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Comment by chronofar | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand this. So you’re thinking if they hold or execute members of Congress that’s all it takes to overthrow the government? This seems ludicrous and yet I’ve seen multiple people espouse such a thing, so I’m wondering if I’m not understanding some kind of checkmate that comes with such a move.

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Until the conclusion of the ceremony that they disrupted, Joe Biden is legally just some guy. If Congress had been more seriously disrupted, it's possible the ceremony would have continued as normal sometime before the inauguration. Also possible it would have been postponed indefinitely for "the security situation in DC" and "investigations into voter fraud." On January 20th it would be Vice President Pence sworn in.

Not checkmate by itself, but very scary.

I guess a can’t refute your hypothetical here, but the process it describes is ridiculously brittle. It seems utterly unbelievable to think all it takes to overthrow the US government is disrupting a single ceremonious formality. That surely cannot be expected to withstand the test of time on merely goodwill and tradition.

I'm afraid the founding fathers didn't imagine mobs holding the congress hostage on confirmation day a probable event... and neither did we, actually.

That seems incredibly unlikely. If anything such a thing was far more likely in their time than the present.

In any case though, if this hypothetical is not hyperbole (and I still suspect it is), it would seem prudent to remedy ASAP.

(IANACL)

Here’s the relevant process per the constitution: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contingent_election

Basically, if there is no absolute majority of electors, each state gets one vote in the house for president and two votes in the senate for VP.

All of that only comes into play if there is no majority winner though, so I don’t think just keeping them from voting would do the trick.

The Presidential Succession Act only covers succession in case of removal from office and only until an election can be held, so it is technically true that Pence would be in line, but that assumes Trump was removed and the electoral votes had still not been counted, a highly unlikely combination. Even then just counting the votes would resolve this problem. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Succession_Act

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