We have a date this week with Traitorgate, the most despicable scandal in American history. Never before have so many members of a purportedly mainstream political party taken a stand against democracy with the stated intent to overthrow the will of the voters. Never before have so many stomped on the American flag in the service of authoritarianism.
Donald Trump’s incipient coup caucus now numbers more than half of all House Republicans and roughly one quarter of all Senate Republicans. The traitors range from Ivy League-trained lawyers like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz (who should know better) to dumb jocks like Tommy Tuberville (Alabama’s senator-elect who can’t even name the three branches of government).
Signaling that they will refuse to certify Joe Biden’s decisive victory in Wednesday’s normally ceremonial event, they say that many Republicans still think the election was “rigged” (60 court rulings say otherwise). Therefore: “A fair and credible audit – conducted expeditiously and completed well before Jan. 20 – would dramatically improve Americans’ faith in our electoral process and would significantly enhance the legitimacy of whoever becomes our next president. We are acting not to thwart the democratic process, but rather to protect it.” (My italics.)
Orwell has been dead for 70 years. But he read that italicized sentence and puked.
Last winter, those Republicans said that Trump shouldn’t be impeached or removed from office because it was up to the voters to decide; now those same Republicans want to throw out what the voters decided. And none of them is arguably worse than Cruz, who’s still toadying for the tinpot thug who insulted Mrs. Cruz’s looks and said that his dad helped kill JFK. His naked opportunism is nauseating. As Robert Caro has written, “Power doesn’t corrupt; it reveals.”
Granted, not all Republicans have renounced their allegiance to free elections. Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey released a statement yesterday: “A fundamental defining feature of a democratic republic is the right of the people to elect their own leaders…I intend to vigorously defend our form of government by opposing this effort to disenfranchise millions of voters in my state and others.”
And Will Hurd, a Texas GOP congressman who’s soon leaving office, spoke for many yesterday when he tweeted: “Elected officials continuing to sow doubt among the public for petty political gain (are) playing into our enemies’ hands. The 2020 election has been the most scrutinized election in our history. The voices of countless Americans have been counted and there is a clear winner. It’s not a conservative principle to deny a single American his or her voice. That is not what the GOP stands for.”
Perhaps not, but I’ve yet to hear Mitch McConnell, Mike Pence, or other Republican leaders condemn the traitors for (at minimum) violating their oaths to support and defend the U.S. Constitution. Ideally, the traitors should not be seated in the new Congress unless they renounce their seditious actions; as it says in Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, “No person shall be a Senator or Representative (who) having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress…to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid and comfort to the enemies thereof.” If expulsion is deemed too harsh, they should be censured or stripped of their committee seats.
Yes, their cynical strategy – perpetuating Trump’s lies in a bid to overthrow the election – will ultimately fail. But the fact that they’re even making this attempt to placate the lame duck infant – who wants to keep sucking on his presidential binky as a bulwark against New York prosecution – is too horrific to shrug off as a new normal. The insurrectionists are trying to establish, as GOP dogma, the blatant lie that any Democratic president is, by definition, illegitimate. For the crime of undermining democracy, for doing potentially lasting damage to our way of life, they need to be punished in some fashion.
Either they’re for free elections, or they’re against them. Either they’re loyal to the Constitution, or to the MAGA cult. It’s binary. Perhaps Steve Schmidt, the former Republican strategist, says it best: “There are only two sides in American politics now. There is the American side and the autocratic side. May God help us all if we falter, flag or fail in defense of American democracy.”