Thread by @jholbo1

Trump has taught the Republicans that a level of bald-faced nonsense-on-stilts can be sold, beyond anything our politicians have heretofore contemplated. It isn't just Greene. It's every elected R who is even dipping a toe, which is most R congresscritters by now. 1/

https://twitter.com/cnnbrk/status/1346215088429162497

The 'fraud' claims at this point are a tight, normative contradiction, roped to an empirical double-absurdity - not merely an empirical long-shot. Normatively, the fraud-claimers are keeping their options open as to which of two contradictory principles they wish to espouse. 2/

1) the principle that 'all (legal!) votes should count', and any mere formal technicality that stands in the way - like, yes, we went through the counts, and through the courts, many times - is not enough. We need ALL LEGAL VOTES TO COUNT. 3/

(Note that there is an internal contradiction already. You are insisting on legality while tossing commitment to the mechanisms of legalism - courts and counts. You are insisting on a supra-legal standard of 'legal vote'.) 4/

2) Or maybe they are standing up for the wild, total headstand denial of that very principle. All that matters is technicalities. We should be prepared to toss millions of votes on a technical dime, even if no one even suggests that they were not legally cast by real voters. 5/

You should not be able to advance a fraud claim while holding BOTH of those principles true. What makes it possible is, to recall an apt phrase, that conservatism is the view that the law protects some, without binding them, while binding others, without protecting them. 6/

If you don't, on some level, believe that, none of this makes any sense. And now on to the empirical level. Obviously there is, first, the wild 'maybe an evil demon stole the election' speculative quality of it. 7/

If you can imagine a scenario in which an evil demon stole the election, we should proceed on the assumption that this is in fact the situation. (I guess maybe this should count as an extra level of normative absurdity, a Cartesian doubt ought, but only applied against D's.) 8/

But moving on: you are now operating on the assumption that some malevolent agency had the power to - and in fact did - flip hundreds of thousands or millions of votes, by some means, we know not how. Maybe this wasn't just in the four states under contention. 9/

The only response if you believe basically all ballots in all states are likely to be fatally tainted, is to toss the entire election, up and down the ballot. All the races. But this only-possible reasonable response to the scenario R's says is actual is not even considered. 10/

So basically there is no possible world in which the R response to the situation makes any sense. I am amazed that MOST R congresscritters are proposing, in effect, that you can just capriciously choose beliefs about elections, including quite illogical beliefs. 11/

And the same is true on the legal side. There is this article II argument that basically boils down to the possibility of being hyper-sticklerish about electoral rule change not adopted by legislatures but delegated to courts or officials. 12/

Now this is radical. But let it ride. Then you have to toss all the votes in every state in which any such any changes were adopted, which is many more than just the four in question. And yet no one taking this Mark Levin line is even bothering to be threadbare consistent. 13/

As we come down to it, I am gobsmacked at how far through the looking-glass we are. R's are all 'but D's have challenged results!' But a comeback would be: but D's have never made multiple charges, all of which are obviously false/invalid in all possible worlds. 14/