Reckless Elise Stefanik fails a crucial test
Elise Stefanik’s behavior and rhetoric since Election Day has been recklessly irresponsible and cravenly cynical. The North Country congresswoman isn’t alone, of course. Other Republicans, senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley prominent among them, participated in the same game, made the same calculations. But Stefanik is our bad actor, and so the spotlight here shines on her.
The problem isn’t simply that Stefanik challenged electoral votes. I’m open to the idea that a member of Congress can raise an honest, if largely symbolic, objection to a state’s presidential electors; as Stefanik notes, Democrats mounted small challenges of their own in recent years.
But Stefanik’s objection on the House floor was fundamentally dishonest and misleading, which puts it perfectly on par with most of what she’s
said since Election Day. That’s the problem.
In the speech she delivered in a Capitol building still shaken by violence, Stefanik claimed her concerns were about “constitutional overreach” — namely that officials in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin unconstitutionally altered voting procedures established by legislatures.
Courts, it should be noted, found that officials acted appropriately. Stefanik apparently disagrees with those decisions, which is fine, but she ignores a key fact: Officials in other states, including some won by President Donald Trump, also changed election procedures without legislative approval.
In Texas, for example, Gov. Greg Abbott issued orders that, among other changes, lengthened the early voting period and limited the number of drop-off locations for absentee ballots. By Stefanik’s standard, Abbott’s moves were undoubtedly unconstitutional.
Did she object to the Texas vote?
Of course not. Nor did she question her own election or results from New York, even though Gov. Andrew Cuomo also unilaterally changed voting rules.
The discrepancy shows Stefanik’s concern wasn’t about the constitution. By focusing only on the handful states where Trump fought the results, Stefanik did the partisan bidding of a president attempting to overturn an election, a man falsely asserting that sweeping conspiracies denied his landslide win.
That extraordinary context for Stefanik’s behavior can’t be ignored. Partly but not entirely due to Trump’s lies, millions of Americans have lost faith in institutions of every kind. They believe the country is so rotten, so corrupt, that no person or reported fact can be trusted. They’re convinced our democracy is a sham.
That’s a fantasy, thank God, and a mass delusion. It’s also deeply unpatriotic. Love of country, then, requires we fight against what amounts to a growing and destructive nihilism, that we combat lies with fact, darkness with light. But that isn’t the path Stefanik chose.
Instead, in recent weeks she repeated debunked conspiracies unrelated to her supposed constitutional concerns, including her claim days ago that 140,000 votes in just one Georgia county were cast by “underaged, deceased or otherwise unauthorized voters” or her suggestion in a Newsmax interview that Dominion voting machines were suspect. (For what it’s worth, as of this Saturday morning writing, she has still not publicly acknowledged that Joe Biden won the election.)
With her mendacious malarkey, Stefanik effectively endorsed Trump’s attempt to upend democracy by disenfranchising millions of voters. As he tried to steal an election, she was an accomplice.
And yet she had the gall to stand on the House floor and declare, as she did Wednesday, that she hoped to restore voters’ shaken faith in our election system. Given how she helped erode that very faith, she’s like an arsonist claiming to worry about smoke.
Stefanik and fellow Ivy Leaguers Hawley and Cruz must know Trump lost. They must see that his fraud claims lack evidence and merit. Deep down, they probably knew they were playing with fire.
It wasn’t as though they weren’t warned. “Somebody’s going to get hurt, somebody’s going to get shot, somebody’s going to get killed,” Gabriel Sterling, a Republican election official in Georgia, said five weeks ago in an emotional plea to cool heated rhetoric.
While there were Republicans, of course, who behaved with honor, Stefanik and her fellow enablers bet that sticking with Trump was better for their ambition than sticking up for truth and country.
The gamble backfired in horrific fashion when rioters stormed into the Capitol, unleashing mayhem that killed Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick and four others. It was a sickening attack on democracy, and those who abetted Trump’s fantastical falsehoods will long carry the stain of a moment that laid bare the costs of their cynicism.
Stefanik is young still, just 36. I suppose we could hope this is a sobering moment, an inflection point, that bends the arc of her career toward decency and honesty. But she’s given us no reason for optimism.
At a defining moment in American history, Stefanik failed a test of character. And if the last four years made anything clear, it’s how much character matters.