Republicans have not only decided Democratic victories are illegitimate, they have assembled a playbook for prosecuting their case.
Jamelle Bouie reminds NYT readers this morning how this playbook has developed over the last 30 years:
It’s a story of escalation, from the relentless obstruction of the Gingrich era to the effort to impeach Bill Clinton to the attempt to nullify the presidency of Barack Obama and on to the struggle, however doomed, to keep Joe Biden from ever sitting in the White House as president. It also goes beyond national politics. In 2016, after a Democrat, Roy Cooper, defeated the Republican incumbent Pat McCrory for the governorship of North Carolina, the state’s Republican legislature promptly stripped the office of power and authority. Wisconsin Republicans did the same in 2018 after Tony Evers unseated Scott Walker in his bid for a third term. And Michigan Republicans took similar steps against another Democrat, Gretchen Whitmer, after her successful race for the governor’s mansion.
Considered in the context of a 30-year assault on the legitimacy of Democratic leaders and Democratic constituencies (of which Republican-led voter suppression is an important part), the present attempt to disrupt and derail the certification of electoral votes is but the next step, in which Republicans say, outright, that a Democrat has no right to hold power and try to make that reality. The next Democrat to win the White House — whether it’s Biden getting re-elected or someone else winning for the first time — will almost certainly face the same flood of accusations, challenges and lawsuits, on the same false grounds of “fraud.”
The “bad faith and dishonesty on display” is stunning. “The issue for Republicans,” Bouie continues, “is not election integrity, it’s the fact that Democratic votes count at all.”
Except 30 years is perhaps too narrow a time frame for charting the Republican erosion of faith in the flag in which they wrap themselves.
So long as women remained barefoot, pregnant, and in their kitchens, all was right with their world.
So long as their god was God and everybody knew it, they felt secure of their place in the next.
So long as Black poeple knew their places, and homosexuals and others remained closeted, society was ordered as it should be with white conservatives at its apex.
So long as America was the preeminent power in the world and the U.S.S R. was its principle adversay in a Cold War played by an unwritten but established set of rules, they knew where they stood.
But the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts helped change that and turned Jim Crow Democrats into Reagan Republicans. For the last half century, America pursued and Republicans supported economic opportunities and new technologies that simultaneously enriched them and eroded the status quo that existed when the world was a smaller, more parochial place more to their liking. The ground shifted, revealing just how empty was the American faith they proclaimed so loudly and proudly, just as Jesus cautioned them not to.
“Even as they criticize an attempted power grab, they echo the idea that one side has legitimate voters and the other does not,” Bouie writes.
Patriotism, values, and principles have all turned to ashes in their mouths. Still, they will condemn one-party states even while trying to establish one for Real Americans™, proving themselves anything but.