The Republican war on democracy
For a generation or more, elected Republicans have been in the habit of waving the flag and proclaiming their love of country above all others. It turns out, however, that they don’t love their country. What’s more, they neither understand nor appreciate the country they claim to hold so dear.
How else to explain Republican attempts, at both the state and national levels, to undermine what makes the country truly great and unique – the thing Lincoln called “the jewel of liberty”: the sovereignty of the people as expressed at the ballot box?
“It’s just simply madness,” Sen. Mitt Romney, the former Republican nominee for president and one of its few dissenters, said this past week.
“The idea of supplanting the vote of the people with partisan legislators, is, is so completely out of our national character that it’s simply mad…. This effort to subvert the vote of the people is dangerous and destructive of the cause of democracy.”
If Donald Trump is able to pull off what he’s trying to pull off – to get the courts or Congress or various state legislatures to proclaim him the winner of an election he clearly and convincingly lost – he and his Republican co-conspirators will have done what King George, Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin could not do with their mighty armies: destroy America.
That’s harsh, but not nearly as harsh as what Trump and the Republican party writ large are attempting.
A week after the election between Trump and Joe Biden, the speaker of the Pennsylvania House, Bryan Cutler, announced his intention to appoint a bipartisan committee to “look into how the election was conducted.”
One of its members, Uniontown state Rep. Matthew Dowling, commented, “This panel will not interfere with 2020 election results.”
Well, that was fine. The special committee had all the earmarks of GOP leaders playing to the party base while signaling to the rest of us – don’t worry, we got this, we know who won the state, and it wasn’t our guy.
More recently, Cutler, along with Dowling, local state House members Ryan Warner and Bud Cook and state Sen. Patrick Stefano addressed a letter to the Pennsylvania members of Congress.
The letter dated Dec. 4 and signed by 64 Harrisburg lawmakers – all Republicans – urged the senators and congressmen and women to “reject” the certified Biden electors submitted by the state when the Electoral College results come before Congress on Jan. 6.
In other words, disregard the popular votes cast for Joe Biden, which exceeds by 81,660 the number of votes cast for Donald Trump in the state.
In still other words, cast aside with extreme prejudice 200-plus years of American history. Treat with the utmost scorn and contempt the sacrifices of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who gave their lives to defend this country, whose essence is that the people rule – not cliques, not parties, not Congresses, not the courts, not presidents.
The letter made four points, which the writers, including the local quartet of democracy-deniers Dowling, Cook, Stefano and Warner, claimed were cause enough to lay waste to the votes of 6.8 million Pennsylvanians.
For voter-adverse, anti-constitutional Republicans, here’s the rub: their objections, or variations thereof, have already been tested in court, in cases brought either by the Trump campaign or others such as Pennsylvania Republican Congressman Mike Kelly.
Time after time, the courts have dismissed the objections. “Voters, not lawyers, choose the president. Ballots, not briefs, decide elections,” Judge Stephanos Bibas wrote for the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court in denying a Pennsylvania election-related petition.
He called the Republican demand that Trump triumphant over the ballots of American citizens simply “breathtaking” in its audacity.
Bibas was a Trump appointee. The two other members of the Third Circuit were also nominated by Republican presidents.
And as The Associated Press put it, “They were upholding the decision of a fourth Republican, U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann, a conservative jurist and Federalist Society member.
“Brann had called the campaign’s legal case … a ‘haphazard’ jumble that resembled ‘Frankenstein’s monster.'”
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court summarily dismissed an election fraud case brought by Rep. Kelly of Butler in a single, terse sentence.
Thanks goodness for the courts. For the elected Republicans in Georgia and Arizona who performed their patriotic duty in the face of the Trump betrayal. And for Sen. Pat Toomey, who last week called Trump’s behavior, and by extension the behavior of his fellow Republicans, “completely unacceptable.”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. His latest book, “JFK Rising,” is available on Amazon. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.