It’s hard to believe they are doing this, but they are:
We’re at a dangerous time in this country,” John Fetterman, the lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, told me by phone. “One party is ignoring court rulings and election results. If the results don’t match what they like, they do their level best to subvert them.”
That quote could be applied directly to President Trump and much of the national GOP, of course. On Wednesday, dozens of congressional Republicans will side with Trump and try to invalidate President-elect Joe Biden’s electors in numerous states.
But in this case, Fetterman, a Democrat, is talking about Republicans in his state of Pennsylvania, where an ugly power play is unfolding that carries unsettling implications.
Here’s what’s happening: The GOP-controlled Pennsylvania State Senate just refused to seat Democratic Sen. Jim Brewster, even as numerous other senators did get seated, after Brewster defeated his Republican opponent by 69 votes.
The rationale is that the senators supposedly need time to consider the Republican candidate’s objection to contested ballots that were missing dates on outer envelopes but were otherwise filled out accurately and submitted on time.
The GOP candidate is doing this even though the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has ruled that the ballots are valid. And the state has even certified the results, which Democrats point out calls into question the need for the review by GOP senators in the first place.
“At the end of the day the Republicans refused to seat the senator,” Fetterman told me.
Fetterman, who is the state Senate’s presiding officer, tried to blocked the refusal to seat Brewster. So Republicans voted to remove Fetterman and replace him as presiding officer with the Republican interim Senate president pro tempore, Jake Corman.
Tell me again that I’ve been too hysterical over Trump and the GOP these last few years. This is happening in Pennsylvania.
I’m just going to leave this here. It’s Michelle Goldberg’s column today:
According to Title 52, Section 20511 of the United States Code, anyone who “knowingly and willfully deprives, defrauds, or attempts to deprive or defraud the residents of a state of a fair and impartially conducted election process” for federal office can be punished by up to five years in prison.
Donald Trump certainly seems to have violated this law. He is on tape alternately cajoling and threatening Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find 11,780 votes,” enough to give him a winning margin in a state that he lost. He may have also broken federal conspiracy law and Georgia election law.
“This is probably the most serious political crime I’ve ever heard of,” Michael Bromwich, a former inspector general for the Department of Justice, told me. “And yet there is the high likelihood that there will be no accountability for it.”
At this point, demanding such accountability feels like smashing one’s head into a brick wall, but our democracy might not be able to stagger along much longer without it. Republicans already often treat victories by Democrats as illegitimate. Their justification for impeaching Bill Clinton was flimsy at the time and looks even more ludicrous in light of their defenses of Trump. Trump’s political career was built on the racist lie that Barack Obama was a foreigner ineligible for the presidency.
Now Trump and his Republican enablers have set a precedent for pressuring state officials to discard the will of their voters, and if that fails, for getting their allies in Congress to reject the results.
It isn’t working this time for several reasons. Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory wasn’t close. Republican state officials like Raffensperger behaved honorably. Democrats control the House, and some Senate Republicans retain a baseline commitment to democracy.
None of those conditions are likely to be permanent, though. Minimally decent Republicans are particularly endangered. Expect Trumpists to mount primary challenges to them and replace them with cynics, cranks and fanatics.
True democracy in America is quite new; you can date it to the civil rights era. If Trump’s Republican Party isn’t checked, we could easily devolve into what political scientists call competitive authoritarianism, in which elections still take place but the system is skewed to entrench autocrats.
Some are trying to constrain Trump’s lawlessness. Two Democratic members of the House, Ted Lieu and Kathleen Rice, asked the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray, to open a criminal probe. In Atlanta, the Fulton County district attorney has expressed openness to bringing a case, saying, “Anyone who commits a felony violation of Georgia law in my jurisdiction will be held accountable.”
But there is little appetite in the House for impeaching Trump again, though he transparently deserves it. (“We’re not looking backwards, we’re looking forward,” Hakeem Jeffries, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said on Monday.) Joe Biden doesn’t seem to want his attorney general to investigate Trump, though he’s also said he wouldn’t stand in his or her way. And experts point to numerous reasons federal prosecutors might decline to bring a case.
The first is what we might call the psychopath’s advantage: Prosecutors would have to prove that Trump knew that what he was doing was wrong. “You’re not dealing with your ordinary fraudster or your ordinary criminal or even your ordinary corrupt politician,” said Bromwich. “He seems to believe a lot of the lies that he’s telling.”
There’s also the sheer political difficulty of prosecuting a former president. “My guess is that in the weeks and months that a prosecutor takes to develop a case like that, they’re at the end of the day going to say, ‘The guy’s not in office, nothing happened, we’re not spending our resources on it,’” the Republican election lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg told me. “Which doesn’t take away from the really immoral nature of the call.”
Taken on their own, most excuses for not investigating or prosecuting Trump make at least some sense. Launching an impeachment less than three weeks before Biden’s inauguration might appear futile. It could even feed right-wing delusions by creating the impression that Democrats think Trump might be able to stay in office otherwise. Both the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress will be fully occupied dealing with the devastation to public health and the economy that Trump is leaving behind. Beyond its legal challenges, a federal prosecution of Trump would maintain his toxic grip on the country’s attention.
Yet if there is no penalty for Republican cheating, there will be more of it. The structure of our politics — the huge advantages wielded by small states and rural voters — means that Democrats need substantial majorities to wield national power, so they can’t simply ignore the wishes of the electorate. Not so for Republicans, which is why they feel free to openly scheme against the majority.
During impeachment, Republicans who were unwilling to defend the president’s conduct, but also unwilling to penalize him, insisted that if Americans didn’t like his behavior they could vote him out. Americans did, and now Trump’s party is refusing to accept it. It’s evidence that you can’t rely on elections to punish attempts to subvert elections. Only the law can do that, even if it’s inconvenient.
I am very, very nervous that the Democrats are going to try to sweep all this under the rug under the misapprehension that they are only empowered to talk about “kitchen table issues” and believe that this is not something they need to worry about since Joe Biden will be in the White House and that’s all that matters. It. Is. Not.
Something very bad is happening and if they put their heads in the sand again we are in big trouble. We have seen how easy it is for these Republicans to activate a propaganda machine that will brainwash their voters and we now know that doing so empowers these anti-democratic would-be authoritarians to degrade and destroy the norms that previously held the system together. We cannot pretend that that we don’t know this because they will not pretend they don’t know this. They are acting on this knowledge as we speak:
I know that Biden wants to “heal the country” and that’s a worthwhile goal, for sure. But we cannot heal while this festering injury to democracy goes untreated. There has to be accountability. The wound must be cauterized. We simply can’t let this go on:
I hope he was just speaking specifically of the idea of impeaching Trump over the Georgia phone call. But he needs to think before he uses that phrase. It makes him a collaborator in right wing radicalism.