Will be a v ugly week, but impt to remember, short of the House flipping red by Friday, there's no remaining power mechanism in the U.S. capable of preventing Biden taking the presidency on Jan 20.

Everything else is just show. A shitshow, to be sure, but a show nonetheless.

Let's walk through the various shitshows that might happen, to various levels of insanity, and why they all still end up with Biden as POTUS on Jan 20.

First it's now certain you'll get objections at the EC with senators + reps. But it needs a majority in both H & S to sustain the objection, and the House is blue, so no dice.

Can they fillibuster the EC to force it to never decide? No, but for complicated reasons.

ECA gives a max two hours of debate per objection, and that caps out at 5 days (ugh).

A suitably devious R senator might go for broke and try to use a Senate rule to bypass that cap, passed by majority vote in the Senate, with the sole purpose of filibustering the EC itself. Which won't happen, and isn't close.

But it did? Guess what, Biden is *still* president.

So here's the problem. Most (but admittedly not all) of the R reps & sens are signing up for this charade *because they know it will fail*. Their calculus is this gives them a media / primary advantage for doing it, but can safely discount the logical conclusion of their argument

That works for them because there's basically no personal cost to doing it. And in the US system as it is, not at all clear to me that externally-imposed consequences would ever be remotely on the table. Not criminal; no personal consequences; no political costs. So an easy win.

The problem is that this strategy is now the new normal. Next time the political cost of engaging in this strategy will be *far* lower.

That's fine (but obnoxious) so long as it stays in the realm of symbolic political bullshittery.

But one day it won't be. Maybe that'll be in 2025, maybe 2029, maybe later. But eventually this strategy will coincide with majorities in Congress where the strategy isn't doomed

And on that day, America will break in a way that won't resolve without extreme violence. America *will not survive* the direct blow of a democratic election for the highest office being explicitly overruled by the other party.