The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
I live in a country where one of the two major political parties is running a rapist for the presidency and basically held a white supremacist rally last night, and where one of the major newspapers has decided to make it its mission to cause the candidate for the other party to drop out, all else be damned.
I fucking hate it here. I hate it here.
Okay. So you’ve noticed the shitgibbon’s long and abiding relationship with professional wrestling, and you know that wrestlers cut themselves on purpose all the time, and you don’t believe that a bullet fired from an AR-15 can graze someone for some reason,(*) and you think the assassination attempt was faked.
Okay. Fine. You go ahead and do that. Think whatever you like.
But before you spout that shit where I can see it, I’m going to insist that you explain the two dead people and the two injured people. And you’re going to have to do so in such a way that it makes more sense than that a nut job got ahold of a gun, took a shot at someone, barely missed, and the Secret Service, around someone whose single greatest skill as a human being might be his ability to surround himself at all times with utterly fucking incompetent people, fucked up.
Because I’m entirely willing to believe in a world where someone missed a shot and cops fucked up. That sounds just like America to me.
I have nothing else to say about this, other than the paragraph to follow, which is more about math than it is about politics.
(*) If it is possible for an AR-15 bullet to hit someone and blow their head off, and if it is possible for an AR-15 bullet to miss someone, than somewhere in between those two places there literally must be some distance where the bullet does damage– and an ear wound is going to bleed like a bitch even if it’s a small cut– that is not fatal. This isn’t even the first president who didn’t get killed due to amazing fucking luck. Teddy Roosevelt had a bullet basically bounce off a speech in his pocket. Andrew Jackson had someone come after him with two pistols and they both misfired, leading to Jackson beating the hell out of his assailant with his cane. The idea that it is impossible for a bullet to barely miss may be the dumbest conspiracy theory in a wild thicket of dumb conspiracy theories.
I don’t have a ton I want to talk about tonight, but I did discover a piece of information earlier today that’s relevant to yesterday’s post and the Biden conversation in general. It occurred to me that we haven’t heard any talk about superdelegates during this primary. Now, on one hand, I wouldn’t expect to hear much about them, on account of there’s only one credible candidate and he’s the incumbent. But the fact that I hadn’t heard anything was interesting.
Well, it turns out the rules changed in 2020, mostly, I assume, because of the vast amount of bitching from Certain Parties in the last several elections about the superdelegates. So here’s how this works: I was correct about the pledged delegates. There’s just under 4,000 of them total and Biden needs a majority of them (which he already has) to be nominated for the Presidency on the first ballot.
On the first ballot.
This is the bit I didn’t know: there are superdelegates this year– 739 of them, to be exact, and technically they’re called “automatic delegates” now, but everyone knows they’re superdelegates– mostly, if you don’t know, elected Democratic officials and Party People. The automatic delegates do not get to vote on the first ballot. But if there isn’t a nominee after the first ballot? They can, which means the total number of delegates increases, which means the number of delegates needed for the nomination also increases.
I pointed out yesterday that even if an unwilling-to-leave Biden didn’t win on the first ballot, the pressure campaign on anyone who voted against him to change their vote in Round 2 would be extreme, particularly if he only missed the majority by a few votes. And to be honest, I feel like the sudden injection of hundreds of superdelegates probably works in the sitting president’s favor, meaning if he didn’t win on the first ballot, he’d likely win on the second. This is a big fucking question mark, though, especially for any scenario where Biden does decide to drop out and not immediately anoint a successor.
I promise, unless something staggeringly interesting happens tonight (Jesus please no) I’ll talk about video games or books or something tomorrow.
I encountered this earlier today on Bluesky and addressed #1 a little bit and now I kind of want to go through the whole thing. Let’s take the idea of Biden dropping out seriously. Why not. Believe it or not, I’m pretty confident about my answers to all of this; that said, feel free to take with salt if you so desire.
I am going to attempt to address each of these questions as neutrally as I can, by the way.
Can Biden be replaced against his will?
Absolutely the fuck not, and I mean that in the strongest terms imaginable. Right now Joe Biden has 3,904 pledged delegates. Everyone else, including “undetermined,” has … 45. He needs a majority. You do the math. While “faithless electors” technically are a thing, most of these folks were picked because they are loyal, and a substantial number of them are legally bound to vote for Biden on at least the first ballot. The idea that nearly two thousand of them would vote for other people on the first ballot is beyond fantasy. It will never, ever happen. And even if this literally impossible thing were to happen, unless those nearly 2000 people chose the same person, Biden would still have a huge plurality. He would absolutely be going back after each and every delegate who had voted against him for the second ballot, and again– he just needs a majority. This just isn’t going to be a thing under any circumstances.
Can Biden drop out?
Yep. He sure can. He could also die. He can direct his delegates to vote for someone else; they don’t actually have to do what he says. He can also simply “release” them and let them vote for who they want.
What if he drops out and throws his support behind Kamala Harris?
One presumes that Harris would be nominated on the first ballot if this happened. It would not be a guarantee but I think it would be very, very likely. The process to find a vice-president would be … interesting. One thing I haven’t seen anyone talking about is Biden throwing his support behind Harris and then becoming Vice-President again. He can do that! It’s happened twice, although neither John Calhoun or George Clinton were President in between the two vice-presidencies. The Constitution only specifies that the VP has to be eligible to become President; Biden has another term of eligibility. There is no legal barrier to him becoming VP again.
What if he actually resigns the Presidency?
This would be an astonishingly bad idea, as Kamala Harris assuming the Presidency would mean that we’d lose the Vice-President and thus lose our tiebreaker in the Senate. A new Vice-President would have to be approved by both the Senate and the House. The House is controlled by the Republicans. They could barely pick a Speaker. We would almost certainly go to January 20 without a Vice-President. You know what else the Vice-President is responsible for doing? Certifying the electoral votes. Regardless of who wins, I cannot even imagine the level of fuckery that could ensue in a situation where the election is close and we don’t have anyone in the position that is supposed to certify that the votes are counted correctly. It would make January 6, 2021 look like a fun day at the beach. I don’t even want to think of it.
Biden absolutely cannot be allowed to resign the Presidency. The good news is I think he’d rather die than quit at this point.
What if he drops out and doesn’t endorse, or endorses someone other than Harris?
There has not been a contested convention for either political party during my lifetime. I believe the last contested Democratic convention was in 1968, coincidentally the year LBJ decided to not sit for another term and then Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. It … didn’t go well. I think it’s still entirely possible Harris wins on the first ballot even without an explicit endorsement. If she doesn’t, who the fuck knows what happens next.
It is probably worth pointing out that if any of the people currently getting tossed about as magical saviors replacement candidates were actually interested in the role, we’d be hearing about them trying to consolidate support behind the scenes. We haven’t, because no one is doing that.
What about a mini-primary?
That’s basically just a contested convention. As I said, one hasn’t happened in a while, but they’re hardly historically unprecedented. Nonetheless, it would be, charitably, a huge fucking mess. I’ve promised to try to be neutral so I won’t go further into that.
What about getting the winner on the ballot in all 50 states?
This, at least in theory, actually isn’t a problem. The Democrats and Republicans both have a ballot line in every state and the various territories that is currently sitting there empty waiting for an official nominee. Whoever the nominee is will be on the ballot. (*)
(*) In a normal year. I can very easily imagine legal fuckery. It would be meritless but the Supreme Court just decided that bribing them is legal and that the President is a king. Those decisions were also meritless. “Meritless” is kinda the Supreme Court’s thing right now. Typically, though, political parties are given wide leeway in determining their own nominees, and I’m not aware (I could be wrong!) of any case of a major-party nominee being seriously challenged in court for ballot access. That says, something ends up on Matthew Kacsmaryk’s desk, who the fuck knows what happens next.
Who takes the money pot?
Hahahahahahaha lol we’re all fucked.
Okay. If Harris/Whoever is the nominee, we’re good. Kamala Harris is part of the Biden/Harris ticket. She should still have access to the funds raised for their candidacy. Note, for the record, that this is the part of this explainer that I’m least confident about, but I’m still confident enough to be writing about it. Presumably they wouldn’t lose a ton of staff over this; there would be some hiccups and some rearranging and such but I don’t foresee any substantial organizational or legal issues.
If the nominee’s name is not “Kamala Harris,” though, we run into some serious shit. The Biden/Harris campaign cannot simply sign those millions and millions of dollars over to some other candidate. They can, after settling the campaign’s debts and dealing with the no doubt huge number of people who want their money back, donate the rest of it to a PAC, or an organization like the DNC, who may spend it as they see fit.
The new candidates would have to start from scratch. They would inherit some infrastructure from Biden/Harris but … Christ. Office leases would have to be renegotiated. TV time, radio, internet and print advertising is still sold … to Biden-Harris. They’d have to staff up almost completely; at the very least everyone who worked for Biden-Harris would have to be rehired, and all of this on no money, at least at first. Website infrastructure. Immense amounts of fundraising, both small-donor and massaging big donors and bundlers, a good portion of whom will probably be pissed that their person wasn’t picked. Email lists. Voter lists. Volunteers. Bank accounts. Fucking candidate scheduling. Across the entire country. All at once.
Oh, and picking a Vice-President, which would also be necessary, and would be a fucking huge mess because that type of thing typically takes months of vetting and carefully examining closets for skeletons. This would make Sarah Palin look like …
… actually, it probably still wouldn’t be as fucked up as picking Palin.
Anyway, part of the reason why we don’t hear anything about Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer getting themselves ready to run for President after the convention is that neither of them are stupid people, and they realize that building up an organization to run for the Presidency is insanely complicated and doing it in three months from nothing is fucking impossible. Neither of them wants to be the person who took the reins from Biden/Harris and then got blown the fuck out of the water because it took a month to even get staffed up.
Most of the people who are advocating for Biden to drop out have not thought about any of this. I’m pretty sure I have a good idea why; I promised to be neutral, so I won’t talk about it. Look at yesterday’s post for an idea, if you like. This is all magical, underpants-gnome thinking of the worst kind, and I would appreciate it if people acted like they have some fucking sense. Please.
I haven’t said a word, at least in this space, about the current New York Times-driven media frenzy to get Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race. There are a couple of reasons for that; you can probably predict most of them without me saying anything.
There’s been some horseshit about Parkinson’s disease lately; there is no way that the legislation Biden signed this week about Parkinson’s disease could have resulted in Parkinson’s experts showing up at the White House, right? Nah.
Ultimately I will literally vote for Biden’s corpse, or Harris, or Bernie fucking Sanders, or a cold pile of bloody vomit in November, whatever is running against Trump. I give no fucks. President Cold Pile of Bloody Vomit will be an adequate replacement. I don’t have the mental energy to war-game this out; it’s the exact same bullshit as But Her Emails or Kerry’s Purple Hearts or Obama being from fucking Kenya. The news media has to have a big lie for every Democratic president. Ultimately, I’m gonna vote for the old guy with the stutter, even if he gets sick a couple more times between now and the election, and anyone who doesn’t want to do that can literally die in a fire for all I care, and that’s all the fuck I have to say about it.
I’m going to write a few sentences, finish my Arabic and then I think going to bed several hours early might be the move tonight. I’m not only not going to watch the debate, I want to be in a position where monitoring it online isn’t possible, so I need to either turn off every device in the house or actually be unconscious, and one of those two options requires a lot less work.
Since my last post was in the Politics category, and I put Biden in as one of the tags, a little wandering around brought me to a lot of 2020 posts. I was not, to put it mildly, especially excited to vote for Joe Biden in 2020, and in fact voted for Elizabeth Warren in the primary even though she’d dropped out by then. Biden was in the midst of sexual assault allegations that, for once, actually proved to be unfounded, and given that I wasn’t convinced by his candidacy anyway I went ahead and voted for someone I actually wanted to be President.
It occurs to me that we really haven’t heard much from Warren since 2020. Maybe I’m just listening in the wrong places.
Anyway, this is mostly an idle thought, but this is further evidence that I Know Nothing About Politics, something I’ve tried to keep in the forefront of my mind since the disaster in 2016. I couldn’t have been any more wrong about what kind of president this guy was going to be. My record of wrongness in presidential elections is pretty stunning over the last eight years, frankly.
Like I said, stray thought, but I’ve spent all day reading (James Islington’s The Will of the Many is so much better than the Licanius trilogy that it’s hard to believe the same guy wrote both) and I don’t have much of anything else to talk about, so … yeah. Grab the image and spread it around if you like; I feel like the left in general is succumbing to savior syndrome again and I’m pre-tired of the next six months.
This primary kind of snuck up on me. I will grant that my particular style of media and news consumption renders me functionally immune to political ads, but other than a handful of prominent signs for local races near work I haven’t seen a Goddamned thing out there. That said, there’s a race or two worth talking about, and a couple of candidates I’m genuinely enthused about, so here we go:
Joseph R. Biden Jr. for President. This will surprise no one, of course, and Biden is running unopposed in Indiana, so it’s not like there’s even another candidate I can vote for. That said, at least in terms of his impact directly on my personal life, Biden has been the best president of my lifetime and it’s not close. I am both happy and proud to vote for him again.
Valerie McCray for US Senate. There is actually a primary race for Senate this year; both candidates passed my initial smell test, and passed my secondary test of “do you have a website that actually contains useful information about you, and makes me feel like I want you as my Senator?”. Dr. McCray’s is here and her opponent, Marc Carmichael, has his website here. While Carmichael doesn’t seem like an unacceptable choice, my rule is that when presented with two acceptable candidates I vote against the white guy. Right now I’ll be fine voting for him if he makes it through the primary, which, given that this is Indiana, I suspect he will.
Jennifer G. McCormick for Governor. Dr. McCormick was formerly Indiana’s Secretary of Education after Glenda Ritz flamed out, and I swear to God she was a Republican when she was appointed, and I spent more time than one might expect while following her on Twitter wondering how the hell a Republican appointee was getting away with saying the very liberal Democrat-ish things she kept saying. Well, if she was a Republican then, she’s a Democrat now, and I was really happy to hear that she’d decided to run for Governor. She’s running unopposed, which also surprises me, so it’s not like I had a second choice, but I can’t imagine who in this state I might have chosen over her. Sadly, she’ll likely get smoked by whatever rape-enabling troglodyte the Republican primary shits out. But we can hope!
I voted for Lori A. Camp for my House representative; I didn’t have another choice, and I’m going to stop short of calling it an endorsement. Honestly I hadn’t heard of her before going in and the sum total of my research was to make sure that I didn’t have to do any research. I glanced at her website; it’s fine, I suppose. I still want Pat Hackett.
Tim Swager for District 10 State Senator. This is inside-baseball as hell; why am I mentioning it here? Because the incumbent, David Niezgodski, is embroiled in a sexual harassment controversy, and everything I’ve seen about it makes me feel like he’s probably a slimy piece of shit. I am, I admit, a teensy bit leery of Swager as well, who has been spending a lot of money on sending mailers so that everyone knows that Niezgodski is a staffer-harassing asshole who maybe voted against abortion access once or twice– I’m not convinced of this– but said mailers are awfully thin on why Swager himself would be a better choice. His website is also rather thin but contains no obvious red flags, so, sure, you can be State Senator over the creepy married dude who broke into his staffer’s house.
I strongly suspect I’m going to go 0/5 here, if not in the primary than in the actual election, although Niezgodski might be weaker than I think; who knows. But I don’t miss elections. So here we are.
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