Daily Archives: December 8, 2020

This Is Sedition

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Today is supposed to be “safe harbor day,” the day states are supposed to have their election results settled and certified and their electors chosen. And I believe all have done so; I can’t find any exceptions. Trump’s lawsuits have continued to crash and burn. One of my Facebook friends quipped that our president-elect has won Georgia so many times they’re calling him Joseph Tecumseh Biden.

Naturally, the Attorney General of Texas has just filed another suit to overturn the election.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing four battleground states — Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — whose election results handed the White House to President-elect Joe Biden.

In the suit, he claims that pandemic-era changes to election procedures in those states violated federal law, and asks the U.S. Supreme Court to block the states from voting in the Electoral College.

Legal experts politiely call this suit a “long shot.” Others call it a “publicity stunt.” And “bonkers.” Note that AG Paxton is under investigation by the FBI for “bribery” and “abuse of office.”

At least AG Paxton is going through the courts. The Arizona Republican Party is calling for insurrection.

There was another Arizona Republican Party tweet that more explicitly called for killing Biden supporters, but that one was removed.

Greg Sargent makes a critical point:

What Republican voters think, or say they think, about who really won matters less than the fact that, as a consequence, they actively want their elected representatives to subvert our democracy and keep Trump in power illegitimately. …

…For instance, The Post reports, protesters have descended on the houses of the GOP state House speaker in Pennsylvania and the Democratic secretary of state in Michigan, chanting, “Stop the steal.” Some have been armed.

That Pennsylvania official has received thousands and thousands of voice mails, prompting his office to describe the pressure on him as “intense.” And the Michigan secretary of state has said her 4-year-old child felt threatened.

More broadly, as Reuters reports, “Elections officials across the United States” have described a “tide of intimidation, harassment and outright threats.”

As always, the Republican Party pays no political price for this behavior.

To excuse the right-wing extremism, many have pointed out that Democrats have raised questions about past elections. The 2000 presidential election is a prime example. Yes, a lot of us think Al Gore was the rightful winner of that election. But I don’t recall anyone in the Democratic Party urging us to go out and start killing Republicans. There was some bitching and grumbling, Al Gore conceded, and then George W. Bush was inaugurated.

Michelle Goldberg recalls the nationwide pearl-clutching that went on after then White House press secretary Sarah Sanders was refused service at a restaurant, and after the homeland security secretary who had overseen child separations was yelled at by a customer in another restaurant.

These two insults launched a thousand thumb-suckers about civility. More than one conservative writer warned liberals that the refusal to let Trump officials eat in peace could lead to Trump’s re-election. “The political question of the moment,” opined Daniel Henninger in The Wall Street Journal, is this: ‘Can the Democratic Party control its left?’”

Somehow, though, few are asking the same question of Republicans as Trump devotees terrorize election workers and state officials over the president’s relentless lies about voter fraud.

And in those previous cases, the perpetrators of the outrage were not Democratic Party officials but private citizens. Now actual Republican officials are calling for violence against Biden supporters. We’re supposed to just accept this as normal and justified.

And it keeps escalating.

Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, described her family’s experience this past weekend: “As my 4-year-old son and I were finishing up decorating the house for Christmas on Saturday night, and he was about to sit down and to watch ‘How the Grinch Stole Christmas,’ dozens of armed individuals stood outside my home shouting obscenities and chanting into bullhorns in the dark of night.”

So far, what happened to Benson doesn’t appear to be turning into a big cultural moment. There’s no frisson of the new about it; it’s pretty routine for Trumpists to threaten and intimidate people who work in both public health and election administration.

Remember the St. Francois County public health director who was bullied into resigning? (You can read here what she went through.) I take it there has been no effort whatsoever to find out who threatened her. The bullies won.

Back to Michelle Goldberg.

Democrats have just won the popular vote in the seventh out of the last eight presidential elections. In the aftermath, analysts have overwhelmingly focused on what Democrats, not Republicans, must do to broaden their appeal. Partly, this stems from knee-jerk assumptions about the authenticity of the so-called heartland. But it’s also just math — only one of our political parties needs to win an overwhelming national majority in order to govern.

I like that “knee-jerk assumptions about the authenticity of the so-called heartland.” You don’t get any more “heartland” than St. Francois County, Missouri. Even the bullied county health official said “I know in my heart these are good people.” Oh, hell, no, they are not. They are ignorant thugs who get off on being thugs and who are allowed to get away with being thugs. This national myth of the virtuous all-American “heartland” versus the alien and corrupt “elitist coastal cities” has got to stop. I’ve lived among so-called heartlanders and in New York City, and while individuals vary on the whole I’ll take New Yorkers in a heartbeat.

Republican officials remain buffered from the consequences of their rhetoric. They continue to at least wink at, if not openly encourage, violence and lawlessnes, and they don’t have to answer for it. I believe all Democrats running for office this year were pushed to publicly state they don’t condone violent protests, but Republicans get a pass from news media and the general public at intimidation and threats of public officials.

If Republicans are facing consequences, it’s within their own ranks.

State party chairs are tearing into their governors. Elected officials are knifing one another in the back. Failed candidates are seizing on Trump’s rhetoric to claim they were also victims of voter fraud in at least a half dozen states.

If Trump’s attempts at overturning the election — which are ongoing, I should note — had succeeded, there would never be another normal election in this country again. However, it’s also the case that Lou Dobbs and Stephen Miller had a screaming fit at each other, which is worth something, I suppose.

But when’s it going to stop? Members of the Trump Administration are still dragging their feet at cooperating with the transition. Congressional Republican leadership is still refusing to acknowledge that Biden won the election. The election was five weeks ago. News outlets called it a month ago.

All kinds of excuses have been made for the GOP’s spineless deferral to Trump’s attempts at a coup. We’re all supposed to give them time to adjust. And for some reason only Democrats are ever held accountable for the bad actions of their supporters; that’s been true for a long time. But the Republicans are playing with fire, and we are not at all out of danger yet. We won’t be for a while.