Today’s Republicans make secessionists seem soft

At least the Confederate secessionists acknowledged that Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election. The 18 Republican state attorneys general and the 126 Republican House members who asked the Supreme Court to throw out the results of the 2020 election had an impudence far exceeding the audacity of the Civil War seditionists in whose steps they are walking.

Here is a translation of what they were telling a majority of the nation’s electorate and voters in states representing 62 of President-elect Joe Biden’s 306 electoral votes:

“We don’t like the president and vice president you chose so we simply won’t accept the result of a free election. We’ll deploy lies and phony statistics to get the United States Supreme Court to impose our will on the rest of the country. The heck with democracy. But we’ll continue to enjoy the Social Security checks, farm subsidies and all the other money that states that voted for Biden send our way.”

This lawsuit, flatly rejected by the court, was originally brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (who happens to be under federal investigation for bribery and abuse of office and has been under indictment for felony securities fraud charges). It was joined by 17 of his Republican colleagues and backed by almost two-thirds of House Republicans. Its claims have been described as clownish, comical, farcical, frivolous, ludicrous, insane and dumb. The court used none of those words, but its action spoke loudly.

The lawsuit is all these things, but it’s also profoundly dangerous, hypocritical and revealing. We need to take it very seriously as a sign that not only President Donald Trump but also a majority of his party would rather tear our republic apart than accept electoral defeat. We went through this once before, and it led to a civil war.

Yes, that’s the moment we should be thinking about. Rush Limbaugh is certainly pondering it. The radio commentator can always be counted on to reflect the dark fears and fervent hopes of large parts of the right. Limbaugh recently invoked the spirit of Fort Sumter, the attitude of those who saw the election of Lincoln, who opposed the spread of slavery, as reason to break up the union.

“I actually think that we’re trending toward secession,” Limbaugh said. “I see more and more people asking what in the world do we have in common with the people who live in, say, New York?”

He later backpedaled — “Now, I didn’t advocate for it. I never would advocate for secession. I’m simply repeating what I have heard.” But what he said the first time is precisely the sentiment behind an insistence that the wishes of the majority should be ignored and that ballots cast in places such as Detroit, Philadelphia and Milwaukee be thrown into the trash.

No matter how they dress things up, the Nullification wing of the Republican Party is obsessed with the fact that they lost key states in part because a lot of Black voters in big cities rejected Trump. Paxton’s initial court filing mentioned Wayne County, home of Detroit, 11 times, Milwaukee seven times and Philadelphia six. “In Wayne County, Mr. Biden’s margin (322,925 votes) significantly exceeds his statewide lead,” the brief declares, almost as if that in itself is evidence of a crime.

The lawsuit is plain about its partisan purposes, complaining of how elections were run in “areas administered by local government under Democrat control and with populations with higher ratios of Democrat voters than other areas of Defendant States.”

Notice something else: Those who claim to believe in “states’ rights” and “local decision-making” are once again showing that their rhetoric is a bunch of hooey. This was true of the Confederates, too. Not only was slavery, not states’ rights, the cause of the Civil War, but slavery’s advocates embraced the Dred Scott decision, which, as Lincoln had argued, laid out the path to nationalizing slavery. Power and results were all that mattered.

So it is with the GOP’S Minority Rule Caucus. They believe Republican jurisdictions should be free to suppress votes. But areas under “Democrat control” must be blocked from making voting easier.

Those who promote this nonsense should put up or shut up. If House Republicans think our nation’s democratic process is illegitimate, they can demonstrate their sincerity by resigning — especially the 19 from Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia who have joined the lawsuit that would overturn their own constituents’ votes.

The rest of us should worry that GOP politicians are blithely willing to walk away from democracy and undermine the institutions they take an oath to defend.