Editorial: Johnson is unfit for Senate with dangerous stunts.
The arrogance of Ron Johnson breathtaking.
Johnson and 12 other Republican senators say they will challenge the tabulation of Electoral College votes in Congress on Wednesday in a dangerous political stunt that will accomplish nothing but may burnish their image with those who would choose outgoing President Donald Trump over democracy.
Johnson and his shameful friends are planning to support Trump as he directly opposes the will of the people.
Their challenge will lead to a long debate in Congress but nothing more, given Democratic control of the House of Representatives.
In the end, the results of the presidential election will not change: Joe Biden will still have beaten Trump by 7 million votes and won 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232.
But Johnson’s stunt our democracy.
What precedent is being set here? What happens the next time a party — either party — loses the presidency narrowly while controlling both houses of Congress? Will those politicians do what Johnson and his hyperpartisan mob are doing? Will they make up lies about the election, cry voter fraud, complain about voting machines, election officials and any other ghost they can conjure?
The playbook for turmoil is simple: Create suspicion. Fuel the fears of the side that lost. Don’t bother with facts or truth. Keep repeating and spreading lies until people forget their source and start to believe them or become so confused they can no longer determine the truth.
Johnson’s disgraceful display should not go unpunished. While there is no way to recall a sitting senator — and censure or expulsion (though deserved) is unlikely given the politics of the moment — we urge voters to remember what Johnson has done. Hold him accountable. Demand that qualified challengers, Republican and Democrat alike, run against him if he has the audacity to break another promise and try for a third term in 2022.
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They are working for Trump and themselves — not you
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Let’s stop for a moment and think about the man these senators are working for.
Trump has lied repeatedly about the outcome of the election. He has claimed without a shred of evidence that balloting was rigged in battleground states like Wisconsin, where he lost convincingly. He has hatched wild conspiracy theories, falsely claiming among other things that voting machines deleted millions of Trump votes, that suitcases were stuffed with ballots in Georgia or that people were stuffing ballot boxes in Philadelphia.
These are all lies.
On Saturday, this contemptible man tried to shake down the secretary of state in Georgia, begging Brad Raffensperger to “find” more votes to help Trump overcome Biden’s lead in that state long after the election was over and certified. And long after dozens of lawsuits filed by Trump had failed — tossed out by judges who said they had no evidence behind them and no merit.
Trump has urged his supporters to show up in Washington, D.C., this week, and that likely means conspiracy theorists, militias, white supremacists and members of extremist groups like the Proud Boys will descend on the capital, risking more violent confrontations.
All of this nonsense is what Johnson stands for now. He has chosen to follow and to represent the least-informed, least responsible members of our society.
Ryan: Move is ‘Anti-democratic and anti-conservative’
The plan to challenge the Electoral College vote became public Saturday night when Johnson and the others announced they would join Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri in the effort. Other Republicans, sensing the danger to their party and the nation, were apoplectic. Former Republican candidate for vice president and House Speaker Paul Ryan of Janesville called the ploy “anti-democratic and anti-conservative.” He’s right on both counts.
“Efforts to reject the votes of the Electoral College and sow doubt about Joe Biden’s victory strike at the foundation of our republic,” Ryan said in a statement. “It is difficult to conceive of a more anti-democratic and anti-conservative act than a federal intervention to overturn the results of state-certified elections and disenfranchise millions of Americans. The fact that this effort will fail does not mean it will not do significant damage to American democracy.”
U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the third-ranking Republican in the House, called it a dangerous precedent.
“This is directly at odds with the Constitution’s
clear text and our core beliefs as Republicans,” she said.
Green Bay Congressman Mike Gallagher was equally concerned.
“I just don’t think we want to endorse the principle that Jan. 6 is a legitimate forum for Congress to overturn the will of the states and the people,” he told WTMJ’s Steve Scaffidi. “If you’ve endorsed that principle, then you’ve already destroyed the idea of American government. Right? At least you’ve destroyed the conservative idea of American government.”
But what has become clear in recent months is that Johnson and the others in the Senate (along with U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany of Wisconsin and dozens more in the House) don’t care how much damage they do to their party — or to our country.
Many of them know better. The senator spearheading this effort, Ted Cruz of Texas, is a Harvard-educated lawyer with a long history of political shenanigans, always in the service of Ted Cruz.
When presidential candidate Cruz won the Iowa caucuses in 2016, Trump made accusations similar to those he is making today, tweeting that Cruz committed fraud, cheated, stole the election — even though Iowans do not use private ballots at caucuses but instead vote with their feet, in public, assembling with the group supporting a candidate.
That Cruz now stands with Trump speaks volumes about what Cruz is willing to do to advance his own boundless ambition.
As for Johnson, he may live within such a propaganda bubble that he actually believes that ginning up controversy over “voting irregularities” and “fraud” — committing arson, then racing to the scene to “investigate” the fire, as NBC’s Chuck Todd described it in an interview on Sunday — is how a senator should do his job. And he may actually believe in these conspiracies.
Or perhaps Johnson is, like Cruz, a calculating politician, who knows he’ll need Trump’s supporters if he decides to run for a third term in two years. Johnson may be wagering that many of those supporters will continue to believe the president’s baseless whining.
But, of course, that’s not leadership. It’s followership. And he’s following the wrong people. A majority of the voters he represents in the Senate, the citizens of Wisconsin, chose Joe Biden over Trump. To date, Johnson is the only senator from a state that chose Biden to join this effort to overturn the legitimate, certified votes for president.
What’s more, as of Dec. 15, Johnson said he had no plans to object to the Electoral College tally. Then the senator held a bogus, partisan hearing on “election security” where Trump’s lawyers repeated baseless claims of election fraud.
Never mind that the senator admits that he has seen no evidence of the kind of fraud that could change the results of the election.
That’s because there is no evidence. Election experts have said repeatedly that the 2020 balloting — held in the middle of a deadly pandemic — was fair and accurate. And the minuscule amount of fraud and honest mistakes that occur in every election are vanishingly small. In the handful of cases discovered around the nation, as many bad votes were cast for Trump as for Biden — as has been the case in every election.
But facts like that don’t matter to Senator Johnson.
With Trump, Johnson has continued to push hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19 even though Trump’s own appointees leading the Food and Drug Administration pulled an emergency use authorization for the drug in June after research showed it appeared to be causing more harm than good for coronavirus patients.
Instead of supporting the best available knowledge, Johnson gave voice to a baseless theory that the medical community wanted to deny patients drugs like hydroxychloroquine because they were cheaper than other treatments.
What an ignorant slap to the faces of the researchers and medical professionals working tirelessly to save lives and reduce harm during the pandemic.
But Johnson’s latest National Enquirer moment is the most unsettling of all because it attacks the very democratic republic he has sworn to serve.
How can this man possibly represent Wisconsin citizens when he wants to throw out the duly cast and certified votes of millions of Americans?
Johnson has joined a defeated candidate who is trying to nullify the voices of American voters while propagating baseless conspiracy theories about voting irregularities.
He has violated his oath of office and in doing so, Johnson has forfeited his right to represent the people of Wisconsin.
Editorials are the consensus opinion of members of the Editorial Board of USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin. The board operates independently of the network’s news reporters and editors. Email: jsedit@jrn.com