"Because That's The Way It Works"

So this article addresses what happened with Georgia’s EVs in 1800, which tfg has been invoking to claim that Pence should have just counted the votes himself in 2021. The bottom line is, yes, the GA vote certificate was screwed up, … https://t.co/ZekiINZc8K

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) July 19, 2021

 Start here, with the horse's....mouth:

Trump then invoked the nonanalogous example he had latched on to: “Thomas Jefferson was in the exact same position, but only one state, the state of Georgia. Did you know that? It’s true. ‘Hear ye, hear ye . . .’—was much more elegant in those days. It was, ‘Hear ye, hear ye, the  great state of Georgia is unable to accurately count its votes.’ Thomas Jefferson said, ‘Are you sure?’ They said, ‘Yes, we are sure.’ ‘Then we will take the votes from the great state of Georgia.’ He took them for him and the president.”

Trump continued, “So I said, ‘Mike, you can be Thomas Jefferson or you can be Mike Pence.’ What happened is, I had a very good relationship with Mike Pence—very good—but when you are handed these votes and before you even start about the individual corruptions, the people, the this, the that, all the different things that took place, when you are handed these votes...right there you should have sent them back to the legislatures.”

The Atlantic article Conway refers to makes the vaguest possible reference to the Electoral Count Act:

Over the years these powers have been limited—but not entirely eliminated—by legislation. A nineteenth-century statute makes it clear that the president of the Senate must obey the instructions of the House and the Senate as long as those chambers can agree on the proper course of action. But what happens if a state submits conflicting electoral votes and the two houses can't reach consensus on which slate should be counted?

And again, here:

The sitting Vice President finds himself in much the same situation Jefferson encountered in 1801. He turns to the nineteenth-century statute, which blandly instructs the president of the Senate to count the electoral ballot certified by "the executive" of the state. But what happens when two conflicting ballots have been signed by an executive officer? The statute doesn't say. What should he do? 

Why let the law get in the way of a good horror story scenario? 

Both times the Electoral Count Act is referenced in the context of the "what if" scenarios everyone was playing with in November until January 6th, ending with all kinds of reasons why Donald Trump would remain President for four years.  Law professors honing their analytical bona fides, in other words, because lawyers are trained to consider the consequences of actions and the worst possible outcomes under law (it's a professional obligation, what can I say?).  It's an especially egregious practice in law professors, who spin fantasies of disaster and doom that only they can see and understand, the rest of us being human beings who aren't really going to follow the law blindly off their hypothetical cliff.

But I digress.

The nightmare scenario they imagine there didn't happen; and, as George Conway points out, the Electoral Count Act obviated the immediate problem of 1800:

… the Electoral Count Act, spelling out how the electoral count should proceed—and confirming that the Vice President’s role is simply ministerial.https://t.co/ZekiINZc8K

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) July 19, 2021

Eliminating, not the nightmare the law professors have cooked up (what law ever determines the outcome of every possible situation?) but the idiot scenario Trump is still insisting on: that VP Pence should have thrown the election to Trump in Congress on January 6th, now because:  Jefferson.

Trump is sure this would have worked because, after all, it's what Jefferson did!  Except it isn't at all what Jefferson did, and besides, there's that Electoral Count Act.*

Later in the conversation, Trump again expressed his disappointment in Pence. “What courage would have been is to do what Thomas Jefferson did [and said], ‘We’re taking the votes,’” he said. “That would have been politically unacceptable. But sending it back to these legislatures, who now know that bad things happened, would have been very acceptable. And I could show you letters from legislators, big-scale letters from different states, the states we’re talking about. Had he done that, I think it would have been a great thing for our country.” But, he surmised, “I think he had bad advice.”

Big strong men, with tears in their eyes....oh, sorry, wrong cliche.  Of course, he also says 1/6 was a lovefest, and there's video tape of that, but "they" won't show it:

He chose to remark again on the size of the crowd. “I would venture to say I think it was the largest crowd I had ever spoken [to] before,” Trump said. “It was a loving crowd, too, by the way. There was a lot of love. I’ve heard that from everybody. Many, many people have told me that was a loving crowd. It was too bad, it was too bad that they did that.”

Pressed again, Trump said he had hoped his supporters would show up outside the Capitol but not enter the building. “In all fairness, the Capitol Police were ushering people in,” Trump said. “The Capitol Police were very friendly. They were hugging and kissing. You don’t see that. There’s plenty of tape on that.” 

The Capitol Police who were bludgeoned by the crowd, were actually "ushering people in."  Well, once they had broken in, some wise officers exercised crowd control by leading the rioters away from the Congressional chambers and offices; I guess that was hospitable.

We do, however, get insight into Trump's ideas on humanity and human nature: 

The Department of Justice, he continued, “is loaded up with radical left, and Bill Barr was being portrayed as a puppet of mine. They said he’s my ‘personal lawyer,’ ‘he’ll do anything,’ and I said, ‘Here we go...’ He got more and more difficult, and I knew it. You know why? Because he’s a human being. Because that’s the way it works.”

Human beings grow "more and more difficult" around Trump, because...well, because they won't do as Trump demands.  What is wrong with people, right?

*by the way, the recyvled and re-emerging argument against the 2020 tally is that courts and officials changed the voting laws in some states in response to covid (like Houston allowing 24 hour voting and drive-through voting, both of which the state Supreme Court allowed) instead of the legislature.  This argument is based on some dicta from Rehnquist in Bush v Gore, dicta no court has ever held to be authoritative.  And how Pence was supposed to change the Electoral Count Act to serve Trump's claims of fraud (which is not how remedies for fraud work in the law, by the way), a direct contravention of this "argument," is not explained.  This is all about as rational as the charges of treason against JFK.  Just because Trump is bluntly ignorant of history and the law is no reason for the rest of us to argue down to his level.