@CharlesPPierce FTW

Charlie Pierce FTW

Chuck Todd was appropriately dismayed. But Senator Brown wasn’t playing that, either.

TODD: I guess I would ask this. Couldn’t you bring up all of those, all of those issues, lay all of that out, without using the word, stolen? And I throw that out there, because we have enough distrust in our institutions as it is…Does that add to it?

BROWN: Okay, Chuck. Don’t do the false equivalency of, of, of, the, you know, the lack of respect in institutions. I mean, we have a president that attacks your profession day after day after day. You, if you saw the earlier part of my election-night speech, you would’ve heard me thank the media. And you would’ve seen hundreds of people in Ohio, on the Democratic — at this election-night gathering, turn around and clap for the media. We see a president that goes after the courts, that goes after the judicial system, a president that says, as the votes were counted, that something’s been wrong with the elections. He criticizes the elections that way. So don’t play this false equivalency. Because a former secretary of state, like me, said that about this election, which clearly is an effort to suppress the vote, not of people that look like you and me, Chuck–

CHUCK TODD: Right.

BROWN: –but people of color especially. And it’s happened. Now spend your air time– I don’t mean to lecture–

TODD: No, no, no, I, look —

BROWN: — but spend your airtime critical of those people who are trying to suppress the vote.

This is not to single out Chuck Todd. His interplay with Brown was merely the most obvious public manifestation of dismay over the senator’s quite accurate assessment of what happened in Georgia. More than a few pearls were clutched over Brown’s choice of language.

Rick Hasen, the election-law guru, writing in Slate, made the same argument at greater length. I confess I don’t follow Hasen’s line of thought at all. He seems to be arguing that calling the election in Georgia “stolen,” as Brown clearly did, undermines the fight against suppressing the vote, as Kemp clearly did.

I’m unclear how this is the case.

First, rhetoric about stolen elections feeds a growing cycle of mistrust and delegitimization of the election process, an attack pushed by President Donald Trump and other Republicans who have been yelling “voter fraud” every time they are behind in the count. I’ve already set out my fear that Trump could refuse to concede the 2020 presidential election if he is ahead in the count on election night and then ballot counts inevitably shift toward Democrats as the counting continues. A democratic polity depends on losers accepting election results, even if the election was not conducted perfectly. I would hold “stolen” election rhetoric for conduct even more outrageous than Kemp’s decisions, which, while odious, either have not been found to be illegal or that courts allowed to remain in place for this election.

I mean, holy hell. Because Kemp used the power of the office he held to help himself gain the office to which he was aspiring, this means that he could not be said to have “stolen” the election, even as a shorthand designation for his clearly corrupt conduct? If a state legislature in, say, Nebraska, were to use its eminent domain power to appropriate a farmer’s land in order to help a foreign corporation build, say, an oil-sands pipeline, is it really not permissible for people to say that the legislature “stole” the farmer’s land, even though it used its power corruptly to benefit a private interest? Is there an exemption by which theft is not theft if it is done under the color of law? A lot of local sheriffs who got rich behind civil forfeiture laws are going to be happy to hear that.

And as for the growing cycle of distrust and delegitimization, that’s already been underway for some time, as Rick Hasen’s previous work has demonstrated. In our current historical moment, it began with the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore. Do the people making the tone-police argument on this issue really believe that the Georgia voters who showed up at their polling place only to find that it had been closed, and who then went out of their way to the nearest one only to find that they couldn’t vote because the hyphen in their last name really was a dash, wouldn’t say their votes were “stolen,” and that, therefore, the election was, too? They don’t need Sherrod Brown to believe that, I assure you.

Hasen also seems to misunderstand the nature of El Caudillo Del Mar-A-Lago, too. If the Democratic Party tries to temper its rhetoric based on whatever the most recent egregious lie has emerged from the presidential* gob, the Democratic Party is going to have a nervous breakdown. The president, because he is both corrupt and something of a dunce, will say what he’s going to say regardless of how temperate the Democratic response is. Sometimes, blunt instruments have to be met with blunt instruments.

Much of the most loyal portions of the Democratic Party’s political base already believe from their own experience, and not because of anything Sherrod Brown and Stacey Abrams have said, that their elections are being stolen out from under them. It’s up to the opposition to speak for those whose right to choose their own leaders was, yes, stolen from them through bureaucratic legerdemain and malfeasance in office. Which is a long way around to point out that the run-off election for Secretary of State in Georgia is the most important election of many lifetimes.

Furthermore, we are in a time in which the very concept of the truth is at issue. It’s vitally important that everyone who cares about that just keep it simple and stick with the facts and the truth. If they steal an election, use the clear words to describe it, don’t hedge, don’t be “nuanced.” At this moment we need all the clarity we can get.

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