John R., John O., I agree nobody knows what November 3 looks like, and I agree that calling for a general strike right now is a slogan without a base. Reimann's Times/Siena numbers on white non-college workers are the reason. I'd add that urban wildcats can't be organized from a standing start in four weeks against the whole union bureaucracy either. If those networks exist in Oakland, good. Where I live they don't.
That's why I keep coming back to the administrative calendar. Read together, your two posts describe one sequence. County boards count and canvass, the state certifies, certificates of election go out, and on January 3 the Clerk of the outgoing House calls the roll of members-elect from those certificates and presides until a Speaker is chosen. O'Brien's January 3 and Reimann's partisan clerk are the same date. A clerk who wants to leave someone off the roll needs a pretext, and the pretext has to be manufactured upstream: a county board that won't certify, a state board like Georgia's sitting on a result, a challenge timed so the deadline passes while a court is still deliberating. Reimann's twelve-hour point cuts the same way. If federal officials can outwait an injunction until the polls close, a court order only works if people are already in the building when the waiting starts. The party lawyers will file regardless. They won't put anyone in the auditor's lobby. In Washington the counties have 21 days to certify, and the secretary of state has 30. For me that means the Clark County auditor's office in Vancouver for most of the three weeks after the election. Those are the days I'm talking about. A few dozen people in shifts can matter there in a way they can't for a strike. What I can't answer yet is who shows up. I don't know how many people in Clark County would sit in a lobby overnight, and I'm not going to pretend the number is large. O'Brien's experience with LA DSA suggests the formal organizations won't supply them. So it gets built the slow way, through the kind of neighborhood contact he's describing, starting now, without any illusion that it'll be ready. Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#43607): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/43607 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/121405050/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
