1/ I want to briefly tease out Cruz's statement, which will help set expectations about what might happen January 6:

2/ At its heart, the presser states, "we intend to vote on January 6 to reject the electors from disputed states as not ‘regularly given' and ‘lawfully certified' (the statutory requisite), unless & until that emergency 10-day audit is completed."
3/ How does a10-day emergency audit happen? Congress would need to enact a statute to amend the Electoral Count Act before January 6, when it's compelled by law to meet. That seems unlikely.
4/ Cruz et al. seem to hold a "thick" view of the Electoral Count Act, adhering to the "statutory requisite," which means that Congress would need to amend or adhere to the statute.
5/ A 10-day audit is impossible under the current statute. Objections to a state are limited to 2 hours' debate. Adjournments are fixed in the statute, too--no recess if you've hit five days: https://t.co/uvgCoIGR6X
6/ Cruz et al. appear to seek to raise a compound objection: the electors' appointments were not "lawfully certified," & that their votes were not "regularly given." These are, I think, best understood as two separate questions.
7/ If objection is that the appointment was not "lawfully certified," then elector has not been appointed. That may take them out of the denominator of the 12th Amendment determining whether a candidate "majority of the whole number of electors appointed" https://t.co/NalCPhsJaa
8/ If the vote was not "regularly given" (as Boxer & Tubbs raised in 2005) then it may simply mean that the appointment is valid, but there is no vote for the candidate, & a candidate still needs 270 electoral votes to win.
9/ (I say "may," because these are all questions Congress has not had to answer in the past &, at times, steadfastly refused to answer.)
10/ In 1969, the objection was to a Nixon elector in North Carolina who cast a vote for Wallace--that his vote was not "regularly given," excluding that vote from the overall count. (I think this is the best way to way to understand the Greeley votes in 1873, too.)
11/ Of course, Cruz, Hawley, & everyone else recognizes this is performative. Congress will count 306 votes for Biden-Harris, & 232 votes for Trump-Pence. It's only a question of how Congress gets there, & what precedents it raises.
12/ One last detail, the presser is coy about "disputed states." Unclear if that's going to be 1, 7, 51, or whatever.

More from Law

1/n How come we still have academics sustaining narratives of #obesity rather than of how real people find value & meaning in everyday lives? Revisit @whatsthepont on @tobyjlowe / @snowded & accept criticising "neoliberal" does not make things

New out 🤯 A review which says lots about the academic context in which it was written - with its embedded behaviorist fixations on just implementing *better* - with complete disregard for the unintended consequences of treating "agency" as a dirty word

In all #becausehuman fields, we see justifiable professional kick-back at reductionist agendas driven by a focus on #obesity & nonsensical CMO guidance of 60 min of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) per day for healthy growth and development


What's fundamentally missing is not just a respect for complexity. It's respect for Homo-Narrans - for the ordinary, everyday story-telling folk all around us whose aspirations & dispositions provide the context in which we find meaning, purpose & value

We don't need spurious arguments against initiatives... but let's consider ethics & unintended consequences - on which, see @snowded (especially around epistemic justice) #becausehuman
https://t.co/gu97xDEamB
https://t.co/E1GzCdCfLA
https://t.co/bKowDAgARQ
https://t.co/evzYMBPwvZ

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I’ve always felt that the luckiest people I know had a talent for recognizing circumstances, not of their own making, that were conducive to a favorable outcome and their ability to quickly take advantage of them.

In other words, dumb luck was just that, it required no awareness on the person’s part, whereas “smart” luck involved awareness followed by action before the circumstances changed.

So, was I “lucky” to be born when I was—nothing I had any control over—and that I came of age just as huge databases and computers were advancing to the point where I could use those tools to write “What Works on Wall Street?” Absolutely.

Was I lucky to start my stock market investments near the peak of interest rates which allowed me to spend the majority of my adult life in a falling rate environment? Yup.