For the MAGA losers who are bent on destroying democracy, it’s always Groundhog Day. Every time Trump and his “legal” eagles wake up, they hear the same old song. But unlike in the film, it ain’t “I Got You Babe.” The song they hear is more aptly titled “Get the Hell Out of My Court.”
For those of us who grasp basic math – most Electoral College votes, most popular votes, things like that – November has been a long weary month, waiting in vain for the lamest of ducks to face reality. If my math is correct, his won-lost record in court (1-34) is way worse than even the ’62 New York Mets (40-120) – and the latest and perhaps greatest smackdown has now been dealt by a federal judge in pivotal Pennsylvania.
For some reason – logic, common sense, take your pick – U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann ruled yesterday that Rudy Giuliani’s last-ditch bid to overturn the free and fair Pennsylvania results was an autocratic power grab designed to screw “millions of citizens.” Joe Biden has won the state by 82,000 votes, end of story. Certification of the results is a certainty. Brann basically scraped Giuliani off his shoe:
The MAGA team’s fraud claim, he wrote, “like Frankenstein’s monster, has been haphazardly stitched together.” What a perfect metaphor for the Trump presidency. But seriously, folks, here is Brann’s most potent paragraph:
Trump wanted the court “to disenfranchise almost seven million voters…One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption, such that this Court would have no option but to regrettably (agree) despite the impact it would have on such a large group of citizens. That has not happened. Instead, this Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations…and unsupported by evidence. In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state. Our people, laws, and institutions demand more.”
Trump’s lawyers say they’re gonna take their grievances to a federal appeals court (natch), and they complained last night that Brann was “Obama-appointed.” But (natch) they omitted several key facts: Brann is a Republican, a member of the conservative Federalist Society, and was co-sponsored for the bench by conservative Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey.
By the way, Pat Toomey said last night: “President Trump has exhausted all plausible legal options to challenge the result of the presidential race in Pennsylvania…I congratulate President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris on their victory. They are both dedicated public servants and I will be praying for them and for our country…(T)o help unify our country, President Trump should accept the outcome of the election and facilitate the presidential transition process.”
Well, that’s progress. Weeks late, but OK.
We saw progress on Friday as well, when Republicans state legislators from Michigan spurned Trump’s attempt to overturn Biden’s 155,000-vote margin victory in their state. In a statement, they stood up for elementary math: “The candidates who win the most votes win elections.” We also saw progress in Georgia, where Biden’s win was certified and the Republican secretary of state said that even though he’s a “proud” Trump supporter, “I live by the motto that numbers don’t lie.” And we saw it in Arizona yesterday, when a Republican election supervisor explained why he voted to certify Biden’s win: “I was inspired by my grandfather, who was a World War II vet. He went to Europe to fight for democracy…And when I became a lawyer, I took an oath to support the Constitution.”
These various remarks – all by Republicans – should give us hope that even though our democratic institutions are being bent in ways never before experienced, they will not break.
And plenty of conservative commentators are outraged about Trump’s attempted con d’etat. Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, is assailing Trump for “trampling the precedent of graceful exits by defeated presidents going back to John Adams in 1800.” The right-wing Washington Examiner is tired of Trump’s fact-free fraud allegations: “There is wisdom in the phrase ‘put up or shut up.'” Jonah Goldberg says that Trump is committing a “hate crime against democratic legitimacy…like a firehose attached to a sewage tank.” Even Tucker Carlson says he’s seen no evidence that Biden’s win was engineered by commies working with computers (as Trump’s flunkies have also claimed).
But Trump is still fixated on fighting his lost cause, chasing phantoms while most Americans yearn to move on. If only he were cognitively capable of heeding a predecessor’s advice. John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated 57 years ago today, once said: “Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.”
His sole agenda for the future – tragically so, for this country – is to pump more sewage into the empty heads of his MAGA minions. To wit, this tweet yesterday: “Why is Joe Biden so quickly forming a Cabinet when my investigators have found hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes…?”
Right. His “investigators” will reveal all, as soon as they return from Hawaii with the skinny on Obama’s birth. The con lives on.