San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Confront sedition or accept it as new normal
I have a favor to ask of Republicans.
Let’s imagine a scenario. A Democratic president loses his re-election bid to a Republican challenger. The president refuses to accept his defeat, even though election officials in the three battleground states he needs to flip — and the president’s own data expert and campaign attorney — insist that the results are legit.
This Democratic president tries to fight it out in the courts and loses 60 attempts to challenge the election results.
When the legal challenges fail, he pressures his acting attorney general to put the heat on swing-state election officials in order to get the results thrown out. When the acting attorney general refuses, the president threatens to fire him and put in place a toady who’ll comply with the president’s wishes.
This Democratic president makes attempts to convince the Defense Department, the Justice Department and the Homeland Security Department to confiscate voting machines in key counties where the results weren’t to the president’s liking.
He calls the secretary of state in one of the battleground states he lost and tries to browbeat that official into finding him the votes he needs.
When all else fails, the president tells his vice president to block the national certification of official election results. He also incites his loyalists to congregate in Washington, D.C., on the day of the vote certification and exert pressure on Congress.
When the vice president refuses to go along with the election overthrow plan, an angry mob calls for the hanging of the vice president. In the Oval Office, the president tells his confidants that the mob has the right idea.
As a Republican, think about how you would feel if all this played out; if a Democratic president defied 233 years of national precedent and refused to accept the peaceful transfer of presidential power.
Hold on to that feeling. It’s the way you should feel about the actions of your party’s standard-bearer, Donald Trump, in the weeks after his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.
In this era of rabid tribalism, it might seem quaint to talk about the rule of law and the need to put country over party. But I’ll take quaint any day over seditious.
On Thursday, we got a Cliffs Notes version of the case against Trump when a House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, domestic terrorist uprising at the U.S. Capitol held its first public hearing.
The hearing offered a reminder of why Jan. 6 was one of the darkest days in this country’s history.
We saw footage of the Trump-worshipping, white nationalist Proud Boys attacking Capitol Police, smashing windows, breaching the Capitol
and rampaging through the building.
We heard testimony from Caroline Edwards, a Capitol police officer, who was knocked unconscious by the insurrectionists. She described the scene as a “war zone” featuring “hours and hours of hand-tohand combat.”
Edwards recalled slipping on the blood of her fellow officers as she tried to walk outside the Capitol.
Regardless of your party affiliation or your ideological leanings, you should be disgusted by what happened Jan. 6 — and by the pathological behavior from Trump that made it happen.
But because the images from Jan. 6 are so disturbing and bizarre, there’s a temptation to place too much emphasis on that day.
The truth is that even if the Jan. 6 insurrection hadn’t occurred, the aftermath of the 2020 election would still be the story of an attempted coup from a president who refused to relinquish his office and abused his power in a desperate bid to hang on.
Trump’s tactics included the attempted weaponization of the federal government, phone calls to convince Republican legislators to flip the electoral votes of Biden states to Trump and a scheme to manufacture a fake slate of pro-Trump electors in seven key states and send them to Congress.
Much of this behavior has the smell of criminality.
It all amounted to uncharted territory for this country, where even cutthroat politicos such as Richard Nixon were conditioned to believe that you had to
accept presidential defeat with a measure of grace.
The danger is that it could become a commonplace occurrence and one that’s increasingly fortified by an insurrectionist political infrastructure.
After all, Pennsylvania’s current GOP gubernatorial nominee, Doug Mastriano, marched in the Jan. 6 uprising and has bragged that as governor he “could decertify every (voting) machine in the state with a stroke of a pen.”
With that in mind, I’ll ask Republicans for one more favor.
Think long and hard about the implications of this madness. Think about the way our system is getting warped. Most of all, think of country before you think of party.