes—you don’t get to vote two or three times on that; as far as the Constitution’s concerned, it’s one vote—and if the one vote doesn’t give the leading candidate 270 electoral votes, then automatically it goes to the House of Representatives, where a whole new process takes over, and a process that clearly favors President Trump,” added the former law professor.
Trump’s campaign or legal team hasn’t publicly stated whether that strategy is in play. Currently, his lawyers have a number of lawsuits filed in several battleground states, including at least one that is slated to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Dershowitz served on Trump’s legal team during the Senate impeachment trial earlier this year.
Other Interpretations
According to a Reuters article on Nov. 4, “Normally, governors certify the [election] results in their respective states and share the information with Congress.”
However, it noted, “some academics have outlined a scenario in which the governor and the legislature in a closely contested state submit two different election results. Battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina all have Democratic governors and Republican-controlled legislatures.”
“It is unclear in this scenario whether Congress should accept the governor’s electoral slate or not count the state’s electoral votes at all,” Reuters said, citing experts.
It further cited the 1876 disputed election, in which three states appointed “dueling electors” that triggered Congress to pass the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which means that “each chamber of Congress would separately decide which slate of ‘dueling electors’ to accept.”
Republicans are in control of the Senate, and Democrats are in control of the House.
“If the two chambers disagree, it’s not entirely clear what would happen,” the article says, citing experts.
In regard to some of these Electoral College laws and scenarios, “it is fair to say that none of these laws has been stress-tested before,” Benjamin Ginsberg, a lawyer who represented the Bush campaign in 2000, told the news agency.
A contingent election could also be in play, where neither candidate reaches 270 votes. The Reuters article echoed Dershowitz in saying that it means that the 50 House delegations—of which the GOP has a majority—would vote on the president, while the vice president would be chosen by the GOP-controlled Senate.
Jan. 20 is when the term of a current president ends. If the dispute isn’t ended by then, according to law, the House speaker is named president for the interim.
Edgar G. Said:
Thank.
@ Michael S:
Yup.
@ Reader:
aaaargh, ya got me. I’m melting.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
It’s not “Reader” who said that, I quoted Deborah Lipstadt who knows more about this part of history than all of us put together.
I am not reading any of your responses under his article anymore and I am not going to respond to them – it is completely useless.
Now I understand why you adore your cult leader – both you and he use the same tactics to win an argument: drown the opponent in misstatements of his arguments, in spurious, irrelevant, and untrue accusations to draw out the proceedings and just wear the opponent down.
You also appear to have the same limited intellectual capacity as your glorious leader, and I have other things to do than to try to patiently and repeatedly (and futilely) reason with you.
Most children reach the stage of abstract reasoning by the age of 11 but some, apparently, get stuck with literal reasoning forever.
So, consider that you’ve won the argument, stick a few colored feathers in your hair and do a victory dance around your living room with you favorite music blaring while screaming “Long live Trump!!!”.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
“Is Trump or anyone else in the Republican party talking about retaliation against opponents after he wins the way AOC and other Democrats are?”
If they focus on this, they’re wasting their time. I think there are only two things everyone needs to concentrate on:
1. Get Donald Trump sworn in on 20 Jan., and
2. Do whatever he can to drain or cripple the Swamp before then.
Anything beyond that is a luxury.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
Is Trump or anyone else in the Republican party talking about retaliation against opponents after he wins the way AOC and other Democrats are? For example:
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/aoc-activists-hint-blacklisting-trump-supporters-after-election
She’s probably too uneducated to know that she just quoted one of the most famous satirical songs from Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado,”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=RDT83W3rgQuXQ&v=1NLV24qTnlg
Reader Said:
Hitler became dictator through two pieces of legislation: The Reichstag Fire Decree and The Enabling Act of 1933. Under the Reichstag Fire Decree, which he persuaded President Von Hindenburg to issue, the day after Hitler took office, he had his political opponents, particularly the Communists, on whom he blamed the fire, rounded up and put in concentration camps.
He then reconvened the reichstag in another location and pressured, threatened and bribed the remaining legislators to enact legislation making him temporary dictator for a defined and renewable period of national emergency. The Nazi parliament did go through the motions of renewing it periodically until 1945.
Where are the concentration camps? Has Trump rounded up his political opponents? Hitler had his own paramilitary organizations to do this, a ready-made alternate government and repressive apparatus ready to step into place. Where are Trump’s? Trump hasn’t even weaponized the IRS, FBI, and CIA against his political opponents as Obama did, and even Bill Clinton to some extent.
@ Reader:
I drew attention to Hitler having annexed another country only two years after taking power in contrast to Trump having started no new wars at the same point in his term (and, since then, I might add, Trump has been winding up old ones), because you said,
Reader Said:
Then why do you bring Hitler into every conversation about Trump?
@ Sebastien Zorn:
You cannot compare people and events which stand almost 100 years apart line-by-line.
As Mark Twain so aptly said:
“The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”
These days the long ago Weimar Republic seems to rhyme with the United States.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
I am NOT comparing Trump to Hitler.
I thought you wanted to find out what Hitler and the Nazis did that was so objectionable other than enabling and perpetrating the Holocaust of the Europe’s Jews.
I think we are siding toward an authoritarian rule, and I am not the only one.
I listed a few features of Nazism that you may find present in the current situation.
Trump may turn out to be a Hitler-like ruler or he may not.
It could be someone other than Trump or we will get lucky this time and the United States will continue on its course and we will merit to keep the republic.
However, a lot of people were upset and frightened when President Trump refused to condemn a group which was described to him as white supremacist and, instead, told them to “Stand back and stand by”.
Let’s take them one at a time. Has Trump started any wars? Recall that by this time in his tenure, Hitler had already annexed Austris.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
Well, for one, starting a world war which killed 60 (or 54 million, assuming the pretend situation in which the 6 million Jews remained alive) people and maimed and wounded tens of millions more because Germany deserved to extend her Lebensraum by taking it away from the racially inferior non-Aryans, seems kind of objectionable, doesn’t it?
Dividing the world into Aryans and Untermenschen whom the Aryans can do with as they please doesn’t seem to be very nice either.
Encouraging street violence by their supporters to intimidate the population.
Taking power through non-parliamentary means after failing to gain more than 1/3 or so of the popular vote in repeated elections.
Burning the Reichstag and using the event to create a one-party/one leader dictatorship, destroy the opposition, and assume total control over the population.
The use of the concentration camps based in Germany to suppress dissent.
Etc., etc. There are zillions of books on the topic, about what was actually going on, as opposed to how “Hitler raised the German economy in 3 years with his charisma”.
Here is my reply to you written in May of this year:
May 5, 2020 at 12:45 am
@ Sebastien Zorn:
The word Nazi means National-Socialist (Deutschland, Deutschland ueber alles!, etc.).
Wanting to murder all the Jews wasn’t (and isn’t) unique to them. They have many other characteristics, such as:
– demagoguery
– shrewdly manipulating the populace through the use of lies, censorship, populist propaganda, and setting up false flag operations and psyops to scare everyone into obeying them
– being sponsored and funded by the wealthy industrialists (in spite of the “socialist” nick) while presenting themselves as a grass-roots movement
– severe suppression of any dissent or opposition to the point where all the decisions are made by the Fuerer and his clique making the parliament useless and unnecessary
– the cult of the Fuerer (made more attractive by the previous traumatic shattering of the economy)
– the use of brute force or a threat of brute force against the population, and buying off the ones that go along
– claiming all of the above is done to save the country and the people from vicious enemies who lie perpetually in wait seeking to destroy the people and the country and their way of life
@ Reader:
OK. I’ll play. Taking their genocidal antisemitism out of it. Taking Jews out of it. What are the characteristics of Hitler and the Nazis that you would argue defines them as a phenomenon. What do you find objectionable? And how do you see those characteristics in America in Trump and Trump supporters.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
Don’t presume (or, rather, ASS U ME – you know what that stands for, don’t you?).
I am Jewish, and I was being sarcastic, although you have to ask yourself what is it that causes the Jews to contribute so disproportionately to human civilization – not their brains, of course, God forbid.
We all know a few Jewish fools, don’t we?
@ Sebastien Zorn:
They were more representative than necessary.
They also had families who, I assume, often agreed with them, and there were those who wouldn’t go as far as to join Naumann’s organization.
It’s funny that you compare them to the anti-Trumpers – was there a Trump then who they were against?
@ Sebastien Zorn:
Your post shows again that for a lot of people (especially Americans) Hitler and the Nazis would be OK if not for their unfortunate (and quite deadly) Jew-obsession.
It is wrong and dangerous to limit the crimes of Hitler and the Nazis to the Holocaust.
BTW, the US does not need an antisemitic government, there is plenty that can be done at the grass-roots level against the Jews (who are in denial, as usual) by those who are sure they know “whose fault everything really is”.
Reader Said:
Did you believe that we were? This sounds like an antisemitic crack. I’m presuming you’re not, yourself, Jewish, right? While it is true that in the aggregate, Jews have disproportionately contributed to world culture in many areas, 20 percent of all Nobel Prize winners have been Jewish, while constituting 0.2 percent of the world’s population, as individuals, only a racist would say that we, or anybody else, is intrinsically more or less intelligent than anybody else.
@ Reader:
Unlike the anti-Trumpers among us, they were hardly representative.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/germany-jewish-population-in-1933
@ Michael S:
I didn’t know insults were “intellectual” property.
I absolutely don’t recall you calling anyone a “vile snake”.
Must’ve missed some of your posts.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
Well, while what you heard in that restaurant was certainly a canard, the one about “Jews for Hitler’ turned out not to be, to my surprise and disappointment.
Apparently, Jews are not really smarter than anybody else.
I am starting to think that irrational belief in an all-powerful Human Savior is a built-in human trait which intensifies periodically leading large masses of humans into even MORE trouble than they had when they turned off their brains and turned on their herd atavism to attach themselves to their current Glorious Leader and Savior.
@ Michael S:
Well…it shows he can read….even if he can’t extract glaringly obvious REAL information from the Guardian and the other tabloids-not forgetting the bootleg maniacal-conspiracy video outlets that he frequents.
Maybe you should sue him for plagiarism. I’d sue him myself, but the 4 lawyers I consulted each broke down in helpless laughter at the nonsense he was pouring out, and couldn’t catch enough breath to deal with it.
So it’ll have to wait…
Michael S Said:
That’s what happened when enough people starting trivializing terms like, “Nazi,” and “Hitler,” and redefining words like, “antisemitism,” as the “civilization jihadists” and their left-wing cheerleaders among us have been advocating for a much longer time. These emotion-laden words that conjured images of the newsreels of liberated death camps, devoid of substance, were effectively taken out of the language for many people. And, into the vacuum, or out of it, stepped the real “neo”- nazis, like Dieudonne in France and then many others. And then the killers. Words Matter.
@ Reader:
“you are such a vile snake.”
Reader, I think you co-opted one of my insults. If this keeps up, a fine old insult will begin to lose its venom!
Godspeed Donald John Trump.
@ Reader:
Reader Said:
If that’s your intention, then, in the future, you might consider comparing him instead to Louis Napoleon or Julius Caesar who got themselves elected emperor. You have many choices. among many other democratically elected heads of state who made themselves emperors history is littered with them; it’s why the Founding Fathers gave us so many checks and balances, including the electoral college, and, deliberately, made radical structural change for arguably good causes so difficult. I could then freely argue with that contention, which is actually what the Democrats are doing for Biden while projecting their actions on to Trump, as they have been doing for 4 years. And, I’d like to have that debate.
Reader Said:
Funny, you should say that because I was reminded of that canard by what you had written earlier. I was specifically reminded of the time that the time, some years ago, when I was sitting at an Arab felafel place called, “Jerusalem Felafel,” with a big framed photo of the Al Aqsa Mosque on the wall – only place that made decent felafel on the upper west side – at the counter – it was tiny, just room for a counter and two tiny tables, outside – – haven’t looked to see if it’s still there – and the young Arab counter said to me with a knowing leer, I suppose assuming I was Jewish, I didn’t know him at all, “Hitler was Jewish, wasn’t he?” When I said, no, he just kept repeating that as if to say, ” Just between, you and me, right?” Wink, wink, nod, nod, know what I mean, know what I mean.”
@ Edgar G.:
I am really getting sick of your sh*t.
No one is asking you to read or like what I write.
I don’t know how you relatives can stand you, you are such a vile snake.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
A complete, step by step dissection and laying out in a glass tray of formaldehyde.
Does ever one like banging his head against a wooden “wall”, which suddenly shift’s it’s strongly stated position to a “hypothetical”, that itself a conglomeration of “possible” maybe”, “what if’s” “n my opinion”..etc. Then, ,attacks the “opponent” with “you don’t understand me” and the like. Forgive the very mixed metaphors.
Zigzagging whilst backtracking, requires a certain skill, but a smooth one, not a blundering error-laden one.
Your research certainly turned up something. I had vaguely heard of .Max Naumann and his Union, at home when a kid,. I know my dear parents and their friends cursed him as a traitor and Ant-Semite. But I didn’t then know what it was all about. My dear Father, who had traded considerably with German companies, cut off all contact with Germany in 1933. I read about Naumann years later.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
I wasn’t comparing Trump to Hitler.
I merely said that, in my opinion, Trump has been planning this election fight all along and it was reported that he stated that he was going to rule for 16 years.
I do think that a Great Authoritarian Power Reset is possible, and I am not the only one.
I DIDN’T KNOW about Naumann and his organization (the Jew that I mentioned wasn’t Naumann and he didn’t have an organization, and, as I remember vaguely, he was assassinated by the Nazis).
I mentioned him not because my description “dwindled” to one Jew but because it was the only one I knew as a fact.
I used to assume that the idea that the German Jews voted for Hitler or supported him came from the same source as the idea that Hitler had a Jewish father or was Jewish himself (which is BS).
The recent events made a significant dent in my assumptions because of Trump idolatry among many conservative, patriotic Jews (I am not saying he is Hitler but he is not your typical Western parliamentarian either, to put it mildly).
These events made me think about a non-antisemitic version of Hitler who the German Jews could have indeed voted for.
This is not because I equate Trump with Hitler but because their demagoguery, populism, authoritarianism, etc. are similar.
Thank you for the info about Naumann, it proves that my previous assumptions that the German Jews could not have supported Hitler were wrong.
It also proves again that Jews in general are not immune to the propaganda that resonates with their feelings of patriotism, etc.
@ Reader:
The truly odd thing here, is that you write as if you believe American Jews voted for Trump “in droves.” Israeli Jews support Trump in the same numbers but they don’t vote in American elections except for a handful with dual citizenship. Do you just read Israpundit and think that this site represents the views of droves of us in both countries? Or, are you just hopelessly confused?
@ Reader:
On the other hand, since 70 percent of American Jews voted for Biden, many, if not most of them saying that solidarity with Israeli Jews is not the top issue for them, and since Biden’s stated intention is to re-enter Obama’s Iran deal, which paves a legal path to the bomb within 10 years for Iran, to oppose Jewish settlement and sovereignty over Yesha and, presumably the Golan Heights, as well, and to resume aid to the PA in violation of the Taylor Force Act and UNRWA, you may not have been far off, but not in the way you intended.
@ Reader: First, you insinuated:
Then you backtracked to
The Nazis did have a Jewish supporter who, I believe, they killed after they came to power.
Yes, I read what you wrote. You compared Trump to Hitler and Jews who support Trump to Jews who supported HItler. Here it is: @ Reader:Reader Said:
@ Reader:
You don’t appear to know. Either that, or you are being intellectually dishonest and disingenuously engaging in hyperbolic rhetoric. I was giving you the benefit of the doubt. Should I not?
@ Reader:
There was such a group, and they, too, thought the crocodile would eat them last, like liberal American Jews, then and now. It had worked with previous antisemitic regimes after the initial bloodbath accompanying the tyrant’s rise to power but Hitler and the Nazis really meant it. So does Iran.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
Why don’t you read what I wrote and try to understand it instead of lecturing me on the subjects I already know.
I said nothing about Trump or his father.
You either can’t understand what I wrote or you are pretending not to.
You ended up proving my point – that for many people, including a few Jews, there is nothing wrong with Hitler EXCEPT for his overriding antisemitism.
That’s why anything I write on the topic bounces off your brain without getting registered.
@ Reader:
One hundred years later, almost to the day, the man you are comparing to Adolf Hitler, quoted above, issued the following executive order:
@ Reader:
“Hitler’s first antisemitic writing. September 16, 1919” – Jewish Virtual Library .
@ Reader:
@ Reader:
He was an eliminationist antisemite from the beginning. In fact, his father had been an Austrian activist in the Pan-German student movement which was the parent movement of National Socialism (Nazism) so he was brought up that way. By contrast, Trump is the philosemitic son of a philosemitic father, Fred Trump. Both of them did a lot for Jewish causes, including civil rights for Jews, both American and Israeli, long before Donald ran for President.
A clarification:
I was also talking about the real Hitler early on in his career before he showed his fangs.
The Nazis did have a Jewish supporter who, I believe, they killed after they came to power.
Like I said, based on my current observations, some German Jewish support for early Hitler (or the hypothetical non-antisemitic Hitler) was possible.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
“Hitler” is “an emotion-laden buzzword” in RETROSPECT (when we know what really happened in the past).
I was talking about a HYPOTHETICAL situation (a WHAT-IF) BEFORE Hitler/Schicklgruber/whoever came to power in Germany where (hypothetically) he would act the same way the real Hitler did except without the real Hitler’s pathological Jew-hatred and his plans and policies motivated by this Jew-hatred.
It wouldn’t be surprising if (at least some) German Jews threw their support behind someone who is a great German patriot, puts Germany first and “ueber alles”, insists on law and order, promises to make Germany great again while it is in the throws of the Great Depression, hates the enemies of Germany which is “the most civilized nation in the world” (this is from one of the speeches by the real Hitler) and vows to teach them a lesson, insists that Germany is a nation with a mission, that it must rule the world and be economically self-sufficient, with implicit understanding that the rest of the world consists of underdeveloped peoples, and it is a God-given task of Germany to civilize them, etc., etc.
Oh, I almost forgot, and that the most evil and uncivilized nation in the world is “Communist Russia” whose evil ideology has to be extirpated to save Germany and the world.
@ Reader:
What a concoction of confused thoughts.
@ Reader:
No, it isn’t. It’s an emotion-laden buzzword that connotes eliminationist antisemitism and the Shoah. Iran and the Fakestinians merit that appellation and Biden will remove sanctions on the one and resume aid to the other, while pressuring and threatening Israel to make Yesha fully judenrein as the fakestinian-controlled areas already, bloodily, are.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
No, of course not. He would have been Shicklgruber.
Where has MY comment gone…????
I’ll repeat it for Sebastien’s assertion….No, of course; he wouldn’t . .He’d have been Schiklgruber………I see Dumbo is there like a shot.. laboriously” “explaining’ the glaringly obvious ….as always.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
Sure, he would still be Hitler.
“Hitler” is a last name – not an occupation or a description of anyone’s personality or attitudes.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
Good point, Sebastien 🙂
Reader Said:
But, he wouldn’t have been Hitler, then, would he?
I am reposting my comment from a couple of days ago here (why would anybody want someone like Trump – who is, obviously, capable of anything, no matter how evil – for President, I will never know):
This could be interesting.