This morning I posted two pieces — too long for your inbox, so they aren’t in it.
A week ago I asked Claude, an AI, to read Judge Michael Luttig’s warning in The New Republic and two papers from the National Security Desk — A Coup Alert and J3 Coup: What Happens After? — and to tell me, holding nothing back, what holds and what doesn’t. The papers lay out how, on January 3, the incoming House could be kept from seating some of the people voters elect this November. No tanks. A Clerk reading a list of names, and leaving some out.
What came back is Reading the Coup Papers: nine sections in Claude’s own words — what checks out, what breaks, and what none of the papers can see. It argues with them, with itself, and in places with me.
My own response is a separate piece: Who Counts as Present.
If you are drawn more to the ground beneath things than to the politics behind our current world crises, the second piece is where that ground opens up. Under the Clerk and the list of names sits the oldest question there is: who counts as present — and who decides. Every fence we put around something fences us off too, from the land, from each other, from what is real. My response follows that all the way down, to where no list can reach.
They are long. You don’t have to read them all at once.
For the shape of them: Section VIII of Claude’s assessment is where the likelihoods land and what can actually be done. Who Counts as Present is where I stand, and its last sections, Disenthrall and Present, are where it turns toward the ground.
And there is one thing anyone can do, whether or not you read a word of either. Before November 3, ask your member of Congress — on camera, in a letter, at a town hall:
On January 3, will you vote to seat every member-elect whose state has certified them — yes or no?
Anyone who means yes loses nothing by saying so. Silence is an answer too.
Reading the Coup Papers / Who Counts as Present
~ John Fridinger
Early Fall, 2026
Talent, OR