Caught between an angry president convincing millions of people that the election was stolen on one side, and reality on the other side, Republican senators have plotted out a path through the middle to avoid enraging their supporters: Settle in, do nothing, and wait for this all to blow over.
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But outside of a handful of die-hard Trump loyalists led by Rudy Giuliani, no one is getting tough. Republicans widely accept the results of the election, but rather than saying so, they defer to the president’s right to exhaust his legal challenges. Republicans who have dared articulate that President-elect Joe Biden won the election have earned blistering attacks or thinly veiled threats from the president.
Nothing in the article confirms the clickbait headline: Republican Senators Say It’s Not Their Job To Actually Tell People That Biden Won The Election.
Still, I agree it is not their job … every time a troll complains, “Why didn’t you mention when Democrats did [blank], HUH?!” I think, because it’s not my job to do your messaging for you.
Still, it is Republican officials’ duty not to undermine the republic they swore to “support and defend … against all enemies, foreign and domestic” in “true faith and allegiance.” That’s not asking too much, is it?
But pushing back on the outgoing president’s fiction that Democrats stole the election from him is too much to ask, apparently. And they have a ready excuse for not doing so.
“Democrats for eight years called George Bush an illegitimate president. Even when he was reelected they called him an illegitimate president,” said Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford, referencing the 2000 Florida recount famously ended by a Republican majority on the Supreme Court.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, a loyal supporter of President Trump’s who just won reelection, presented half the country rejecting election results as a possible new normal. People who hated Trump spent years arguing that he was illegitimately brought to power by Russian election interference, he said.
My memory might be a bit fuzzy or my hearing bad. Bitterness over the Florida recount and the Supreme Court’s intervention I remember. Questions about Russian interference in 2016 I remember. But I don’t recall hearing what Lankford and Graham claim they heard about illegitimacy. Not from Democrats of any prominence, anyway. It all sounds like the “evidence” with which Rudy Giuliani and his legal buzzards just lost their 45th case. Argument by anecdote and bald-faced assertion. I could be wrong. They never admit to being wrong.
A close friend used to have this joke he made in response to unsupported assertions like these. His stock response was, “Oh, yeah? Name five.”