Tag Archives: Democratic Norms

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.

Off the Rails, Republicans

Republicans have become as thoroughly shameless as the President they defend

As the Washington Post headline reminds us, the lack of shame confers political advantage. Donald Trump is shameless. Republicans’ defense of Trump – of his assault on truth, the rule of law, and institutional safeguards that preserve our democracy – is not possible without shedding all sense of shame.

In 2015 Jack Shafer of Politico, analyzing Trump’s “ability to wipe yesterday’s slate clean but suffer little political damage,” observed, “You can’t shame a shameless man.” In 2017, Jack Goldsmith of the Atlantic wrote, “A corollary to Trump’s shamelessness is that he often doesn’t seek to hide or even spin his norm-breaking.” The Republican Party circa 2019, the party of Trump, is all-in with the shameless trashing of democratic norms.

After delivery of a searing report by Robert Mueller (a man with a sterling career of public service, from Marine Corps officer in Vietnam to Director of the FBI, whose integrity was accepted by both Republicans and Democrats in Washington) concluded, “The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion,” and “established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome,” Republicans (once the party of ‘law and order’ and of staunch opposition to U.S. adversaries abroad) are now undaunted by the spectacle of a lawless president elected with the help of Russia.

William Barr, the consensus view had it, was a well-regarded, old-school institutionalist returning to the Justice Department as he neared retirement. Certainly, he would be concerned with his reputation and place in history. He would step up to embrace the role of Attorney General of the United States at a time – with a president, hostile to the rule of law, who had attacked the FBI, the intelligence agencies, Justice Department, and even the courts – when the nation needed a reassuring presence. Didn’t happen. Barr chose another course.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, ignoring a heretofore unimaginable number of contacts between Russian agents and Trump campaign operatives, and ten prima facie episodes of obstruction of justice by the President, declares, “Case closed. Case closed.” (McConnell, of course, may be the political archetype of the shameless partisan.)

Chairman Lindsay Graham of the Senate Judiciary Committee, once a Trump critic and a loud, proud defender of national security, is on the same page as McConnell. “The Mueller Report is over for me. Done.”

While Graham and McConnell feign an interest in repelling foreign interference in American elections, the President’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, doesn’t bother. He publicly announced – never mind that he walked it back, a Giuliani mannerism: he has already signaled to our foreign foe what he wants – that he intended to press the Ukrainian government to open an investigation into a Democratic presidential contender:

“There’s nothing illegal about it,” he said. “Somebody could say it’s improper. And this isn’t foreign policy — I’m asking them to do an investigation that they’re doing already and that other people are telling them to stop. And I’m going to give them reasons why they shouldn’t stop it because that information will be very, very helpful to my client, and may turn out to be helpful to my government.”

And this week, when information came to light that the Senate Intelligence Committee – which traditionally has functioned in a bipartisan way, because the nation’s security is not a partisan issue – has subpoenaed Donald J. Trump, Jr. to return as a witness (after apparent conflicts in his previous testimony with other witnesses and documented evidence, and DJTJ declined to return voluntarily), so the committee can clarify the role of Russia in the attack on our country, Chairman Richard Burr was pilloried by a host of his fellow Republicans in the Senate and the House. That doesn’t happen very often, but defense of Trump requires it. The mob included Senators Rand Paul, Tom Tillis, and John Cornyn, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, and Chairman of the Freedom Caucus in the House, Mark Meadows.

When Trump’s campaign began, most Republican leaders kept their distance (and a modicum of self-respect). At the beginning of his presidency, Trump still faced occasional push-back from Congressional Republicans, among others, who valued their professional reputations. Post-Mueller, the Trumpification of the Republican Party is virtually complete.

Donald Trump, Off the Rails, Republicans

Taken for granted: Trump holds himself above the law and the GOP supports him

Quote of the day:

“It is by now simply taken for granted that this president holds himself above legal accountability and that his party will support him to the hilt.” — Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine

Context: the House Ways and Means Committee makes a written request for Donald Trump’s tax forms; the law clearly authorizes this request. Senator Chuck Grassley, Chair of the Finance Committee criticizes Congressional Democrats because they “dislike” Trump.

As Chait summarizes, this is an entrenched pattern (which the media more or less shrugs off as the new normal):

“Grassley is fixating on the motivation of Congress to obtain Trump’s taxes, while ignoring Trump’s own motivation to hide them, so that he can steer the conversation away from the obvious solution — from the standpoint of both the public good and the letter of the law. This is the method Republicans have used to justify every debasement of norms and the law Trump has undertaken: Drain the question of any neutral principle and reduce it to a simple struggle of us versus them. And the more gross and unjustifiable Trump’s behavior, the more Democrats resent him, which gives Republicans all the more reason to defend him.”