In which I explain (more Biden questions)

On July 10, 2024July 12, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics5 Comments

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.

A couple of things that seem related but probably aren’t

On March 6, 2020March 9, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing2 Comments

I’ve been sick all week. I spent one damn day at C2E2 and I’ve had a sore throat for a week as a result; I stayed home from work yesterday (and did not get paid for it, as I’m out of sick days) because when I woke up I found myself completely unable to talk. My voice is still not remotely normal today, and I lost it a couple of times at work today, but not quite as bad as yesterday morning. I did not factor being out a day’s pay into the cost of C2E2, and that loss combined with not being able to swallow for a week has pushed the trip well into “not worth it” territory.

As of this afternoon, I have cancelled my one existing convention commitment for the rest of the year; I was going to go to IndyPopCon in July and have reconsidered those plans. I’ve been doing Kokomo-Con every year for three or four years now; I’m not signed up this year and I think I’m going to skip that as well. While I could probably mumble a bit about coronavirus or something like that and, Jesus, I’m absolutely certain I’ll have that the second it hits Indiana, the simple fact is that these cons have gotten very samey over the last few years and, unfortunately, I’ve started to lose interest in pushing books to strangers. I’m not really working on anything at the moment, I haven’t been in a while, and while that will probably change eventually it’s not gonna change soon. I need to hit reset on a lot of things, and stepping away from cons for at least the rest of 2020 seems like a good idea even without a global pandemic fucking things up during an election year. I just don’t need it.

(I have been sick every two weeks, if not more frequently, since August, to the point where I’m starting to wonder if there’s something in my classroom making me sick, or something going on with my immune system that I need to have looked at. I have never, ever been this consistently sick in seventeen years of teaching. Not close.)

(The blog is not going anywhere. The blog is essential to my mental health. I will keep writing here even if literally no one is reading it.)

My Patreon is probably not long for this world either, as I don’t pay enough attention to it to feel good about charging people, and I basically forgot it existed in February and then charged everyone anyway. If I can’t come up with a use for it in March that I’m actually going to stick to I’m going to pack it up at the end of the month. I don’t mind the extra little piece of change that I get from it every month (and it’s a little piece of change; don’t get me wrong) but I’m not going to take it from people if I’m not giving them something useful in return, and right now that’s not happening.

Anyway. I’m okay, don’t worry about it; I just need to do some reassessing and reprioritizing, and the simple fact is it’s been going on for a while now, I’m just admitting it and making it official. I’m gonna lie low for most of the rest of this year. We’ll see what happens in 2021.

#C2E2 Roundup

On March 1, 2020March 1, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Photography3 Comments

We had a good time! Other than having to park a full 27-minute walk away from the venue, that is. That’s a decent length for a walk in the cold, and my watch asked me on the way to and from my car if I was working out or not. No! I’m just trying not to die.

Also, when we got there, there was absolutely no signage that there was a security line or a bag check to go through? Just literally a few thousand people all milling around being confused, because no one knew why they were there but everyone stood in the huge mob because they felt like they ought to?

We had our badges already, and they were already activated, so I literally moved a barrier aside and the three of us went in. Somebody tried to follow us and got sent back, and tried to get security to go get us too, but they didn’t. For some reason I found that hilarious. I didn’t find out until after the show that we’d actually dodged the security line; as I said, no signs at all, just a lot of confused people in a herd. I wouldn’t have jumped out of line if I’d have known that, but … whatever, I guess. I thought it was will call, I swear. 😀

I feel like there were a ton more people at the show than the last time, but more on that in a few minutes. I had goals! Nerd goals! First one: meet Gail Simone and Al Ewing. Well, Al wasn’t at his booth at all on Saturday, which was a bummer. But I met Gail!

So, interesting detail: Gail follows me on Twitter. And the account belongs to Luther, which, remember, isn’t my real name. So the fact that I automatically went into “I’m at a con” mode and told her to sign my graphic novel to Luther took me by surprise. Then I found out she was selling scripts and snapped one of those up too– that issue of Tony Stark: Iron Man contains what might honestly be my favorite single-panel joke in all of comic book history:

Gail’s husband accidentally told me something VERY COOL that might be coming out and I was immediately sworn to silence, but I wasn’t told not to tell you that I know something cool now. Which I do.

Authors! We ended up leaving before Robert Jackson Bennett’s signing, but my wife got Sam Sykes to sign a book, and I got autographs from John Scalzi and S.L. Huang:

By this point, I’d set precedent that books were signed to Luther, so I decided to roll with it. John was nice enough to let me take a picture with him, too:

On the Charizard: the boy put it on the table, and John immediately volunteered to sign it if he wanted, which he declined, not knowing who the hell John was. We only talked for a minute or two but he was very nice– in general, everyone was, unsurprisingly.

Also, I bought stuff:

New leather dice bag! Forgive the vast amounts of cat hair on the piano bench, there; it’s one of Jonesy’s favorite spots and I’m not about to retake the pictures somewhere cleaner.

Leather dice tray! It was either this or a tower, and I went with this instead, because of…

…the super fuckin’ cool obsidian dice I bought, which the salesperson made sure to point out are made of glass, and thus, honestly, are probably not the best choice to make dice out of? The price of the set, plus the box and the tray was frankly ridiculous, but much more reasonable compared to the first set I looked at, which were made of Damascus steel and priced at four hundred dollars. But fuck it: twelfth/third anniversary and we both saved up to buy cool shit at this show and I was ferdamnsure going to buy cool shit.

Oh, and I ran into my friend Verna Vendetta, who I met at Starbase Indy a million years ago:

The only real fail of the show, at least for me, was the sparse number of cosplayer pictures I took. Turns out that 1) it’s way easier to get people to let them photograph you when you’re at a booth, and 2) it really was hugely crowded, so most of the time if I saw somebody I might have tried to get a picture of in other contexts, the ridiculous number of people in between us made stopping to do so practically impossible. So I missed out on, say, the guy in the 12-foot-tall Bumblebee costume, because despite being near him there was no way I was going to get him to stop. So I didn’t get nearly as many pictures as I thought I was going to, but I did get a handful of them:

So, yeah: didn’t get arrested, spent lots of money, met cool people, walked seven miles, Achilles tendons currently really painful. I’ll call that victory! If you’d told me at fifteen that I’d not only eventually attend a nerd convention with a hundred thousand people there but that I’d have my wife and son with me and we’d be doing it on our anniversary, I’d have called you a liar. It’s good to be a geek.

It is decided

On February 22, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek1 Comment

For our 12th anniversary, my wife and son and I will be attending C2E2, which is a huge show that I attended once as a vendor several years ago. This will be the first nerd convention that I have been to in years where I will actually get to be a fan and an attendee and not trying to hawk books, so it ought to be a lot of fun, although I’ll probably need all of Sunday to recover afterwards. I have important decisions to make during next week now, mostly along the lines of how much money am I going to allow myself to blow at this thing and when I find a giant sword that I want, should I consider buying it, or am I past the point where I should be buying giant swords?

I mean, realistically I know the answer to that, but still.

There will be tons of pictures of cosplayers, of course, and there may be pictures of me taken with a handful of my favorite authors, as John Scalzi, Sam Sykes, and Gail Simone are all going to be in attendance. I will absolutely go meet Gail; Scalzi and Sykes will depend on the length of lines, as we’ll have the boy with us and I feel like C2E2 is not an optimal place to “meet” people who I might want to talk to for more than ten seconds. We’ll see, though.

Finally! A plan!

Saleswanking 2019, and Writing 2020

On December 31, 2019December 31, 2019 By Luther M. SilerIn life, Writing2 Comments

Don’t worry, this will be brief, because there’s not a whole damn lot to talk about: I sold exactly 114 books in 2019, 91 of which were in person and a whopping 23 on Amazon. I had no new releases of any kind this year. I intended to spend most of the summer broadening the places where my books were available (I went off KDP forever ago, so I’ve been Amazon-exclusive with no real benefits for it since then) and working on a new novel (I have three in various stages of not-finished) but the Ongoing Medical Calamity derailed the fuck out of that. I’ve written some microfictions and maybe a couple of short stories this year over at Patreon and that’s it. I went to … three cons, I think? Four? Kokomo-Con, InConjunction, ConGlomeration, and Hall of Heroes con. So four. I know I canceled at least two because of the Calamity, and right now I’m only scheduled for one in 2020– Indy Popcon, which was one of the two I cancelled last summer.

I said this yesterday, and let me repeat it: there is no risk– none– of the blog going anywhere, because it’s too important to my ongoing mental health even before you get to the part where I like writing here. But for the first time in several years I’m thinking about deliberately hitting pause on calling myself an independent author for a while. I’ve mostly been ignoring my books on here except for the occasional Station Identification post on the weekends and the static links on the right; I may as well put them back on KDP if I’m not going to do the legwork necessary to have them available all over the place. I don’t write a lot of fiction any longer because with everything going on in my life I haven’t had the mental space for it, and I require an enormous amount of headspace to be able to write fiction. Nonfiction? Blog posts? Dead easy. But I don’t like writing fiction, and I never have– what I like is having written fiction, which is an amazing high that unfortunately requires me to spend hours pulling teeth first. I think about writing fiction all day, every day, I just don’t actually do it.

It might be time to put it away for a bit and not think about it at all. I’ll either get my mojo back, which would be good, or I won’t, which really won’t be any different from now except for the guilt. My family’s health situation isn’t getting better anytime soon– there is no silver lining to this cloud and no light at the end of the tunnel, and that’s not depression talking, it’s unfortunate and inevitable fact– so the only thing to do is decide what to do about it. I can make a serious effort to reprioritize my fiction, which means finding some other things to put away, or I can put it away. I just need to decide which one I’m going to do.

Kokomo-Con 2019 Wrapup

On October 13, 2019October 13, 2019 By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

The following things are all true; I am finding that I’m terrible at evaluating how these shows actually go, and this one was more mixed than most:

Attendance was pretty good; they announced about a thousand people through the door at the end of the show, which was a couple hundred more than last year, I think.
Weirdly, there were a lot of empty booths, which I don’t think was the case in previous years– any booth that was empty had a placard on it for someone, which means there was a last-minute cancellation. This time it looks like a lot of them just didn’t sell for some reason.
I sold half as many books as I’ve sold in previous years.
I paid for the table, which is always the goal, and there’s $150 in my pocket that wasn’t there on Friday.
Despite the poorer-than-usual sales, there were three other authors there who I’m friends with and know from previous shows, and I outsold all three of them, and in two cases pretty considerably.
Damn near every single person who came up and bought a book mentioned that they’d bought books from me at previous shows and were back for more, which is always an awesome feeling. One person came over to apologize for not having gotten to my book yet, but he wanted me to know he was still going to read it. Dude, I left a Salman Rushdie book on my unread shelf for a year once. You can make me wait. The book ain’t going anywhere.
The exception to the above was a guy who I talked to for five minutes who then bought every book I had except for Searching for Malumba.
Unrelated to the con, but fun: there was some sort of car show in central Indiana somewhere on Saturday, and the whole way down we were surrounded by Corvettes and classic cars driven by people who almost certainly didn’t know each other but figured out that they were all going to the same place and so fell into caravans. It was pretty cool. Also cool: passing six Corvettes in a row on the highway when you’re driving a Kia Soul. 🙂

So, yeah, pretty spectacularly mixed, yeah?

I was planning on taking a year off from this show– I love Kokomo-Con, and I’ve been three years in a row, but there’s a more writing-focused three-day con in Louisville on the same weekend that I’ve heard all kinds of good things about and I was planning on checking that one out in 2020. However, next year the Kokomo-Con is moving a weekend deeper into October, so it’s possible that the shows won’t overlap with each other next year, in which case I’ll need to decide if I want to/am able to do two shows in two weekends. So I’m not reserving my 2020 table just yet, and we’ll see what weekend the Imaginarium ends up being next year.