Aridas
Crazy Little Green Dragon
My point was, if the 1/6 Rioters held Congress at gunpoint and said "certify Trump the winner or y'all dead", courts would very likely deem that vote to be null & void.
Assuming that the courts were then free of such coercion, sure. If Congress had been coerced at gunpoint, that significantly raises the chance that the courts would end up being coerced, too, though, in practice. However, Jan 6 wasn't the scenario invoked. Given that the scenario actually invoked involves quite widespread coercion throughout for the sake of making the point, in such a scenario the courts would be nigh certain to be either complicit or under duress. If one wants to poke at a more real world example of something much closer to such an election - Russia's sham annexation elections in Ukraine. Russia's elections in general have serious issues, of course, from various legitimacy angles, even if they're not engaging in direct coercion. Going by the argument that you had started with, sufficiently widespread coercion and duplicity would make things entirely legitimate, even if they utterly trample upon... everything good, really. When that was pointed out, your attempted defense became an attempted appeal to how an institution was totally invulnerable to duress and duplicity and had the power to magically enforce its rulings, despite a long and unpleasant history of such being quite vulnerable to both duress and duplicity, here and elsewhere, and judgements being frequently difficult to enforce in the face of opposition in many cases even at good times. That's honestly not much of an argument here.
To get down to a more fundamental level, though, the issues at hand have far more to do with what legitimacy actually is and how legitimacy actually works. Those are questions that are very poorly served with superficial and overly simplistic answers, even if such answers are the easy ones.
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