Category Archives: Republicans

2020 General Election, Republicans

Kevin McCarthy — after lying about the election and undermining the results — calls for unity

When we last checked in with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, he had issued a statement that failed to hold Donald Trump responsible for months of lies about the election, underhanded attempts to overturn it, and then the violence on the 6th.

McCarthy subsequently spoke on the House floor, in a call for unity, explained why he would oppose impeachment:

A vote to impeach will further divide the nation. A vote to impeach will further fan the flames of partisan division.

Most Americans want neither inaction nor retribution. They want durable, bipartisan justice. That path is still available, but it is not the path we are on today.

He continued by placing a measure of responsibility on Trump:

That doesn’t mean the President is free from fault. The President bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters. He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding.

These facts require immediate actions by President Trump: Accept his share of responsibility. Quell the brewing unrest. And ensure President-Elect Biden is able to successfully begin his term.

In the context of a months-long campaign before November 4 to undermine the election, repeated attempts to overthrow the results afterwards, and stirring up a mob to demand that the Vice President and Congress declare Trump, not Biden, the victor, this is pretty weak tea.

Nor is this circumscribed view of the President’s responsibility surprising considering Congressman McCarthy’s role in the subversion.

On November 5 on Fox News, McCarthy insisted:

President Trump won this election. So, everyone who is listening: Do not be quiet. Do not be silent about this. We cannot allow this to happen before our very eyes. 

We can unite together. And you don’t need to be a Republican. If you believe in every legal vote needs to count, if you believe in American process, join together and let’s stop this.

McCarthy — whom Trump affectionately calls, “My Kevin” — ingratiated himself with Trump with a lie, which he followed up with a call to action: “Let’s stop this.”

A month later, McCarthy was one of 126 GOP House members — well over half the caucus — to sign onto a meritless court challenge to Biden’s victory.

On January 6, he voted to reject Biden’s victory in Arizona. And then, hours after the violence in the Capitol, McCarthy cast a vote with 137 other House Republicans to reject the electoral votes of Pennsylvania.

McCarthy lied about the outcome of the election. He urged on others to act on this lie. He joined a suit in court to overturn the results. Then he voted to throw out Biden’s victories in two battleground states that Trump falsely claims he won.

McCarthy doesn’t offer a mea culpa or an apology or even an excuse for this string of “undemocratic, un-American, and criminal” actions (to borrow his words). He doesn’t acknowledge his bad behavior at all. Instead he appeals for unity.

In his spoken remarks that evening, McCarthy said, “this call for unity may ring hollow.” That’s for sure.

(Image: PBS.)

Republicans

McConnell’s management style: “He lets the cards play out until he plays his cards …”

Mitch McConnell hasn’t yet decided whether or not he will vote to convict Donald Trump at the Senate impeachment trial. He announced yesterday, “…while the press has been full of speculation, I have not made a final decision on how I will vote and I intend to listen to the legal arguments when they are presented to the Senate.”

This is in keeping with McConnell’s approach to sticky political issues, as described in The Cynic: The Political Education of Mitch McConnell, the Alec MacGillis book about the senator, which portrays McConnell as a highly skilled negotiator, who often swoops in after lying low as controversies rage and other political actors skirmish.

MacGillis — describing one of the shutdown episodes generated by “archconservatives” aka “self-aggrandizing extremists” in the Republican caucus — quotes former Senator Judd Greg (a McConnell ally) on the Kentucky senator’s approach in that crisis and in other controversies:

“It’s Mitch’s management style–he lets the cards play out until he plays his cards and then he wins.”

The Republican Party, after Trump’s failed insurrection and the two Georgia defeats, is at war with itself. Lots of stuff is going to happen between now and January 20 — and in the following weeks.

McConnell will decide on another day how to vote on impeachment. The stakes are high and McConnell doesn’t always win.

So, the wily senator is watching and waiting as the cards play out. He hopes to have a better read of the hand he holds in a few weeks than he does today.

Or — maybe not. Perhaps McConnell knows how he’ll vote, but he’s psyching out other players at the table. Or misdirecting the media as they offer a play by play. Or grasping for some advantage that may or may not become clear to us for a while.

This much is clear: It is not likely that “the legal arguments” will sway Mitch McConnell nearly as much as political calculations.

Bet on it.

(Poker face? Image from CNBC.)

Democracy, Donald Trump, Republicans

Most Republicans refuse to hold Donald Trump accountable, even after assault on the Capitol

Since the 2016 inauguration, most Republicans — if they didn’t step up to defend and support him — have dodged and weaved, made excuses, changed the subject, ducked reporters and declined to comment, when confronted with norm-busting outrages by Donald Trump. Throughout four years of aberrant presidential behavior, there have been a handful of GOP critics who objected forthrightly to one discrete thing or another, but then retreated into silence (and acquiescence); other Republicans have (at most) tut-tutted about tweets, overlooking every other crash through the guardrails of democracy. Virtually all Republicans serving in the Senate and the House — whether voicing occasional murmurs of disapproval or not — hardly ever strayed from the Trump-GOP party line. They were willfully blind to Trump’s off-the-rails conduct.

The Republican Party has never been willing to hold the President accountable for his actions. Not even when national security was as stake — from choosing Putin over the Intelligence Community in Helsinki, to betraying American allies in Syria, to extorting the Ukrainian president, to refusing to utter a word of criticism regarding Russian bounties on American soldiers or cyberattacks on government agencies and corporations — the pattern has been to let it slide. Trump made implementing tax cuts and packing the courts possible. Republicans kept their heads down, celebrated their partisan victories, and endeavored to preserve their careers.

At this stage — four days after Trump instigated the crowd that assaulted the Capitol, seeking to overturn the election — the pattern hasn’t changed one whit. There are a handful of GOP critics who have taken their leader to task, while the vast majority of Republicans have stayed silent, sought to deflect Trump’s sedition by changing the subject, and absolutely refused to hold him accountable.

(The pattern looks different but only because of a handful of names, including four Senators: Mitt Romney, Pat Toomey, Lisa Murkowski, and Ben Sasse. Yes, their voices have our attention, but this is still a small number of Republicans. Turning to the House, few Republicans — Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger stand out — have objected to Trump’s anti-democratic rampaging.)

Look no further than House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. On Friday, he issued a statement that condemned “the violence, destruction, and chaos that unfolded at the Capitol on Wednesday” as “unacceptable, undemocratic, and un-American.” He said he had spoken with Trump (after the rioting had unfolded) to advise him that “he had a great responsibility to intervene to quell the mob and start the healing process.”

There is no further reference to Donald Trump in McCarthy’s statement, no suggestion that Trump paused to consider McCarthy’s advice, and not a hint that the President bears any responsibility for the violence he encouraged. McCarthy (with most Republicans) has let Donald Trump off the hook.

The Minority Leader hasn’t acknowledged that the rioters were Trump supporters of all stripes, from (what passes for) mainstream Republicans to fringe groups and true believers who revere the President.

Donald Trump has waged a months-long campaign to challenge the integrity of the election; to hurl baseless charges of fraud; to press, through established legal channels as well as through rogue, illegal, and corrupt efforts without precedent in American history, to overturn a democratic election. After Georgia officials refused to bend to Trump’s will, he turned to the ceremonial certification of the Electoral College vote in Congress. While Vice President Pence declined to play along with the Trump script, and a violent mob could only delay the count, Senate and House Republicans got on board to challenge the results in several battleground states that Trump lost.

McCarthy’s January 8 statement acknowledges none of this, though I submit that Trump’s campaign has been “unacceptable, undemocratic, and un-American,” the tactics of a wannabe strongman, not the elected leader of a free country. McCarthy doesn’t acknowledge that Donald Trump bears the least responsibility for any of this.

McCarthy’s statement appeals to President-elect Joe Biden to “work together to lower the temperature and unite the country to solve America’s challenges.” And he doesn’t spare high-flown rhetoric in his statement:

The coronavirus is still coursing through our communities, businesses and workers are facing unprecedented stress, and children are falling behind. Threats from adversaries such as Russia, China, and Iran are increasing. As leaders, we must call on our better angels and refocus our efforts on working directly for the American people. United we can deliver peace, strength, and prosperity our country needs. Divided, we will fail.

In a statement a day earlier, the Majority Leader acknowledged his role in casting doubt on the integrity of the election. He noted that “millions of Americans” questioned that integrity, without referencing the role of the President, Congressional Republicans, and conservative media in spreading lies. He further proclaimed the challenges served “to ensure that our country follows an accurate and accountable process.” He doesn’t note that after the Trump mob trashed the Capitol, McCarthy (and 139 of his House colleagues, plus 8 Senators, Republicans all) returned to the chamber to challenge the integrity — without any factual basis — of the election results in Pennsylvania.

Never mind McCarthy’s role in the campaign to delegitimize the election; never mind doubts about the sincerity of his appeal to unity. What is indisputable is that McCarthy declines to ascribe responsibility to Donald Trump for either the welter of lies regarding the election or the full-court press to overturn the results.

In the Senate, Marco Rubio’s stance is instructive. While Rubio, a perennial weathervane in the Republican caucus, stood with the majority of his colleagues in rejecting the challenges, he is not prepared to hold Donald Trump responsible for his anti-democratic crusade. Instead, Rubio has decided to change the subject. He has gone on a tear, first criticizing Biden’s comments — which “makes everybody blow up and go back in their corner” — and which equally characterized Rubio, who never left his corner. Then the next day he turned his attention to a perennial Republican grievance: Rubio tweeted that Twitter, in banning Trump, would “only stoke new grievances that will end up fueling the very thing they claim to be trying to prevent,” another charge that applies equally to Rubio and his tweets.

Senator Rubio, like Kevin McCarthy, is loath to even nod to the possibility of holding Donald Trump accountable.

We shall see, if and when the Democratic House moves to impeach Donald Trump, what fraction of Republicans acknowledge Trump’s role in delegitimizing and seeking to overturn a free and fair election, which culminated in the attack on the Capitol. I suggest — based on recent history — that there will be no more than a handful.

January 11 updates: David Frum called out Rubio for a hedged and contorted statement on the violence in the senator’s 4-minute “blame-everybody-but-me video” (which I hadn’t seen) that “joined 20 seconds of forthright condemnation to nearly four full minutes of blame shifting and excuse making.” The video consists of shameless grievance-mongering. There are two passing references to Donald Trump, but the principal blame for the attack on the Capitol falls on Trump’s and Rubio’s political opponents.

Jonathan Bernstein weighed in on Republicans’ retreat “to the flimsiest of defenses against impeachment and removal,” defenses that “say nothing about whether the president is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, and nothing about whether his offenses are so grave that they demand the extraordinary action of impeachment and removal in the last days of his term. Surely that’s what matters, not whether standing up for the republic is divisive or hurts the feelings of those who oppose it.”

(Image: Sky News.)

2020 General Election, Donald Trump, Republicans, Tribalism

Who do you believe? Donald Trump (+GOP leaders, Fox News, Levin, Limbaugh…) or your own eyes?

Image: CBS News.

Sixty-six percent of registered voters blame Donald Trump (either a great deal, 55%, or somewhat, 11%) for the storming of the Capitol building. The consensus of opinion is hardly surprising: Trump was there. He had urged his supporters to come to the Capitol on January 6 — “Be there, will be wild!” he tweeted — after spending months crying fraud after losing the election decisively to Biden (a “fake president”), trying to overturn the results in court after court, in appeals to governors, state legislators, secretaries of state, and others. He implored the crowd of his supporters on January 6:

Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down–

We’re going to walk down. Anyone you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol–

And we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.

Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.

He meandered through a string of lies about the results of the election, made-up charges of voting fraud, complaints of disloyal Republican officials, and — despite his pledge to march with the crowd — drove directly back to the White House. The revved-up Trump enthusiasts took it from there.

CBS.
CBS.
ABC.

Only 28% of Republicans blame Trump for the sacking of the U.S. Capitol. Instead, a majority — 52% — of Republicans blame Joe Biden: 35% place a great deal of blame on Biden, while 17% say he is somewhat to blame.

Chart from YouGov.

There’s nothing in the water that Republicans drink that explains this perception. Rather, Republican voters are — unsurprisingly — listening to the national leadership of their party: the President, Republican senators and members of Congress, and most emphatically, Fox News Channel, along with conservative talk radio and websites on the right trafficking in alternate facts. And these sources have been on a raging campaign of disinformation for months, with nary a dissenting voice.

This is their tribe. And though it was folks at the Trump rally, waving Trump flags (American flags, Confederate flags, Gadsden flags) and banners (“Stop the steal,” “Jesus is My Savior, Trump is My President,” “Unleash the Kraken,” “Q”), and enthusiastically cheering Trump on, who marched to the Capitol, broke through police lines, smashed through doors and windows, and trashed the place — Joe Biden (the fake president), the man who somehow, someway stole an election (without leaving a trace of evidence), was responsible.

To come to any other conclusion contradicts what these voters are convinced they know. For certain. After hearing it day in, day out.

The message from the most influential source (apart from Trump himself) — Fox News Channel — for those in the bubble, is delivered slickly, professionally, with the look and feel of a genuine news report — with clear intent to deceive. When the actual news is inconvenient, shift attention to something else (even something manufactured out of whole cloth).

Kevin Drum offers a summary of the disinformation technique as mastered by Laura Ingraham:

In a nutshell, it goes like this:

    1. Introduce scary story about minor state legislation that has no chance of ever going anywhere.
    2. Invent out of whole cloth a segue into racism as a public health issue.
    3. Conclude that liberals want to lock up white people they disapprove of.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the pros do it.

Editor’s note: more to come.

(Image above headline: ABC News.)

2020 General Election, Democracy, Republicans

Donald Trump, Josh Hawley, and Ted Cruz: 3 repulsive architechts of descecration

[See Update below.]

The headline is cribbed from the first sentence of a George Will column, “Trump, Hawley and Cruz will each wear the scarlet ‘S’ of a seditionist.” While I don’t share Will’s politics, we both deplore the current state of the Republican Party. With this post, I highlight Will’s condemnation of the two ambitious scammers from the Senate who — with Trump — put into motion yesterday’s shameful events at the Capitol:

Hawley announced his intention to object to the certification of some states’ electoral votes, for no better reason than that there has been an avalanche of “allegations” of election irregularities, allegations fomented by the loser of the election. By doing so, Hawley turned what should have been a perfunctory episode in our civic liturgy of post-election civility into a synthetic drama. He turned this moment into the focus of the hitherto unfocused fury that Trump had been stoking for many weeks. 

Of Cruz, Will said: 

Image: The Victory Channel on YouTube.

With his characteristic unctuousness, he regretted the existence of what he and kindred spirits have not only done nothing to refute but have themselves nurtured — a pandemic of suspicions that the election was “rigged.”

“I want to take a moment to speak to my Democratic colleagues,” said Cruz. “I understand your guy is winning right now.” Read those weasely words again. He was not speaking to his “colleagues.” He was speaking to the kind people who were at that instant assaulting the Capitol. He was nurturing the very delusions that soon would cause louts to be roaming the Senate chamber — the fantasy that Joe Biden has not won the election but is only winning “right now.”

Will observes that Trump will soon be gone.

Yes, and I’m in complete agreement with Will regarding the two senators: “from this day forward, everything they say or do or advocate should be disregarded as patent attempts to distract attention from the lurid fact of what they have become. Each will wear a scarlet “S” as a seditionist.”

Both Hawley and Cruz, of course — privileged fellows who strike populist poses — claim to be intent on examining allegations or dispelling suspicions, though they have had a heavy hand in spreading the disinformation that Trump’s followers accept. No matter their clever language, they are liars, as another conservative, Yuval Levin, notes (“Failures of Leadership in a Populist Age”):

To knowingly pretend a lie is true is, simply put, to lie. Doing that carefully enough to let you claim you’re only raising questions only makes it even clearer that you know you’re lying. Lying to people is no way to speak for them or represent them. It is a way of showing contempt for them, and of using them rather than being useful to them. This is what too many Republican politicians have chosen to do in the wake of the election. They have decided to feign anger at a problem that cannot be solved because it does not exist, and this cannot help but make them less capable of taking up real problems on behalf of their voters. And in any case, it makes them cynical liars.

Update:  Josh Hawley’s mentor, former senator John Danforth set aside his opposition to Trump in backing Hawley’s bid to knock-off former senator Claire McCaskill: 

Hawley was Danforth’s guy. They met at a Yale Law School dinner when Hawley was still a student and Danforth was the smitten elder statesman. Enough so that years later, Danforth, a Never Trumper, turned a blind eye to Hawley’s cynical embrace of the president, intended to ensure the support of rural Republicans who love the president for all the wrong reasons.

Republican after Republican has “turned a blind eye” regarding Trump over the past five years. Finally, with less than two weeks to go, they are backing away:

“Supporting Josh and trying so hard to get him elected to the Senate was the worst mistake I ever made in my life,” Danforth said in a phone interview Thursday afternoon. “Yesterday was the physical culmination of the long attempt (by Hawley and others) to foment a lack of public confidence in our democratic system. It is very dangerous to America to continue pushing this idea that government doesn’t work and that voting was fraudulent.”

One of Hawley’s biggest Missouri donors, David Humphries, has also rebuked the senator. “Along with his sister, Sarah Atkins, and his mother, Ethelmae Humphreys, his family provided $4.4 million of the $9.2 million Hawley raised for his 2016 campaign for attorney general.” The Humphries added another $2 million to Hawley’s senate campaign. 

Now David Humphries has had enough:

Josh Hawley … has shown his true colors as an anti-democracy populist by supporting Trump’s false claim of a ‘stolen election.’ Hawley’s irresponsible, inflammatory, and dangerous tactics have incited violence and further discord across America. And he has now revealed himself as a political opportunist willing to subvert the Constitution and the ideals of the nation he swore to uphold.

“Hawley should be censured by his Senate colleagues for his actions which have undermined a peaceful transition of power and for provoking yesterday’s riots in our nation’s capital. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to protect our country and its Constitutional underpinnings.”

None of this means that Hawley’s bet that his recent showboating regarding “allegations” won’t pay off with Republican voters in 2024, or moreover, that the blowback he is experiencing now won’t pay dividends in  that campaign. But at this stage, the Republican Party is split in two and (at least for the time being) the bet that Hawley and Cruz made is hardly a sure thing.

(Image above headline: KSDK TV.)

2020 General Election, Democracy, Off the Rails, Republicans

An unhinged President continues his efforts to overthrow the free and fair election that he lost

With fewer than 16 days left in his term, Donald Trump continues to try to wheedle, bully, beseech, and whine his way into staying in office beyond January 20, when Joe Biden is sworn in — as revealed in the recording of an hour long phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (reminiscent of his call to Ukrainian President Zelensky).

“We won very substantially in Georgia. You even see it by rally size, frankly. We’d be getting 25-30,000 people a rally, and the competition would get less than 100 people. And it never made any sense.”

In addition to rally size, Trump made many disparate appeals — to rumors, social media trends, conspiracy theories, and lies, none of which were grounded in fact, evidence, or reason.

A rambling Trump brought up 250-300,000 mysteriously lost ballots; a couple hundred thousand forged signatures; the promise of providing an accurate number – in the 50s of thousands – “with certified accountants”; 4,504 voters who weren’t registered; 18,325 vacant address voters; 904 with only post office box numbers; a burst water main (and vanishing Republican poll watchers); suitcases or trunks with ballots, rather than official ballot boxes; 4,925 out-of-state voters; 2,326 absentee ballots with addresses, but no names; drop boxes that were picked up, but not delivered for three days according to affidavits from many people; ballots dropped in massive numbers; close to 5,000 ballots from dead people; 300,000 fake ballots; 3,000 pounds of shredded ballots; a big issue with Dominion removing voting machines, or replacing the internal parts; a person identified on the internet as responsible for 18,000 to 56,000 phony ballots, including a “devastating” new tape showing the ballots fed through voting machines 3 times; and a “corrupt” Fulton County taking advantage of Raffensperger.

The vote margin of Biden’s win — 11,779 — is referenced multiple times, including the ask that Raffensperger somehow, someway find 11,780 votes to put Trump ahead in the count.

Trump reminds the Secretary of State that he is a Republican, calls him a child, objects that the GBI and FBI (who have found no evidence of voter fraud) are “either dishonest or incompetent,” and mocks him: “Stacey Abrams is laughing about you. She’s going around saying these guys are dumber than a rock. What she’s done to this party is unbelievable, I tell ya.”

Trump references “corrupt” ballots, warning Raffensperger:

And you are going to find that they are — which is totally illegal — it is more illegal for you than it is for them because, you know, what they did and you’re not reporting it. That’s a criminal, that’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. And that’s a big risk.

Whatever else this call reveals about the pathetic, incoherent, flailing narcissist who sits in the White House, it exposes something else: an abuse of power that clearly constitutes impeachable conduct.

The President of the United States is actively, compulsively (albeit fecklessly) intent on overturning the results of a democratic election.

A majority of the Republican caucus in the House is on board with this theft, including the minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, while nine-term member (and former judge), Louie Gohmert, responded to his loss in federal court (where he sought to overturn Trump’s defeat) with these words: “But if bottom line is, the court is saying, ‘We’re not gonna touch this. You have no remedy’ — basically, in effect, the ruling would be that you gotta go to the streets and be as violent as antifa and BLM.”

In the Senate, a dozen Republicans intend to resist Biden’s victory.

A handful of Senate Republicans have spoken out against these attacks on an election that was free and fair, and in which Donald Trump lost decisively. Most prominent among these dissenters are Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse. But most national Republicans are Trump enablers — actively endorsing his conspiracy theories that Biden’s election was fraudulent; pretending that the election is in doubt, while dodging and weaving to avoid embracing the lie that Trump won; or maintaining silence, so as not to offend their vindictive leader.

Donald Trump and the Republican Party pose a grave threat to democratic governance. The GOP is seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, cast aside the votes of millions of Americans, and keep the Republican loser in power. That is fundamentally incompatible with democracy.

A full recording and transcript of the call is available from the Washington Post; the link to the recording in the first paragraph is from Atlanta’s 11Alive on YouTube.

(Screengrab of firefighter extinguishing an arson fire at a ballot drop box in Los Angeles from KCBS report.)

2020 General Election, Democracy, Republicans

Many Republicans are eager to fortify Trump’s authoritarian, anti-democratic Lost Cause

Joe Biden, the president-elect, received 81,283,098 votes in the November election, beating President Donald Trump, who received 74,222,958, by more than seven million. More critically, the Democratic candidate won the Electoral College vote 306 to 232.

Map from CNN.

● “… Trump and his allies filed at least 60 post-election lawsuits. They’ve lost 59 of these cases, and their one victory involved such a minor matter that it had little impact on the final vote tallies.”

● State and federal officials (including Trump’s Department of Homeland Security) have concluded:

“The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result. 

“When states have close elections, many will recount ballots. All of the states with close results in the 2020 presidential race have paper records of each vote, allowing the ability to go back and count each ballot if necessary. This is an added benefit for security and resilience. This process allows for the identification and correction of any mistakes or errors. There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.

● Bill Barr (before his resignation last month as Trump’s Attorney General) concluded:

To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election. . . .

There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results. And the DHS and DOJ have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that.

And yet, though there are exceptions, much of the leadership of the Republican Party refuses to reject Donald Trump’s lie (“We won the Presidential Election, by a lot.”), while often ducking and dodging to avoid straightforwardly asserting that lie. That middle ground is occupied by men and women who lack the courage of their convictions, or simply lack the principled convictions that elected officials ought to have (including the commitment to honor their oaths of office).

Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri has recently declared his intention to challenge the election outcome on January 6, when the Congress meets to certify the results of Biden’s Electoral College victory: “Millions of voters concerned about election integrity deserve to be heard. I will object on January 6 on their behalf.”

Hawley does not dispute the outcome. He denies that he is subverting the results of a popular election. Rather, he insists, “My objective in this is, as I’ve said repeatedly, is this is my one opportunity in this process to stand and be heard.”


Senator Ben Sasse suggests: ‘When we talk in private, I haven’t heard a single Congressional Republican allege that the election results were fraudulent – not one. Instead, I hear them talk about their worries about how they will “look” to President Trump’s most ardent supporters.’

Sasse continues, pointing to “a bunch of ambitious politicians,” without naming the Missouri senator who is widely expected to seek the 2024 GOP nomination for president (if Donald Trump gets out of the way) and engaged in a transparent ploy to gain support from Trump’s base (and perhaps from Trump himself):

The president and his allies are playing with fire. They have been asking – first the courts, then state legislatures, now the Congress – to overturn the results of a presidential election. They have unsuccessfully called on judges and are now calling on federal officeholders to invalidate millions and millions of votes. If you make big claims, you had better have the evidence. But the president doesn’t and neither do the institutional arsonist members of Congress who will object to the Electoral College vote.
Let’s be clear what is happening here: We have a bunch of ambitious politicians who think there’s a quick way to tap into the president’s populist base without doing any real, long-term damage. But they’re wrong – and this issue is bigger than anyone’s personal ambitions. Adults don’t point a loaded gun at the heart of legitimate self-government.

“Adults don’t…” is an interesting choice of words. But of course Hawley — a graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law School, who taught law, and served as an appellate litigator and then as Missouri’s Attorney General before his election to the U.S. Senate — is hardly a juvenile or (as Daniel Drezner has dubbed a psychologically damaged Trump) a toddler.

For better or worse, the senator — who has taken aim “at the heart of self-government” — is an adult. What he isn’t is a decent adult. Or at least: not an adult with a decent respect for our country’s democratic institutions, the Constitution, or the rule of law. He is a man so eager to advance his career, to please the base, to exploit partisanship for personal advantage, that he is willing to cast doubt on the results of the 2020 presidential election.

The junior senator from Missouri will be joined by ten additional Republican senators:

The group is led by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and also includes Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, James Lankford of Oklahoma, Steve Daines of Montana, John Kennedy of Louisiana, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Mike Braun of Indiana, and Senators-elect Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.

“When people show you who they are, believe them.” We know who Josh Hawley is. And Ted Cruz and Ron Johnson and Steve Daines and John Kennedy and Marsha Blackburn and Mike Braun and Cynthia Lummis and Roger Marshall and Bill Hagerty and Tommy Tuberville.

Donald Trump, Republicans

Is it time for a Barr reappraisal? Not a chance.

A headline at TPM’s Editor’s Blog asks, “A Barr Reappraisal?” and suggests an affirmative response from a reader, based on the recent report that the investigation of Hunter Biden, begun in 2018, was kept secret (from the press and the President). Reader JG suggests, since the investigation (if made public) “would have been weaponized in the campaign,” we must give Barr credit for keeping it under wraps. JG offers the view that Barr has used “DoJ as a shield for Trump, not a sword to go after political enemies.”

Josh Marshall is skeptical, “I need to see a lot more to convince me we’re getting the full or true story here. As it is the facts just run too counter to Barr’s tenure and that of the DOJ for the last four years. Something does not add up.”

I agree and suggest an alternative to JG’s view: Just because something could be “weaponized,” it doesn’t follow that it would be effective politically to weaponize it (as the Trump campaign certainly would have done). Bill Barr has reason to regard himself as a savvier operator than most of the sycophants surrounding Trump. It is hardly a stretch to believe that in his judgment revealing the indictment would have generated as many votes for Biden as for Trump. (Furthermore, Barr stayed out of the line of fire — from Democrats, the press, Trump, and Trump’s accolytes — by keeping the report quiet. There is little reason to think that any flak from a leak would have “effected a different outcome in the election,” to borrow a phrase.) And so Barr didn’t leak the report before the election.

Whether this pragmatic judgment is right or wrong, it’s defensible; and furthermore, given the evidence of the past year and a half, it’s a more plausible account of Barr’s motivation than the idea that he kept the indictment secret because ethical or professional or reputational constraints held him back.

It is far more likely that he saw no point in releasing the information, no clear advantage to the Trump campaign. It’s laughable, after all we’ve seen since Barr came on board, to think that leaking an investigation of Joe Biden’s son was a bridge too far for the A.G.

Last week, Bill Barr said, “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” separating himself from Trump. While this is striking, in the sense that Barr has acted, at times, like another Trump sycophant. He is not and never was simply a Trump flunky.

Instead, he has been a devoted partisan of the Republican Party. That partisanship led to his defenses of the Republican president — when the the party’s and Trump’s interests coincided (fortifying a strong executive, undermining the Mueller investigation, pushing back against Nancy Pelosi’s House, and so on).

As I posted earlier, “Bill Barr is carrying water for the Republican Party ….” Trump’s interests (to salve his wounded ego and pump up his brand) and the GOP’s interests (winning two senate seats) diverged in a way that frightened the Republican Congressional leadership. So — placing party first, as he has always done — Barr separated himself from Trump.

There’s no paradox, no change of heart, no signs of “Barr’s limits” (in Marshall’s words). There’s an unflagging allegiance to the Grand Old Party. Same as it ever was for Bill Barr — going back decades.

(Image: Bill Barr and Donald Trump at the 38th Annual National Peace Officers’ Memorial Service via Wikimedia Commons.)

2020 General Election, Democracy, Donald Trump, Off the Rails, Republicans

The Republican Party has become an authoritarian threat to our nation’s democracy

Since Election Day, State and Federal courts throughout the country have been flooded with frivolous lawsuits aimed at disenfranchising large swaths of voters and undermining the legitimacy of the election. The State of Texas has now added its voice to the cacophony of bogus claims. Texas seeks to invalidate elections in four states for yielding results with which it disagrees. Its request for this Court to exercise its original jurisdiction and then anoint Texas’s preferred candidate for President is legally indefensible and is an afront to principles of constitutional democracy.

. . .

Texas’s effort to get this Court to pick the next President has no basis in law or fact. The Court should not abide this seditious abuse of the judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated. — Attorney General Josh Shapiro, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

The quotation (the first and last paragraphs of the preliminary statement) is from Pennsylvania’s response to the suit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that asks the Supreme Court to prohibit four battleground states where Biden beat Trump – Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin – from appointing electors to the Electoral College based on the results of the election. Instead, Texas proposes a do-over, asking the court to order each of the four states to call a special election, which would determine the selection of electors.

Seventeen Eighteen states have joined Texas’s appeal.

One hundred and six House Republicans (over half the caucus) filed an amicus brief in support of the lawsuit. [Update: the number has reached 126.]

Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks is seeking allies in the House (and Senate) to cast votes against official certification of the Electoral College results. 

“In my judgment, based on what I know to be true, Joe Biden was the largest beneficiary of illegally cast votes in the history of the United States,” Brooks said in a phone interview with AL.com today. “And I can either ratify that illegal vote system, or I can object to it, in hopes that our election system will become more secure in future elections.”

Seventy five members of the Pennsylvania state legislature (from both chambers) signed a letter asking their Members of Congress to reject certification of Pennsylvania’s Electoral College votes for Joe Biden.

Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, each seeking reelection on January 5, have declared their support for the Texas lawsuit.

Almost all Republicans in both the Senate and the House, including leaders Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, continue to play along with Trump’s defiance of the election results, refusing to acknowledge Joe Biden as president-elect.

A whining, blustering Donald Trump is throwing a tantrum over his defeat at the hands of Joe Biden. The President of the United States is determined to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He is acting openly, persistently, in plain sight.

Governors, legislators, attorneys general, party leaders, and others have heard from a desperate Trump, who has sought to have Republican-controlled state legislatures nullify the decision their voters made.

Though his efforts, in the courts and among state officials, to throw out votes have met with consistent failure, Trump’s rampage represents a frightening erosion of democratic principles and practices. Yes, state election officials have stood firm. (This time.) But this threat to democratic governance is far more consequential for having found such broad support across the Republican Party at the national, state, and local level.

The voices we are hearing are not marginal figures in the Republican Party. Nor are the elected Republicans who have chosen to give tacit backing to Trump’s fever dreams. This is the primary message of the party right now — weeks after the results of the election have become clear. What we are witnessing is not a fringe movement within the party. This fierce fight against democracy — against the sanctity of elections and accepting the possibility of victory by ones opponents — has been embraced by the Republican Party.

The GOP’s party line is beyond the pale — beyond reason, facts and evidence, and democratic principles. The Arizona Republican Party asks whether its followers are ready to give their lives for the fight against the Trump loss in a democratic election.

https://twitter.com/AZGOP/status/1336186861891452929

Georgia Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue are the last candidates standing in the way of Democratic control of the Senate. While Perdue is in hiding, Loeffler’s campaign consists of repeating, like incantations, scary names for her opponent and an insistence that the 2020 election was fraudulent.

https://twitter.com/martin_samoylov/status/1335824066666770433?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

The campaign message in Georgia (an increasingly diverse state with enough Democratic constituencies to appear more like the nation, and less like the solid South that Republican pols have become used to) is the message of the national Republican Party.

And, unsurprisingly, the Republican majority of the Georgia state senate has responded to Trump’s loss with promises of investigations of “fraudulent activities,” “misconduct,” “criminals” (purported out-of- staters who may have infiltrated into the state to cast votes), and — of course — additional proposals to suppress the vote and reduce turnout in future elections:

As soon as we may constitutionally convene, we will reform our election laws to secure our electoral process by eliminating at-will absentee voting. We will require photo identification for absentee voting for cause, and we will crack down on ballot harvesting by outlawing drop boxes. 

The Republican Party, trafficking in “discredited allegations and conspiracy theories,” is furiously pushing back against the results of the 2020 presidential election.

That the grounds for overturning the election are flimsy, that the efforts are meeting with failure after failure, that it is tempting to regard the whole spectacle as pathetic and ridiculous — none of this diminishes the indecency of the GOP’s refusal to acknowledge the outcome of the election.

These are the actions of a political party that has become authoritarian. That transformation constitutes a grave threat to our democracy, to “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

2020 General Election, Democracy, Donald Trump, Republicans

Grand old Party sees only traditional American politics as usual in Trump’s lies and rampages

President Trump called Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) on Saturday morning to urge him to persuade the state legislature to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the state and asked the governor to order an audit of absentee ballot signatures, the latest brazen effort by the president to interfere in the 2020 election.

Hours before he is scheduled to hold a rally in Georgia on behalf of the state’s two GOP senators, Trump pressed Kemp to call a special session of the state legislature to get lawmakers to override the results and appoint electors that would back him, according to a person familiar with the conversation. He also asked the governor to demand an audit of signatures on mail ballots, something Kemp has previously noted he has no power to do. — Amy Gardner and Colby Itkowitz, “Trump calls Georgia governor to pressure him for help overturning Biden’s win in the state”

More than 2,900 Americans died of COVID-19 on December 3, one month after the election. The death toll has topped 2,600 every day this month, while the United States leads the world in overall fatalities at more than 285,000. The President of the United States — who predicted that the virus would “disappear” and asserted that it would no longer be featured in the media after November 3 — has demonstrated complete indifference to the raging pandemic since his defeat in the election. Instead he throws holiday parties in the White House.

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, in How Democracies Die (written during the first year of the Trump administration) suggest, “Perhaps President Trump’s most notorious norm-breaking behavior has been lying.” Certainly the man has proven to be a prodigious liar; as of October 22 — reflecting the most recent update — Trump had told more than 22,247 whoppers since the inaugural.

Note also Donald Trump’s disregard for the welfare of the American people and refusal to serve the public interest — as we can plainly observe — which constitute among the most egregious violations of the governing norms that other presidents have adhered to. We have, before Trump, taken for granted that our presidents were committed to acting in our best interests.

This president is hell-bent on evading the decision of the electorate to remove him from office and put Joe Biden in the White House. His torrent of lies, attacks, and conspiracy tales in recent weeks have focused on discrediting the electoral process, denying the outcome, and — as in his phone call to Governor Kemp — to overturning the decision of the people.

This behavior is straight out of the authoritarian handbook. Trump lost the election. His off the rails conduct to fend off this fact does grave damage to democratic institutions, Americans’ trust in the integrity of our elections, and the nation’s standing in the world.

This would all be bad enough. The damage is compounded by the complicity of the Republican Party, whose leadership (with few exceptions) has made the decision to go along to get along with the Republican in the White House. Consider the 249 elected Republicans in the House and the Senate:

Just 27 congressional Republicans acknowledge Joe Biden’s win over President Trump a month after the former vice president’s clear victory of more than 7 million votes nationally and a convincing electoral-vote margin that exactly matched Trump’s 2016 tally.

Two Republicans consider Trump the winner despite all evidence showing otherwise. And another 220 GOP members of the House and Senate — about 88 percent of all Republicans serving in Congress — will simply not say who won the election.

Those are the findings of a Washington Post survey of all 249 Republicans in the House and Senate that began the morning after Trump posted a 46-minute video Wednesday evening in which he wrongly claimed he had defeated Biden and leveled wild and unsubstantiated allegations of “corrupt forces” who stole the outcome from the sitting president. — Paul Kane and Scott Clement, “Just 27 congressional Republicans acknowledge Biden’s win, Washington Post survey finds”

The lies, the disregard of the public good, the defiance of a free and fair election — these are the acts of a would-be authoritarian strongman, not a leader committed to democracy — no matter the wishes of the Republican base.

 As Levitsky and Ziblatt observe, it is political parties that sustain governing norms threatened by authoritarian incursions. Responsibility for opposing extremists, and upholding democratic institutions, falls on our political parties.

Potential demagogues exist in all democracies, and occasionally, one or more of them strike a public chord. But in some democracies, political leaders heed the warning signs and take steps to ensure that authoritarians remain on the fringes, far from the centers of power. When faced with the rise of extremists or demagogues, they make a concerted effort to isolate and defeat them. Although mass responses to extremist appeals matter, what matters more is whether political elites, and especially parties, serve as filters. Put simply, political parties are democracy’s gatekeepers.

The Republican Party has absolutely failed to safeguard democracy. After limited efforts at constraining Trump fell short, the GOP has chosen to remain loyal to an erratic, reckless leader. To do otherwise, as Levitsky and Ziblatt observe, would damage careers. So:

. . . Trump’s deviance has been tolerated by the Republican Party, which has helped make it acceptable to much of the Republican electorate. . . . There is no “containment” strategy for an endless stream of offensive tweets. Unwilling to pay the political price of breaking with their own president, Republicans find themselves with little alternative but to constantly redefine what is and isn’t tolerable.

Recall that this was written during Trump’s first year in office. By the end of 2020 — in a process accelerated following a near party-line vote to acquit an impeached president — the ongoing redefining required thrashing core democratic institutions, such as fealty to the results of free and fair elections; graceful, timely embrace of the peaceful transition of power; and (as outlandish as it appears today) doing what one could to ensure the success, for the benefit of the American people, of the incoming president. Instead, Trump is deliberately sabotaging his successor — through vindictive purges, frantic rulemaking, capricious national security actions, and — by doing nothing, except boxing Biden in – ensuring that both the raging pandemic and the faltering economy are far less manageable on January 20, than they are today.

All this — with the GOP’s silent blessing — has been redefined as American politics as usual. Citing Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s concept of defining deviance down, Levitsky and Ziblatt observe, “in the face of widespread deviance, we become overwhelmed—and then desensitized. We grow accustomed to what we previously thought to be scandalous.”

The Republican Party, in the wake of Donald Trump, sees no scandals among its partisans (though mean tweets from Neera Tanden may threaten her cabinet appointment).

(Image: Trump in Georgia via NBC News.)