Photo credit: Oliver Willis
United States Supreme Court Building
Anyone who thought the dangerous threat to American democracy would end when President Donald Trump was defeated for re-election by the largest opposition vote in history was sadly mistaken. Trump has so corrupted his political party a huge majority of elected Republicans now publicly support his supercharged attempt to completely destroy our nation’s most basic democratic principles including the right to vote.
Whatever other personal reasons Trump might have for promoting the interests of Russia, which actively supported his election, he clearly shares their anti-democratic, authoritarian tendencies. So do an increasing number of former strongly anti-communist Republican politicians.
Nearly two-thirds of House Republicans—126 out of 196—and Republican attorneys general in 18 states signed onto an absolutely ridiculous lawsuit without any evidence or legal basis brought by Texas Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton. Paxton sought to throw out every legally cast vote in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia — disenfranchising nearly 20,500,000 Americans, both Democrats and Republicans—to reverse the outcome of the presidential election. By eliminating the actual votes, Paxton wanted Republican-controlled legislatures to award those states’ 62 electoral votes to Trump instead of Joe Biden who won them.
Appallingly, 19 radical rightwing Republican congressmen supported abolishing voting rights in their own home states including Wisconsin Congressman Tom Tiffany joined by seven other elected Republican House members in Georgia, seven in Pennsylvania and four in Michigan.
Supreme Court Rejects “The Big One”
Within hours after an emergency hearing, the U.S. Supreme Court made the only decision it could to retain any legal integrity. It unanimously turned down the case with a brief, unsigned statement that Paxton had no legal standing to abolish elections in other states. Paxton absurdly argued he had no evidence of election fraud because the four states “violated the law by systematically loosening the measures for ballot integrity so that fraud becomes undetectable.”
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The swift Supreme Court rejection of Paxton’s nutty, off-the-wall lawsuit that Trump called “the Big One” could be the court’s final word on all the nonsensical Trump lawsuits fraudulently claiming vote fraud. The Supreme Court now has the most extreme rightwing 6-3 majority it’s had in decades after adding three Trump appointees. But none of them were willing to totally ignore the U.S. Constitution and overturn Biden’s huge victory by more than seven million votes and 74 electoral votes. More than 50 state and federal courts had already ruled against Trump’s lawsuits, often with scathing opinions citing the total lack of legal and factual evidence. That included 38 judges appointed by Republicans, including by Trump himself.
The most recent was Saturday when Wisconsin Federal District Judge Brett Ludwig, appointed by Trump in September, dismissed what he described as an “extraordinary” attempt to throw out Wisconsin’s votes. “A sitting president who did not prevail in his bid for re-election has asked for federal court help in setting aside the popular vote based on disputed issues of election administration, issues he plainly could have raised before the vote occurred,” Ludwig wrote. “This Court has allowed plaintiff the chance to make his case and he has lost on the merits.” Ludwig added Trump asked for the rule of law to be followed. “It has been.”
That’s the good news. Despite Trump appointing more than 200 judges rushed through confirmation by Republican Senate Majority Mitch McConnell, those two haven’t succeeded in totally destroying the rule of law in our courts. The incredibly bad news is other elected Republicans appear determined to continue their assault on American democracy long after Trump is carried bodily from the White House if necessary still falsely protesting he won the election.
9/11 for Democracy
Trump didn’t invent Republican opposition to democracy and suppression of voting rights. President Richard Nixon betrayed the party of Lincoln by welcoming into the party white, racist, southern Democrats abandoning President Lyndon Johnson and northern Democrats for supporting civil rights and voting rights in the 1960s. But Trump’s crude, explicit racism has attracted more dangerous, violent, white nationalists to the party including Klansmen, neo-Nazis and newly formed fascist groups like the Proud Boys. Republicans now depend upon that support to win elections. Those same armed supporters are now threatening and stalking election officials and vote counters because Trump lost.
Steve Schmidt, the veteran Republican political strategist who ran Republican nominee John McCain’s presidential campaign and a founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, calls the support of elected Republicans for disenfranchising tens of millions of U.S. voters a historic 9/11 moment for American democracy: “We’re now one election away from losing our country to people who no longer believe in democracy.”
Stuart Stevens, another veteran Republican strategist and Lincoln Project founder, wrote “It Was All a Lie,” a book about Trump’s takeover of his party. “The Republican Party has adopted an attitude that if democracy helps them be in power, then, fine, they’re for democracy,” Stevens said. “If it blocks them from being in power, they’re against democracy.”
