The lasting cost of a coup attempt
President Trump’s inability to endure his election loss, an eventuality that a long list of politicians have tolerated with equanimity, has transformed a discrete defeat into an improbably long losing streak. His legal, political and rhetorical campaign against the first loss, far from overcoming it, has yielded a sea of losses stretching from Carson City to Capitol Hill.
Trump has no chance of reversing Presidentelect Joe Biden’s victory by 74 electoral votes and over 7 million ballots. What he and his allies are undoing, with dire implications, is more than two centuries of consensus on one of the most fundamental rules of a rulesbased system: That we will be governed according to the will of the electorate.
The Trump team’s impressive string of legal defeats in half a dozen states he lost reached its apex Tuesday, when the U. S. Supreme Court refused to intervene in an effort to throw out millions of votes in Pennsylvania on dubious grounds unanimously rejected by the state’s highest court. The justices — twothirds of them nominated by Republicans and onethird by Trump himself — dismissed the case in one sentence spanning a total of 18 words.
The day wouldn’t end without yet another loss for the president. On Tuesday night, the Nevada Supreme Court unanimously rejected the Trump campaign’s bid to overturn the results there.
The appellate defeats followed a series of lower court rebukes as Trump has lost over 35 challenges to the election, according to the Associated Press.
The case dismissed in Washington, however, is being succeeded by an even more dubious attempt to bring the high court into the fray. Unlike the Pennsylvania case, which at least was led by a Republican congressman and a losing congressional candidate from that state, the latest complaint comes from Texas, a state whose electoral votes are being awarded to Trump without dispute. But Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is reportedly under federal investigation, is asking the court to throw out more than 10 million votes in four other states — Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — based on a collection of false and baseless claims.
It’s outlandish, though not too outlandish to have been joined by 17 other state attorneys general. Likewise, a Washington Post survey of Republican members of Congress found that more than 200 — nearly 9 out of 10 — still haven’t acknowledged Biden’s victory.
Several judges who have ruled against the president in no uncertain terms have seized the opportunity to reassert the norms he and his allies would trample. Linda V. Parker, a federal judge in Michigan, noted in a ruling Monday that the Trump campaign was asking her court “to ignore the orderly statutory scheme established to challenge elections and to ignore the will of millions of voters. This the court cannot, and will not, do.”
The country will long regret that so many of those elected to make and enforce our laws have offered no such defense of them.