Consider two current news items: one on the “Stop the Steal” fantasies about the 2020 election, the other on the equally quixotic effort to pretend that the Equal Rights Amendment was ratified on time. Both illustrate the power of magical thinking about the National Archives. Unfortunately for the fantasists, American law is not a Nicholas Cage movie.

Item one: As part of the baseless effort to dispute Joe Biden’s victory, Trump electors in seven states met in their states and cast purported “electoral votes” for Trump, even though Biden had won the popular vote in those states. As I detailed at the time, those votes were never authorized or certified by any arm of their states’ governments. Yet, the existence of these thoroughly bogus “electoral votes” was the predicate for John Eastman’s advice to Donald Trump and Mike Pence about how Pence and/or Republicans in Congress might thwart the counting of Biden’s electors. In order to provide a fig leaf of justification for that scheme, phony “certificates” were sent to the National Archives, which under the Electoral Count Act plays a role in receiving and transmitting the legitimate certificates signed by each state’s governor. The phony certificates were, apparently, made up in the same format as legitimate ones, with similar recitals.

This is, of course, indefensible, and a sign of detachment from reality. But is it a crime? Because these were false statements intended to influence the outcome of a legal process, some...

Read Full Story: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/you-cant-change-reality-just-by-sending...