Don’t forget these men’s names. In the not too distant future we will be asked to take them seriously and the media will treat them with respect. And we must remind ourselves and everyone else just how fatuously sycophantic they were when it really counted:
“There was fraud in this election,” said Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chair of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, who called the controversial hearing and said Monday that he acknowledged Biden’s win. “I don’t have any doubt about that.”
It’s a nebulous argument, made without proof, that allows the receiver to make what they want of it. Coming a day after Biden won the electoral college, it seems like an attempt to bridge Trump and his most hardcore allies, who seem to truly want to believe in widespread election fraud, with the reality that there was none, and with shades in between.
Johnson invited several Trump lawyers who had lost cases in courts in several different states to restate the claims that the courts deemed not credible — including on the merits of the actual fraud claims: that people voted twice, dead people voted, poll workers weren’t allowed to watch, etc.
One lawyer for the Trump campaign who testified Wednesday had his lawsuit thrown out by a Nevada judge who examined the claims and decided that the campaign, for all its efforts, “did not prove under any standard of proof that illegal votes were cast and counted.”
The judge, as many others have, also derided witness statements the Trump campaign submitted about potential fraud as “self-serving statements of little or no evidentiary value.” In other words, useless.
Yet Senate Republicans in this hearing were willing to use the fact that those statements exist to say that something must be wrong if people were willing to make them. They didn’t go as far as Trump in straight-up saying that the election was stolen. But they were willing to inject the question of whether there was fraud deeper into the political conversation, which allows it to be easily conflated with the false claims of a president who has systematically tried to undermine the democratic process at every turn.
“I think it’s the right thing to do to get people to feel comfortable that elections are free and fair,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said of holding the hearing. “And if this one wasn’t that, the next one will be.”“Fraud happened,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said, without evidence. “The election in many ways was stolen.”
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) even tried to use the fact that a majority of Republican voters believe the election was rigged as proof that it might have been: “Yesterday I was talking from the state of Missouri with some of the constituents back at home, a group of about 30 people. Every single one of them, every one of them told me that they felt they had been disenfranchised, that their votes didn’t matter, that the election had been rigged. These are normal, reasonable people. These are not crazy people.”
They may not be crazy but they have been brainwashed by Donald Trump and right wing media — and Josh Hawley knows that. In fact, he has helped brainwash them. It is his fault for failing to tell his constituents the truth.
At some point all these people are going to stake a claim to leadership and expect people to fall in line behind him. But when it counted, when they could have been brave enough to help their constituents believe in reality, when they could have stood up for democracy and the constitution, they opted for the cynical easy path to maintain their power. (Well, all but Ron Johnson who really seems to be brainwashed himself — there’s something very wrong with him, always has been.)
Here are some highlights of that hearing. WTF is happening to our country?
Remember their names.
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