Opinion
The President vs. American Democracy
A republic works only when the losers of elections
accept the results and the legitimacy of their opponents.
By The
Editorial Board
The
editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by
expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate
from the newsroom.
Jan. 5,
2021
The
Republican effort to derail Congress’s electoral vote count on Wednesday will
fail, and President-elect Joe Biden will be sworn in at noon on Jan. 20, as the
Constitution commands. What will persist, however, is an existential crisis:
What to do about a political party that is no longer committed to representative
democracy?
On the one
hand, there are the Republican officials, such as Brad Raffensperger, the
Georgia secretary of state, who have stood up against President Trump’s efforts
to keep this reality at bay.
Two months
after a majority of voters rendered a decisive verdict against him, the
president is still pretending he didn’t lose. At first it was baseless tweets
about fraudulent ballots in Detroit and Philadelphia. Next it was demands that
Republican-led state legislatures disregard the will of their voters and flip
their electors from Mr. Biden to Mr. Trump. Then, on Saturday, the president
spent an hour attempting to extort Mr. Raffensperger, whom he threatened with
criminal prosecution unless the Georgia official helped “find” 11,780 votes for
Mr. Trump — one more than the margin by which he lost the state to Mr. Biden.
Mr. Trump
went on and on about dead people voting and burned or shredded ballots. He
unleashed a stream of specific-sounding numbers — 4,502 unregistered voters!
18,325 vacant address voters! — which Mr. Raffensperger, who certified
Georgia’s vote total in November, after a hand recount of nearly five million
ballots, calmly parried. “Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is,
the data you have is wrong,” he said.
Thanks to
Mr. Raffensperger and his team’s decision to record the call, there is no
contesting what Mr. Trump was seeking: the disenfranchisement of millions of
American voters. “The Trump campaign had ample opportunity to challenge
election results, and those efforts failed from lack of evidence,” Paul Ryan, a
former Republican House speaker, said Sunday in a statement. “The legal process
was exhausted, and the results were decisively confirmed.”
For the
record, falsifying vote totals, or soliciting someone else to do so, is a crime
under both federal and state law. It is without question an impeachable
offense. Even though he has only two weeks left in office and the country’s
focus should be on stopping the Covid-19 pandemic, there is a strong argument
that Mr. Trump — perhaps the most lawless and least qualified chief executive
in the nation’s history — should be not only impeached for a second time but
also convicted and disqualified from ever again holding public office.
The most
chilling part of Mr. Trump’s call with Mr. Raffensperger was the president’s
threat of prosecution if Mr. Raffensperger didn’t fall in line. “You know what
they did, and you’re not reporting it,” Mr. Trump warned him, in reference to
people who had supposedly destroyed ballots. “That’s a criminal offense. And
you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer.”
(Ryan Germany, Mr. Raffensperger’s general counsel, was also on the call.)
Why does
all this sound so familiar? Mr. Trump was impeached a little more than a year
ago for doing essentially the same thing, only that time the call was to a
foreign leader rather than a state official, the demand was to manufacture dirt
on his political opponent, and the threat was the withholding of hundreds of
millions of dollars in badly needed military aid. But the ultimate goal of both
calls was the same: the use of corrupt means to hold on to power.
The first
time, Republicans in Congress were more than happy to let him get away with it
— all Senate Republicans but one voted to acquit Mr. Trump of the two articles
of impeachment approved by the House of Representatives. Susan Collins of Maine
defended her not guilty vote by claiming that the president had learned “a
pretty big lesson.” She pointed out that his extortion effort had earned him
rebukes from both Democrats and Republicans. “I believe that he will be much
more cautious in the future,” she said.
Ms. Collins
was right about the first part: Mr. Trump did learn a pretty big lesson. He
learned that he can break the law and undermine democracy with impunity. He
learned that he can do the political equivalent of shooting someone in the
middle of Fifth Avenue, and he won’t lose the support of Republicans. So,
naturally, he pulled the trigger again.
This time,
many Republicans have again swarmed to the president’s defense. As of Monday
night, more than 140 House members and at least 13 senators were expected to
object to electoral vote results on Wednesday, when Congress officially counts
the ballots. That is, more than 150 Republican lawmakers have signed on to
reject the votes of tens of millions of Americans.
On what
grounds are they taking this stupefying step? Overwhelming evidence of voting
fraud and irregularities, they claim. When called to present such evidence in a
court of law, however, they’ve got nothing. In dozens of lawsuits filed over
the past two months, Mr. Trump’s lawyers and allies have been unable to
document more than a few isolated cases of fraud in any state, much less the
hundreds of thousands of cases in multiple states that would be necessary to
change the outcome. That’s no surprise in an election that was praised by
election officials as “the most secure in American history.”
There are
lawmakers who understand the grave danger in what their colleagues are doing.
Several Republican senators — including Ms. Collins, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska,
Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Mitt Romney of Utah — have urged Congress to
“move forward” and certify Mr. Biden’s victory. In choosing any other path,
warned Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, “Congress would take away the power to
choose the president from the people, which would essentially end presidential
elections and place that power in the hands of whichever party controls
Congress.” Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has also urged his colleagues
not to object.
In a sense,
this is all political theater. Every state long ago certified its vote totals
without contest. On Monday, Gabriel Sterling, a top Georgia election official,
publicly and painstakingly debunked every one of Mr. Trump’s claims of fraud.
“This is all easily, provably false,” he said. The objectors know this; many
won their own seats on the same ballots that they are attempting to invalidate.
What they are really objecting to is the fact that Mr. Trump lost.
But there
are many Americans who believe their claims who are not in on this
disingenuous, cynical game — and who believe that their votes for Mr. Trump are
the ones being invalidated. That mistrust will have consequences that extend
far beyond Wednesday’s certification, including the creation of a generational
myth of a stolen election, the discrediting of Mr. Biden’s presidency from the
outset, and the passage of stricter voting laws that target Democratic-leaning
voters, under the guise of electoral integrity.
That’s a
big problem, because a republic works only when the losers accept the results,
and the legitimacy of their opponents. All the more reason to commend
Republican officials like Mr. Raffensperger and Mr. Sterling — and the handful
of Republican Congress members who have spoken out, however wanly, about Mr.
Trump’s scheme — for resisting the immense corruption and pressure from their
leaders.
If only
that weren’t extraordinary in the Republican Party today.
The Times
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