Have any you seen this yet?
‘An Indelible Stain’: How the G.O.P. Tried to Topple a Pillar of Democracy
Even some Republican leaders delivered a withering assessment of the 126 G.O.P. House members and 18 attorneys general who chose to side with Mr. Trump over the democratic process, by backing a lawsuit that asked the Supreme Court to throw out some 20 million votes in four key states that cemented the president’s loss.
“The act itself by the 126 members of the United States House of Representatives, is an affront to the country,” said Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee. “It’s an offense to the Constitution and it leaves an indelible stain that will be hard for these 126 members to wipe off their political skin for a long time to come.”
With direct buy-in from senior officials like Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and the Republican leader in House, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the president’s effort required the party to promote false theory upon unsubstantiated claim upon outright lie about unproved, widespread fraud — in an election that Republican and Democratic election officials agreed was notably smooth given the challenges of the pandemic.
And it meant that Republican leaders now stand for a new notion: that the final decisions of voters can be challenged without a basis in fact if the results are not to the liking of the losing side, running counter to decades of work by the United States to convince developing nations that peaceful transfers of power are key to any freely elected government’s credibility.
“From a global perspective this certainly looks like many of the cases we’ve seen around the world where an incumbent tries to hold onto power,’’ said Michael Abramowitz, president of Freedom House, a Washington-based group that promotes democracy abroad with support from both parties.
On Saturday, Mr. Trump lost yet another court case, as a federal judge in Wisconsin, Judge Brett H. Ludwig, who was appointed to the court by Mr. Trump this year, said his claims “fail as a matter of law and fact.” The case was dismissed with prejudice, meaning Mr. Trump is barred from bringing cases on similar grounds in that district.
But civil rights attorneys saw the potential for long-lasting damage outside of the legal realm where the Republican efforts — and the lie that Mr. Biden’s win was the result of widespread fraud — have so definitively failed.
On Saturday, Mr. Trump lost yet another court case, as a federal judge in Wisconsin, Judge Brett H. Ludwig, who was appointed to the court by Mr. Trump this year, said his claims “fail as a matter of law and fact.” The case was dismissed with prejudice, meaning Mr. Trump is barred from bringing cases on similar grounds in that district.
But civil rights attorneys saw the potential for long-lasting damage outside of the legal realm where the Republican efforts — and the lie that Mr. Biden’s win was the result of widespread fraud — have so definitively failed.
“There is an anti-democratic virus that has spread in mainstream Republicanism, among mainstream Republican elected officials,” said Dale Ho, director of the Voting Rights Project at the A.C.L.U. “And that loss of faith in the machinery of democracy is a much bigger problem than any individual lawsuit.”
Indeed, after the Supreme Court’s ruling, the Texas Republican Party effectively called for secession by red states whose attorneys general joined in the Texas suit.
There is one inescapable reality that is driving many party leaders to embrace the president’s position, as antithetical as it is to democracy. “Donald Trump is still the 800 pound gorilla in the Republican room — he’s the biggest gravitational force that’s probably ever existed in the party,” said Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of the conservative network Newsmax.
Whatever their primary sources of information, Republicans overwhelmingly view the election as fatally flawed; a Quinnipiac University poll released on Thursday found that only 23 percent of registered Republican voters — and slightly less than half of all white men who are registered to vote — said they believed Mr. Biden’s victory was legitimate.
Those doubters do not represent a majority of Americans; 60 percent of registered voters overall said they accepted the results. But they form the core of the Republican base, and the party’s leaders have proven continually unwilling to go against them — especially with a critical runoff looming in Georgia that will determine partisan control of the Senate.
Even after Mr. Trump’s loss, catering to the wishes of Republican voters has meant aping the president’s own paranoid style of politics by clinging to supposed examples of fraud even after they have been debunked in court.
For instance, last month Mr. Graham said during an interview on “Fox & Friends” that a signature verification machine in Clark County, Nevada, which encompasses Las Vegas, was used improperly to accept “every signature whether it was fraudulent or not.” In the same interview, he shared an allegation that people in the county were spotted filling out fraudulent ballots on “a Biden/Harris truck.”
Those allegations were contained in a lawsuit Republicans filed in the state. Last week a judge found that the signature machine in question had, in fact, sent 70 percent of the signatures it scanned back to election workers for human verification. “The record does not support” allegations that the machine “accepted signatures that should have been rejected,” wrote the judge, James T. Russell. Similarly, he ruled, a witness account about false ballots filled out on a Biden/Harris vehicle was “not credible.”
It's becoming blazingly clear that the current Republican leadership couldn't care less about what the majority of the electorate wants. The numerous lawsuits have vanishingly little evidence of widespread, systematic voter fraud to "steal" the election from Trump. If anything, it is the Republicans trying to fraudulently steal the election. There is far more documented evidence of Republicans deliberately trying to suppress voting by fraudulently removing legitimate, minority voters, than there is of Democrats trying to rig the election. If any party is guilty of trying to steal the election, Republicans are more likely the guilty party than Democrats.
No precept or claim is more suspect or more likely to be false than one that can only be supported by invoking the claim of Divine authority for it--no matter who or what claims such authority.
