Maybe Stefanik’s win was fraudulent, too?
In the weeks since Election Day, we’ve witnessed nothing less than a battle for the soul of the Republican Party. On one side, there are GOP officials who are doing their best to counter a tide of misinformation and protect faith in our elections. They are doing so, in many cases, under great pressure. Some are even receiving death threats.
On the other side are Republicans who have backed President Donald Trump as he drowns the electorate in unproven conspiracies and works to overturn an election he clearly lost. This group of GOP officials are putting political expediency over the good of the country. They are cowards.
Unfortunately, the most prominent Republican in this area, U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, is a member of the second group.
As I noted in a recent column, the North Country congresswoman has refused to say who
won the election — hardly a sign of courage but, whatever, she isn’t the first politician to duck an easy question. Far, far worse was Stefanik’s endorsement last week of the ridiculous and shameless Texas lawsuit that sought to hand the election to Trump.
The effort, which the Supreme Court rejected Friday, tried to disqualify results in four states where Trump narrowly lost — Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — by arguing that state officials violated the Constitution when they changed rules to expand mail-in and absentee voting, even though the Constitution makes clear that states are in charge of their own elections.
Alex Degrasse, a spokesperson for Stefanik, said the amicus brief she signed “was not about overturning the election.” Instead, Degrasse said, it was about “protecting the Constitution and asking the Supreme Court to rule on whether unelected bureaucrats or governors have the unilateral authority to circumvent the legislative process.”
But the lawsuit brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton did, in fact, seek to overturn the election. That was its real and true purpose, no matter what Degrasse claims.
Notably, the lawsuit did not allege fraud.
Instead, it claimed only that the changes made fraud more likely and, tellingly, impossible to prove. Isn’t that clever? We think a crime was committed, but we just can’t prove it!
That, of course, isn’t how our legal system is supposed to work.
You don’t have to take my word for it.
Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey and a Trump ally, called the lawsuit’s legal theory “an absurdity.” GOP Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska called it a “PR stunt.” Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, asked: “Why would a state, even such a great state as Texas, have a say-so on how other states administer their elections?” Excellent question. Indeed, the ramifications of the lawsuit, had it succeeded, would have been enormous, and not just for the 2020 election. If states could sue other states for their laws and how they ’re implemented, the result would be chaos — a total collapse of constitutional order.
Federalism and states’ rights, long-standing Republican Party principles, would have been jettisoned.
Taken to its logical conclusion, the precedent would have allowed New York Democrats to sue a state that elected conservative Republicans. It would allow New York to sue Alabama over the latter’s gun laws. It would let California sue Texas over emission standards.
In effect, states as independent entities would cease to exist.
The Supreme Court was never going to go along with such a thing, as Stefanik surely knew.
But she and 105 other members of the House — the so-called Kraken Caucus — endorsed the lawsuit anyway, presumably to curry favor with Trump and the subset of voters that, despite a lack of evidence, still believes the election was fraudulent.
Stefanik and the others put their careers ahead of country.
It is among the lowest political moments I can remember. The cynicism is stunning. The hypocrisy is glaring.
I mean, if Stefanik honestly and truly believed the Texas lawsuit, she wouldn’t just want the results from the four states to be tossed. She’d demand that her own election in New York’s 21st Congressional District be undone.
After all, New York lawmakers expanded absentee voting ahead of the election, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo modified election procedures by executive order. That would seem to make Stefanik’s decisive victory unconstitutional by the claims of the Texas lawsuit, which ignores that the governor of Texas also unilaterally modified election procedures.
Plus, counties in Stefanik’s district use the Dominion Voting Systems machines central to a Trump election conspiracy claiming that they changed votes. Trump legal advocate Sidney Powell has even suggested that some Republicans may have paid to have the machines fix elections.
So, hmm, how do we know Stefanik’s victory was legitimate? It absolutely was, of course, just as Joe Biden’s victory was.
But when one legitimate election is called into question, they all become suspect. By giving credence to Trump’s madness, Stefanik and the other Republicans on the wrong side of this fight are playing with fire.
They’re undermining the whole electoral system. They’re threatening our democracy.
And for what?