USA TODAY International Edition
Our View: The choice between democracy and Trump is easy
Among the Republicans who voted to acquit Donald Trump of impeachment charges last year were those who saw the shame of a Senate trial as punishment enough. “I believe the president has learned from this case,” Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said. “He will be much more cautious in the future.”
Sure he will. The fact is, Trump doesn’t know shame. His instincts lie elsewhere — in the feral perception of just how far he can push Republicans to appease and enable him.
Since losing the Nov. 3 election, Trump has checked out of his day job, largely ignoring the raging coronavirus and focusing instead on spreading unfounded claims of voting fraud. He has hounded the governors of Arizona and Georgia to help overturn voting results in those states; summoned Michigan lawmakers to the White House for armtwisting to achieve the same; and, in a brazen phone call Saturday, pleaded with the Georgia secretary of state and his lawyer to “find” enough votes to flip the state in his favor.
In other words, the president has learned absolutely nothing since the House impeached him for a phone call in which he attempted to use foreign aid to shake down a foreign leader to dig up dirt on Joe Biden.
Today, in what should be a ceremonial proceeding for Congress to simply count electoral votes certifying Biden as president, at least a dozen Republican senators and scores of GOP House members will seek to reject election results unless a special commission is created to investigate baseless claims of consequential voter fraud spread by Trump and his media allies — claims that have been disproven by multiple recounts and tossed out of dozens of courts. ( Democrats have raised similar certification challenges in the past, but never in such numbers and never with the support of the defeated candidate.)
The effort is doomed to fail. There should be more than enough votes in the Senate and certainly enough in the Democratically controlled House to block this effort to overturn an American election. But why would so many people who call themselves conservatives even take these radical steps to subvert democracy?
Many fear Trump’s power to sway GOP votes against them in future primaries. He brandished that cudgel in a rally Monday night, vowing to campaign against the 2022 reelection of Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp for his refusal to intervene in the state’s election on Trump’s behalf. Others, such as Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri, harbor ambitions to win populist support among Trump voters for future presidential bids.
And some of the Senate plotters — James Lankford of Oklahoma and Mike Braun of Indiana, to name two — say their actions are merely symbolic moves to placate constituents who believe that Trump should have won.
Today’s certification votes are being cast as a difficult choice for Republican lawmakers — including Vice President Mike Pence, who will preside over the Senate — between upholding the constitutional process and conciliating a corrupt president.
No, this isn’t hard at all, as a number of Republican senators understand. “Let’s be clear what’s happening here: We have a bunch of ambitious politicians who think there’s a quick way to tap into the president’s populist base without doing any real, long- term damage,” said Ben Sasse of Nebraska. “But they’re wrong.”
The effort sets a dangerous precedent for future lawmakers tempted to overturn the will of the people. “The Founders entrusted our elections chiefly to the states — not Congress,” argued Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a Trump supporter who nonetheless declined to cast his lot with a rebellious few.
The actions by Hawley, Cruz and others also risk further emboldening a president who has shown no capacity for self- constraint. Beyond bullying tactics to overturn the election, Trump has urged supporters to gather for a “wild” demonstration today in Washington, D. C. ( prompting local authorities to call out the National Guard); met with a former adviser who advocates that Trump declare martial law and hold new elections; countermanded orders to pull a carrier group out of the Middle East to ease tensions with Iran; and installed acolytes in a series of high Pentagon posts.
This behavior is so unnerving that the 10 living former Defense secretaries, led by Dick Cheney, signed an extraordinary opinion piece warning that “efforts to involve the U. S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory.”
The Republicans who have chosen to appease Trump by challenging the election results must know they will bear some level of responsibility for any desperate act the president takes before Biden assumes office on Jan. 20. Trump will be gone in two weeks, but history will long remember those who conspired with him to undermine America’s democracy.