The issue facing Biden, the Democrats and long-term politicians at large is that government is by consent. That is our social contract. As soon as any group decides that they are not getting their end of the bargain, they revoke their consent and what you get is unrest, violence, riots and revolution. There's a reason nobody took to the streets screaming about "blue lives matter" until it was a counterprotest: by and large, cops are doing fine. African Americans, on the other hand, are experiencing an abrogation of their rights as citizens. They are thusly taking to the streets and rejecting the status quo.

All the Republican machinations are outside the rule of law. They are outside convention. They are a revision of the social contract - "hey we think Republicans have more rights than Democrats." The posturing and specious legal gambits don't change that: they can't accomplish their goals within the system so they're attempting to change the system.

The moment of truth was the BLM protests. Had the National Guard restored order, we'd be in a dire place. Had vast legions of uniformed stormtroopers taken to the streets against mild unrest, we'd be living in fascism. Had Esper doubled down on the gassing of DC protestors in order to secure a mediocre photo op we'd be in a really shitty place. Instead we've got a hundred-odd goons without insignia mechanized by credit cards and Hertz stomping about and kidnapping people for 24 hours. Biden had a ten-point lead among the military a week before the election - the armed forces haven't backed a Democrat in my memory and I've been voting since 1992.

So the crux of the issue is this: a splinter faction of the Republican Party wants to have a conversation about overturning the electoral process. The minute anyone with any credibility engages with them, the conversation becomes legitimate - "Mr. Biden, when did you stop beating your wife?" - and all of a sudden, our consent of governance starts to shift from "our vote counts" to "in what conditions should our vote count" and there is zero - none - benefit to anyone but Trump in this conversation. The battle we're seeing now is the Trump administration doubling down because they have nothing to lose and rallying as many others with nothing to lose behind them. However, the overwhelming majority of the country has plenty to lose, do not experience any great inconvenience from a Biden win and would rather live to fight another day. Podunk Whothefuk can grab national headlines by holding a press conference and saying "I, the duly-elected voting supervisor of Nowhere, Wisconsin, feel very strongly that something hinky is going on" but the strings of power give no fucks. This is rabble-rousing and it's all gonna vanish in 70 days. I must be the only guy who remembers the entire fucking country being paralyzed for two fucking weeks over whether or not Terry Schiavo's feeding tube should be removed - this is a great environment for empty posturing and a shitty fuckin' trap for anyone who actually thinks it's going to do anything.

That's the Montgomery County PA lawsuit in which the court asks Team Trump's lawyer "do you want to put your license on the line for this bullshit?" and the lawyer asserting that he most definitely does not.

So the Democrats are treating this as a sound and fury signifying nothing, which is appropriate. Drawing parallels to 2000 is dumb; 2000 was a fucking travesty but in order to overturn it, the Gore campaign would have had to assert that they weren't abiding by the Supreme Court. That was probably the time to have that fight. It woulda been something. We'd be in a better place. But it also would have been dicey AF.

We're through the dicey bit. Now it's just inconvenient, shameful and utterly unsurprising. Democrats aren't fighting because this bullshit shouldn't be dignified with a response.