Last updated on July 18th, 2023 at 01:50 pm
We have all heard the odd cry now and then from Mike Lindell or Steven Bannon about the ongoing attempts to decertify certain states’ votes from the 2020 election. They are easily shaken off, there is absolutely no Constitutional mechanism, nor an evidentiary threat to Joe Biden’s victory. Biden is president until January 20th of 2025. But there is a serious underlying effort that has been taken on by certain state legislators to go through the process to decertify the victory anyway and that ongoing effort threatens every election in the United States from this point forward.
The idea that states can alter their vote after the fact, largely based upon the sheer willpower to do it, has infected the body politic. Except there is only one side that believes in its use. Only one side sees it as a necessary tool and not a fascist nightmare. It is the side that attempted the last coup.
According to a New York Times report released late yesterday, experts are taking the threat extremely seriously, believing that our government’s structure is on the line:
“At the moment, there is no other way to say it: This is the clearest and most present danger to our democracy,” said J. Michael Luttig, a leading conservative lawyer and former appeals court judge, for whom Mr. Eastman clerked and whom President George W. Bush considered as a nominee to be the chief justice of the United States. “Trump and his supporters in Congress and in the states are preparing now to lay the groundwork to overturn the election in 2024 were Trump, or his designee, to lose the vote for the presidency.”
Consider this. Since 1992, the Republicans have won a majority in the vote for president once. In 2004, George W. Bush got more overall votes for president than John Kerry. In every other election, the Democrats won the popular vote with the Republicans relying solely on the outdated and dangerous Electoral College to win. Now, even that might not be enough. The GOP no longer even considers the possibility of winning the popular vote and went into 2020 with the assumption that Joe Biden would have three to six million more total votes, a sign that one’s democracy is already weak and, quite possibly, no longer a democracy.
The GOP-MAGA party recognizes it is a permanent minority party and its current efforts are directed at the means of retaining power without respect to votes. Even in the Senate, currently “50-50,” the Democrats represent 70 million more people. To the GOP-MAGAs, winning power is less about winning votes so much as being declared the victor. Remember Georgia and the phone call? “All we need to do is find…”
The ongoing effort to decertify 2020 is less about reinstating Trump and more about keeping MAGA-Republicans in the Oval Office into the future utilizing the powerful tools they have to do just that.
“There are a lot of things still percolating,” Mr. Eastman said in an interview with The New York Times last fall.
The fringe legal theory that Mr. Eastman and Mr. Epshteyn are promoting — which has been widely dismissed — holds that state lawmakers have the power to choose how electors are selected, and they can change them long after the Electoral College has certified votes if they find fraud and illegality sufficiently altered the outcome. The theory has surfaced in multiple states, including several that are political battlegrounds.
It would not be a problem if it were only a fringe theory among the MAGA rally-goers. It is a problem because the “fringe” referenced in the article exists within state legislators and in Trump-backed candidates for Secretary of State and other state positions, particularly concentrated in those “problematic” states that Trump lost. The other danger, one not addressed by the New York Times but should have been, there is no reason that the same reasoning won’t be applied to the 2022 race for the Senate, or even the House if it is close enough.
Lingering underneath all this is a terrified group of “patriots” frantically trying to keep their grip on power. They do not have time to set forth policies. As PoliticusUSA Editor In Chief Sarah Jones wrote over the weekend, the GOP doesn’t have a platform that goes beyond “stopping” the Democrats. And that’s where we see the unholy marriage. A permanent minority party committed solely to “doing what we want” (As evidenced by the 2020 Republican platform, they didn’t have one. They can’t know ahead of time what Trump will want). It is the perfect environment in which to nurture burgeoning fascism. Need it even be said that this same group is far more violent in nature than the opposition? Or that the MAGAs will be more willing to use violence in 2024 than 2020?
This is why the seemingly “stupid” and “giggle-worthy” efforts to decertify the 2020 election within certain states aren’t funny but present a clear and present danger to democracy. It is also why Merrick Garland’s inaction is now quickly becoming a clear and present danger, too.
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