Opinion

This is a glimpse of what Republicans running for Congress nationwide can expect next year. Indeed, mainstream Republicans are already being ritualistically forced to affirm Trump’s supposedly stolen re-election (and the nobility of the subsequent insurrection). They are not allowed to just pretend it didn’t happen and move on.

Along those same lines, just hours before the rally in Virginia, Trump released a statement saying, “If we don’t solve the Presidential Election Fraud of 2020 (which we have thoroughly and conclusively documented), Republicans will not be voting in ’22 or ’24. It is the single most important thing for Republicans to do.”

This should be interpreted as a serious threat because it speaks to the very efficacy of voting. Trump is not saying that he will tell his voters to stay home in 2022 to punish Republicans. He is making a much more furtive and veiled threat: He will tell the voters not to waste their time voting, unless, of course, other Republican politicians (a) buy into the bogus premise that the election was stolen from him, and (b) support whatever election “reforms” he says will prevent that from happening again.

This is a devious way of holding Republican politicians hostage to his demands while avoiding being labeled a spoiler.

Nice elections you got there. Be a shame if something happened to them.

The beauty is that Trump doesn’t even have to deliver on his mob-boss threat; he just has to issue it, and Republican politicians will bend to his will. That’s because the threat is believable, first because Trump doesn’t care about the party, and second because Trump has demonstrated that he is careless and erratic. In this regard, he is employing Nixon’s “madman theory”—against his own party.

Every compromise made to appease him or kick the can down the road (in hopes he will fade away) only empowers him more.

Trump isn’t just the biggest X factor in the 2024 presidential race, he may prove the greatest unknown in the 2021 and 2022 elections. He is the elephant in the room—the “known unknown.” His actions are unpredictable and chaotic, making it impossible for Republicans to plan for, much less manage, them.

Elections come and go. Trump is forever. And all he demands iseverything.

This year we joined more than 150 conservatives — including former governors, senators, congressmen, cabinet secretaries, and party leaders — in calling for the Republican Party to divorce itself from Trumpism or else lose our support, perhaps with us forming a new political party. Rather than return to founding ideals, Republican leaders in the House and in many states have now turned belief in conspiracy theories and lies about stolen elections into a litmus test for membership and running for office.

Starting a new center-right party may prove to be the last resort if Trump-backed candidates continue to win Republican primaries. We and our allies have debated the option of starting a new party for months and will continue to explore its viability in the long run. Unfortunately, history is littered with examples of failed attempts at breaking the two-party system, and in most states today the laws do not lend themselves easily to the creation and success of third parties.

So for now, the best hope for the rational remnants of the Republican Party is for us to form an alliance with Democrats to defend American institutions, defeat far-right candidates, and elect honorable representatives next year — including a strong contingent of moderate Democrats.

It’s a strategy that has worked. Mr. Trump lost re-election in large part because Republicans nationwide defected, with 7 percent who voted for him in 2016 flipping to support Joe Biden, a margin big enough to have made some difference in key swing states.

Even still, we don’t take this position lightly. Many of us have spent years battling the left over government’s role in society, and we will continue to have disagreements on fundamental issues like infrastructure spending, taxes and national security. Similarly, some Democrats will be wary of any pact with the political right.

But we agree on something more foundational — democracy. We cannot tolerate the continued hijacking of a major U.S. political party by those who seek to tear down our Republic’s guardrails or who are willing to put one man’s interests ahead of the country. We cannot tolerate Republican leaders — in 2022 or in the presidential election in 2024 — refusing to accept the results of elections or undermining the certification of those results should they lose.

To that end, concerned conservatives must join forces with Democrats on the most essential near-term imperative: blocking Republican leaders from regaining control of the House of Representatives. Some of us have worked in the past with the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, but as long as he embraces Mr. Trump’s lies, he cannot be trusted to lead the chamber, especially in the run-up to the next presidential election.

And while many of us support and respect the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, it is far from clear that he can keep Mr. Trump’s allies at bay, which is why the Senate may be safer remaining as a divided body rather than under Republican control.

For these reasons, we will endorse and support bipartisan-oriented moderate Democrats in difficult races, like Representatives Abigail Spanberger of Virginia and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, where they will undoubtedly be challenged by Trump-backed candidates. And we will defend a small nucleus of courageous Republicans, such as Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Peter Meijer and others who are unafraid to speak the truth.

In addition to these leaders, this week we are coming together around a political idea — the Renew America Movement — and will release a slate of nearly two dozen Democratic, independent and Republican candidates we will support in 2022. [/expand]

‘Foul Five’ seeking to replace Sen. Portman will heap shame on Ohio: Brent Larkin

ByBrent Larkin, cleveland.com

Published: Oct. 10, 2021

https://www.cleveland.com/opinion/2021/10/foul-five-seeking-to-replace-sen-portman-will-heap-shame-on-ohio-brent-larkin.html

CLEVELAND — Ohioans should prepare for the possibility of another enormous blow to what’s left of the state’s reputation. Of the seven candidates with a plausible chance of succeeding outgoing Sen. Rob Portman, at least five would be a giant-sized downgrade.

This is not to excuse Portman’s silent sanctions of former President Donald Trump’s toxic behavior and lies. But as a person and legislator, Portman possesses qualities far superior to the “Foul Five” who have already shredded any sense of respectability in pursuit of a job for which they are uniquely unqualified.

The Foul Five are Josh Mandel, J.D. Vance, Jane Timken, Bernie Moreno and Mike Gibbons. Should any one of them win next year’s Senate election, those of us who regularly criticized Portman will be yearning for his return the day after he leaves office.

Of the seven candidates with a chance of replacing Portman, only longtime Rep. Tim Ryan, the presumptive Democratic nominee, and State Sen. Matt Dolan, the sole candidate representing the Republican Party that exists now in name only, have the potential to serve well.

Dolan alone among the GOP candidates refuses to surrender his personal dignity and reputation in service of the worst president in history.

But to win the primary, Dolan needs at least 30% of the vote, a tall order given that a CNN poll in September showed that 78% of the nation’s Republicans don’t believe Joe Biden won the presidency. More frightening, 54% believe there is evidence it was stolen – although no such evidence exists.

Attractive as Dolan may be to those who believe honesty is a virtue, it’s wise to remember that voter enthusiasm and turnout in Republican primaries tend to be highest among those whose views are far right of center. The same is true of Democratic primaries and far-left voters.

Members of the Foul Five have apparently concluded that embracing an anti-science, anti-fact agenda is the only path to victory in next spring’s Senate primary. The rallying cry of this sick and twisted appeal is “freedom” – freedom for Ohioans to live their lives as they see fit, even if it jeopardizes the lives of others, including children.

The worst of the Foul Five, for now, is Mandel, the former state treasurer whose long service in elected life is best remembered for a 2017 scheme using $1.84 million in tax dollars to promote himself. So egregious was Mandel’s waste of taxpayer funds that the Republican-run legislature amended state law to prevent some future officeholder from repeating it.

Mandel has no soul, no bottom. He uses social media to vaguely hint at the need for violence and often argues the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. On Sept. 23, Mandel took to Twitter with the preposterous claim there was widespread voter fraud in Ohio last year, offering no evidence, because none exists.

But the GOP’s race to the bottom is a competitive event. J.D. Vance, a Fox News favorite and author of the runaway best-selling book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” is working hard at proving more repugnant than Mandel. During the 2016 campaign, Vance positioned himself as a truth-teller with, “I can’t stomach Trump. I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.”

Now, it’s Vance who wants to lead America to a very dark place, regularly serving the base helpings of bigotry and hatred. He revels in describing immigrants as “dirty” and regularly rails against “elitists,” then jets off to the Hamptons to fill his campaign coffers with their money.

On Sept. 5, Vance reached a point of no return, raging in a tweet that right-wing conspiracy crackpot Alex Jones “is a far more reputable source of information than Rachel Maddow.” Three weeks later, a federal judge in Texas ruled against Jones in a lawsuit brought by families of the children massacred at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. Jones had cruelly claimed the Sandy Hook shooting never happened. He said the whole thing was a hoax.

If this is Vance’s idea of “reputable,” Ohio would be far better off without him. Not long ago a fresh face with a compelling life story, now it’s Vance who has been unmasked as a hoax. His journey from best-selling author to candidate for Ohio’s U.S. Senate seat was best described in a July profile in The Atlantic headlined, “The Moral Collapse of J.D. Vance.”

Timken, who resigned as Ohio Republican Party chair to run for the Senate, and successful Cleveland businessmen Mike Gibbons and Bernie Moreno, are a wee bit less contemptible than Mandel and Vance. But that requires clearing the lowest political bar imaginable.

Of these three, only Timken has a plausible path to victory. But her betrayal of U.S. Rep. Anthony Gonzalez for the Cleveland-area congressman’s vote to impeach Trump following the Jan. 6 insurrection evidenced a mind-numbing lack of character.

At the end of January, Timken told The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com that Gonzalez had a “rational reason” for his impeachment vote, describing him as “a very good person.”

He is. She isn’t. Barely a month later, the conscience-free Timken called on Gonzalez to resign.

His life threatened by the Trump mob for doing the right thing, Gonzalez chose family over politics, deciding not to seek a third term. If only every Trump voter possessed the self-awareness required to acknowledge the role they indirectly played in these attempts to ruin a man’s life for doing what was right.

It’s hard to imagine a worse look for Ohio than The Wall Street Journal’s front-page story of Oct. 7 detailing how Trump has actually “enhanced his influence” among Ohio Republicans since losing the 2020 election. About the 2022 election here, Trump said, “The biggest single issue is the election fraud of 2020.”

Trump’s “election fraud” claims are a nonissue to anyone who believes facts matter. But facts clearly matter not all to the Foul Five, because they all lack the constitution to demand Trump stop spreading these lies. Not one of them seems to care Trump’s obvious goal is to undermine voter confidence in democracy.

A far better option for the Foul Five would be for them to take their talents elsewhere.

I’ve found just the spot.

The village of Rendville is the tiniest town in Ohio. Tucked in the foothills of southeast Ohio, about 25 miles north of Athens, Rendville is home to 28 residents, down from 36 in 2010.

Funds are scarce in Rendville. If a road needs repair, residents do it themselves. For police and fire protection, they rely on the generosity of neighboring communities.

Bryan Bailey has been mayor of Rendville since 2000. “I’ve been at this a long time,” Bailey told me. “I’m pretty sure I won’t run again.”

Belief in the myth of the rigged election has persisted for months — for years, actually. But every time Trump has had the opportunity to prove fraud, he’s failed.

Trump failed through his 2017 Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which could document no fraud and dissolved in early 2018 without even issuing a report. Through the more than 60 court cases that Trump supporters lost after the election. Through the Michigan Senate committee, led by Trump supporters, that comprehensively rejected Trump’s allegations of election fraud. Through the FBI and Justice Department post-election investigation.

If the audits that Trump himself has demanded keep coming up empty, maybe, just maybe, some true believers in Trump’s falsehood will recognize he’s been feeding them snake oil.

These proceedings run by Trump supporters at least present that opportunity. Reducing that 30 percent number will be good for everyone, Republicans included.

Challenging election outcomes when one party doesn’t like the results is a door Republicans need to realize swings both ways. Having two-thirds of your voters not trusting election results will over time injure Republicans more than Democrats. Why should Republican voters turn out? It’s a lethal path for a party that has already seen depressed turnout in some elections, such as the Georgia Senate runoffs and California governor’s recall.

Moreover, if a state’s elections are so flawed that Democratic victories should be reversed, that will also be fodder for Democrats to challenge the certifications of Republicans who ran on the same ballots.

Something has to change, and the key to that change is to convince some portion of the 30 percent that Trump has failed to deliver on his bombast. Trump is hoisting himself on his petard. Let him.

I value such exchanges and the chance to model the ability to disagree in a civil way. But no longer will I accept any invitation where Eastman is also speaking. I urge my fellow professors to similarly boycott events where Eastman is provided a forum. I have never said this about anyone before, but never before have we had someone so actively try to overthrow our government. Eastman’s memo, which came to light in a new book by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, said that Pence, in presiding over Congress on Jan. 6, should refuse to count the electoral votes from states where there were claims of fraud.

To be clear, judges in these states found no credible evidence of fraud. Recently, a Republican-led recount in Arizona found that Biden won by an even larger margin than originally thought. According to Eastman, excluding electoral votes from these states would leave 232 electoral votes for Trump and 222 for Biden. Eastman says Pence should then rule Trump reelected. “(T)here is very solid legal authority, and historical precedent, for the view that the president of the Senate does the counting, including the resolution of disputed electoral votes … and all the members of Congress can do is watch,” Eastman wrote.

There is absolutely no such legal authority or historical precedent. Eastman’s memo says Pence could then say the matter should go to the House of Representatives, where each state delegation would get one vote for president. Twenty-six state delegations in the House had a Republican majority. Thus, he expected they would select Trump. Eastman concludes his memo by saying “Pence should do this without asking for permission — either from a vote of a joint session or from the Court.” According to Woodward and Costa, Trump relied on the Eastman memo to urge Pence to overturn the decision of the Electoral College. Thankfully, Pence rightly concluded he had no such authority.

Had Pence followed the Eastman prescription, American democracy would have ended. Eastman was forced to resign from Chapman University but remains a featured speaker at academic conferences. I believe the California Bar, of which he is a member, should consider disciplinary actions, and I think it essential that other professors condemn Eastman’s actions. This is not an ideological disagreement. I differ with Eastman on virtually every issue but was always glad to debate him. This is about recognizing the grave seriousness of what happened on Jan. 6.

Election integrity should be a nonpartisan issue, but like everything else it’s been polarized, and reforms seem unlikely to pass the current Senate despite a razor-thin Democratic majority, given Republican intransigence — unless Democrats blow up the filibuster so a simple majority can decide the issue.

So what should Democrats do? Setting aside the filibuster for this one issue ultimately is the right way to go, because election subversion poses the gravest threat imaginable to American democracy. But we should recognize that there are dangers in this route. Voting reform passed with only Democratic support may persuade Republicans that efforts to avoid subverting election results are themselves meant to rig the outcome. So it’s important for Democrats to reach out to Republicans, and for responsible Republicans to join Democrats in this cause, which is sensible and nonpartisan.

Any bill aimed at election subversion should include a few crucial components. One would be the mandated use, in every state, of voting machines that produce paper ballots — ballots that can be examined by a court or other neutral body in the event of a dispute over the integrity of the vote count. (About 12 percent of Americans still voted on fully electronic machines in 2020, according to a Brennan Center analysis.)

Paper balloting requirements ought to be coupled with rules governing the chain of custody of ballots (and of voting machines), to insure they aren’t tampered with; meanwhile, mandatory post-election audits — conducted by independent officials — can help make sure no one inside or outside government messed with the voting technology used to cast or count ballots. (A National Conference of State Legislatures survey found that only a handful of states already incorporate into law requirements for state and local officials to do “risk-limiting” audits — the gold standard — to confirm official accounts, although more states have begun pilot programs.)

The Electoral Count Act, an arcane set of rules dating back to 1887 that governs how Congress counts electoral college votes, is in desperate need of a rewrite. New legislation aimed at preventing stolen elections could incorporate such a revision. Congress could clarify that only extreme circumstances impeding voting — such as a natural disaster — would justify a state legislature’s sending in a competing slate of electors. It should also be harder for members of Congress to raise frivolous objections to a state’s slate of electors; right now it takes only one senator and one House member, from any state, to bring the counting process to a halt for separate debates on the validity of that state’s counts.

We also learned in 2020 about potential choke points within some states in the process of certifying presidential election results. Procedures need to be streamlined so that political hacks charged with ceremonial roles in certifying results don’t insert themselves into the process, as almost happened in Michigan in 2020. (Republicans later replaced the courageous Republican canvassing board member in that state who voted to affirm Biden’s victory.) The rules that worked in the 1880s no longer make sense for our deeply divided modern democracy.

Congress could provide for meaningful federal court oversight when there is reason to believe election officials have tampered with vote counts. At present, federal courts play only a limited role in assuring fair vote counts, and state court processes might not be sufficient everywhere to assure such fairness.

And the new legislation should prevent state takeovers of local election bodies — the replacement of election officials with naked partisans. (Some think Georgia is poised for such a takeover in the Democratic bastion Fulton County, which contains Atlanta: The Georgia State Election Board has approved a majority-Republican panel to “review the performance” of the Fulton County Board of Elections. State oversight of local election bodies should truly be limited to assuring competence — and should not involve messing with the rules for conducting fair elections.)

Congress could also increase the criminal penalties that apply to election tampering, whether done by election officials or others. These activities are already illegal, but the threat of serious jail time should hang over those who would not report a fair vote count. In 2020, election officials like Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger stood up to Trump’s demand that he “find” over 11,000 votes to flip the state’s results from Biden. Someone with less integrity next time might still be deterred by a sufficiently severe criminal penalty.

Republicans have so far blocked all election reform that Democrats have proposed: Witness Senate Republicans’ filibustering a few months ago of the For the People Act, designed to counter a wave of ballot restrictions in Republican-led states. But much of Democrats’ efforts have been focused not on election subversion per se, but with issues related to voting rights or campaign financing. Legislation like the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore some aspects of the Voting Rights Act struck down by the conservative Supreme Court, raise important and serious issues and deserve to be passed. But considering voting rights issues separately from anti-subversion issues increases the chance for bipartisan compromise on the latter.

Some Republicans might well be enlisted in the cause — including the few Republican House members and Senators who voted either to impeach Trump or to convict him after the insurrection in Washington on Jan 6. The importance of election integrity knows no party, so a bipartisan bill would be the ideal.

But if Republicans won’t act, that shouldn’t stop Democrats from moving ahead on this issue. If protecting elections isn’t worth setting the filibuster aside for — if only temporarily — it’s hard to know what would be.

For the millions eager to preserve some semblance of democracy in the United States, the autumn of 2021 arrived with a best-of-times respite — the seeming implosion, at least to rational human beings, of the Arizona scam that many dubbed “the fraudit” — in what otherwise feels like a worst-of-times moment for the American Experiment. There have been shocking new revelations about both how close we came to the abyss in 2020-21, and apocalyptic scenarios for 2024 that are coming into sharper focus.

The sense of urgency and angst was nailed this weekend in a truly remarkable Washington Post essay by Robert Kagan — hardly a man of the left, but rather an infuriatingly wrongheaded neocon advocate for 2003′s Iraq War — that pulled no punches in portraying American democracy as possibly on the brink of a total meltdown. Writing that Trump — barring ill health — has already locked down the 2024 GOP nomination and that a scheme to empower Trump-besotted vote counters is well underway. Kagan wrote there’s “a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves.”

“All right-wing authoritarian movements always do this — it’s how they come to power,” Steve Schmidt, the former Republican who advised John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Friday night. “They drive chaos through policies of cynicism [and] nihilism, and then they promise to restore order with easy scapegoats.”

Partially driving the new waves of concern have been a stream of major new revelations about how close the plotting around a Trump-led coup to keep him in office came to succeeding. Specifically, there was the discovery and leaking of the so-called Eastman memo — developed by conservative lawyer and Federalist Society member John Eastman — that spelled out a point-by-point plan for how Vice President Mike Pence could push to not certify valid Electoral College results at the Jan. 6 proceedings and either declare Trump the winner or throw the contest into the House, which would likely elect Trump with its arcane 18th-century rules.

Rioters climb the west wall of the the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6. A House committee investigating the insurrection has requested that telecommunications and social media companies preserve the personal communications of hundreds of people who may have somehow been connected to the attack.

New reporting shows that Pence didn’t necessarily reject this ridiculous advice out of hand, but was talked down by Establishment Republicans including the most unlikeliest of heroes (or “heros”), Indiana’s former GOP veep Dan Quayle. We’re also learning a lot more about a supposed-to-be-secret Jan. 5 meeting of key Trump allies at the Willard Hotel, and about communications between pro-coup Trumpists and the then-president. The growing sense is that 2020 was less spontaneous chaos than a trial run for the next time. And what Trump’s neo-fascists learned is that an American election can be stolen — but only if wild-eyed loyalists can position themselves inside the sweet spots of the judiciary, state legislative leadership, and the key vote-counting roles, especially the all-important secretary of state position.

So the Trumpian strategy for 2024 seems to have two prongs. One is to createa continuous four-year cloud of uncertainty — at least for loyalists who only consume news on Fox or Facebook — about Biden’s 2020 victory. In other words, the outcome of these bogus investigations like Arizona’s not-really-an-audit isn’t what matters as much as keeping the plates of baseless accusation spinning. That’s why on Friday night, just moments after the Arizona alleged findings were released, the Republican secretary of state in Texas — which, you’ll recall, Trump actually won in 2020 — announced a new audit of four counties there. This series of “rolling ‘fraudits’” will keep the conversation on your uncle’s Facebook page for the next 26 months.

Equally significant in Texas is the presence of a Republican secretary of state. Key to Biden’s tenuous victory in the Electoral College in 2020, on the other hand, was the presence of pro-democracy officials in these key posts, from Democrats in Arizona and Pennsylvania to a pro-facts Republican in Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger. So the critical goal of Team Trump is to change all of that for 2024.

Supporters of Donald Trump gather outside the Pennsylvania State Capitol on Dec. 14, 2020, in Harrisburg.Michael M. Santiago / MCT

A stunning report last week by the Reuters news service found that 10 of the 15 top Republicans running for secretary of state in five key battleground states — where the post, unlike Pennsylvania, is an elected position — “have either declared that the 2020 election was stolen or called for their state’s results to be invalidated or further investigated.” Several of these candidates have already been Trump-endorsed, including Arizona’s Finchem but also Georgia Congressman Jody Hice, who is running to get rid of Raffensperger and called Jan. 6 “our 1776 moment.”

Pennsylvania — the closest battleground state with the most electoral votes, where the election was called for Biden last November — is a powerful example of exactly what the Trump scheme to unwind American democracy looks like. In Harrisburg, Republican legislative leaders — after weeks of lobbying and browbeating by Trump himself — are plowing ahead with their unpopular plan to yet again review (definitely NOT an audit) the 2020 outcome, which involves handing over my personal data and that of 9 million other voters to an unknown but probably dodgy vendor. Again, the medium — creating chaos — is the message.

The Democratic state attorney general, Josh Shapiro, has seized on this abuse of personal data in filing a lawsuit seeking to stop the GOP probe before it gets off the ground. That’s the right thing to do on Shapiro’s part, but it’s not the most important thing the Montgomery County politico can do to save democracy, in either America or its Keystone State. Shapiro is also the presumed front-runner to become his party’s nominee for governor. If he wins, he will pick the next secretary of state — and thwart a key element of Trump’s scheme.

If the GOP wins Pennsylvania’s open 2022 gubernatorial race to replace term-limited Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf — and the governor’s mansion has flipped parties without fail since the 1960s — then the secretary of state pick will be made by a Republican who will surely have to curry favor with Trump to get through a crowded primary. One of the front-runners is a mirror image of Arizona’s Finchem — State Sen. Doug Mastriano, who organized buses to Capitol Hill on Jan. 6 and was photographed near the insurrection. If Mastriano or one of several other Trump-crazed candidates wins the general election, it’s a lock that Pennsylvania’s 48th governor will name a secretary of state who will work feverishly to restrict voting rights in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, and — if Trump gets fewer votes, again — cast doubt on the outcome, or work to simply ignore the results, as would be expected in a dictatorship.

So while, yes, Pennsylvania’s governor’s race will be important for the usual reasons like education funding or the fate of fracking, this time around voters are essentially tasked with preserving America’s 245-year experience with democracy … or not. We need to listen with great care to what former conservatives like Robert Kagan or Steve Schmidt are trying to tell us. The future of the United States, and its vital yet imperfect promises of liberty, are at the edge of a cliff, looking over the edge. We must seize this moment to pull it back.

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Today’s arguments over the filibuster will seem quaint in three years if the American political system enters a crisis for which the Constitution offers no remedy.

Most Americans — and all but a handful of politicians — have refused to take this possibility seriously enough to try to prevent it. As has so often been the case in other countries where fascist leaders arise, their would-be opponents are paralyzed in confusion and amazement at this charismatic authoritarian. They have followed the standard model of appeasement, which always begins with underestimation. The political and intellectual establishments in both parties have been underestimating Trump since he emerged on the scene in 2015. They underestimated the extent of his popularity and the strength of his hold on his followers; they underestimated his ability to take control of the Republican Party; and then they underestimated how far he was willing to go to retain power. The fact that he failed to overturn the 2020 election has reassured many that the American system remains secure, though it easily could have gone the other way — if Biden had not been safely ahead in all four states where the vote was close; if Trump had been more competent and more in control of the decision-makers in his administration, Congress and the states. As it was, Trump came close to bringing off a coup earlier this year. All that prevented it was a handful of state officials with notable courage and integrity, and the reluctance of two attorneys general and a vice president to obey orders they deemed inappropriate.

These were not the checks and balances the Framers had in mind when they designed the Constitution, of course, but Trump has exposed the inadequacy of those protections. The Founders did not foresee the Trump phenomenon, in part because they did not foresee national parties. They anticipated the threat of a demagogue, but not of a national cult of personality. They assumed that the new republic’s vast expanse and the historic divisions among the 13 fiercely independent states would pose insuperable barriers to national movements based on party or personality. “Petty” demagogues might sway their own states, where they were known and had influence, but not the whole nation with its diverse populations and divergent interests.

Such checks and balances as the Framers put in place, therefore, depended on the separation of the three branches of government, each of which, they believed, would zealously guard its own power and prerogatives. The Framers did not establish safeguards against the possibility that national-party solidarity would transcend state boundaries because they did not imagine such a thing was possible. Nor did they foresee that members of Congress, and perhaps members of the judicial branch, too, would refuse to check the power of a president from their own party.

In recent decades, however, party loyalty has superseded branch loyalty, and never more so than in the Trump era. As the two Trump impeachments showed, if members of Congress are willing to defend or ignore the president’s actions simply because he is their party leader, then conviction and removal become all but impossible. In such circumstances, the Framers left no other check against usurpation by the executive — except (small-r) republican virtue.

Critics and supporters alike have consistently failed to recognize what a unique figure Trump is in American history. Because his followers share fundamentally conservative views, many see Trump as merely the continuation, and perhaps the logical culmination, of the Reagan Revolution. This is a mistake: Although most Trump supporters are or have become Republicans, they hold a set of beliefs that were not necessarily shared by all Republicans. Some Trump supporters are former Democrats and independents. In fact, the passions that animate the Trump movement are as old as the republic and have found a home in both parties at one time or another.

Suspicion of and hostility toward the federal government; racial hatred and fear; a concern that modern, secular society undermines religion and traditional morality; economic anxiety in an age of rapid technological change; class tensions, with subtle condescension on one side and resentment on the other; distrust of the broader world, especially Europe, and its insidious influence in subverting American freedom — such views and attitudes have been part of the fabric of U.S. politics since the anti-Federalists, the Whiskey Rebellion and Thomas Jefferson. The Democratic Party was the home of white supremacists until they jumped to George Wallace in 1968 and later to the Republicans. Liberals and Democrats in particular need to distinguish between their ongoing battle with Republican policies and the challenge posed by Trump and his followers. One can be fought through the processes of the constitutional system; the other is an assault on the Constitution itself.

What makes the Trump movement historically unique is not its passions and paranoias. It is the fact that for millions of Americans, Trump himself is the response to their fears and resentments. This is a stronger bond between leader and followers than anything seen before in U.S. political movements. Although the Founders feared the rise of a king or a Caesar, for two centuries Americans proved relatively immune to unwavering hero-worship of politicians. Their men on horseback — Theodore Roosevelt, Grant, even Washington — were not regarded as infallible. This was true of great populist leaders as well. William Jennings Bryan a century ago was venerated because he advanced certain ideas and policies, but he did not enjoy unquestioning loyalty from his followers. Even Reagan was criticized by conservatives for selling out conservative principles, for deficit spending, for his equivocal stance on abortion, for being “soft” on the Soviet Union.

Trump is different, which is one reason the political system has struggled to understand, much less contain, him. The American liberal worldview tends to search for material and economic explanations for everything, and no doubt a good number of Trump supporters have grounds to complain about their lot in life. But their bond with Trump has little to do with economics or other material concerns. They believe the U.S. government and society have been captured by socialists, minority groups and sexual deviants. They see the Republican Party establishment as corrupt and weak — “losers,” to use Trump’s word, unable to challenge the reigning liberal hegemony. They view Trump as strong and defiant, willing to take on the establishment, Democrats, RINOs, liberal media, antifa, the Squad, Big Tech and the “Mitch McConnell Republicans.” His charismatic leadership has given millions of Americans a feeling of purpose and empowerment, a new sense of identity. While Trump’s critics see him as too narcissistic to be any kind of leader, his supporters admire his unapologetic, militant selfishness. Unlike establishment Republicans, Trump speaks without embarrassment on behalf of an aggrieved segment of Americans, not exclusively White, who feel they have been taking it on the chin for too long. And that is all he needs to do.

There was a time when political analysts wondered what would happen when Trump failed to “deliver” for his constituents. But the most important thing Trump delivers is himself. His egomania is part of his appeal. In his professed victimization by the media and the “elites,” his followers see their own victimization. That is why attacks on Trump by the elites only strengthen his bond with his followers. That is why millions of Trump supporters have even been willing to risk death as part of their show of solidarity: When Trump’s enemies cited his mishandling of the pandemic to discredit him, their answer was to reject the pandemic. One Trump supporter didn’t go to the hospital after developing covid-19 symptoms because he didn’t want to contribute to the liberal case against Trump. “I’m not going to add to the numbers,” he told a reporter.

Because the Trump movement is less about policies than about Trump himself, it has undermined the normal role of American political parties, which is to absorb new political and ideological movements into the mainstream. Bryan never became president, but some of his populist policies were adopted by both political parties. Sen. Bernie Sanders’s supporters might not have wanted Biden for president, but having lost the nomination battle they could work on getting Biden to pursue their agenda. Liberal democracy requires acceptance of adverse electoral results, a willingness to countenance the temporary rule of those with whom we disagree. As historian Richard Hofstadter observed, it requires that people “endure error in the interest of social peace.” Part of that willingness stems from the belief that the democratic system makes it possible to work, even in opposition, to correct the ruling party’s errors and overreach. Movements based on ideas and policies can also quickly shift their allegiances. Today, the progressives’ flag-bearer might be Sanders, but tomorrow it could be Sen. Elizabeth Warren or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or someone else.

For a movement built around a cult of personality, these adjustments are not possible. For Trump supporters, the “error” is that Trump was cheated out of reelection by what he has told them is an oppressive, communist, Democrat regime. While the defeat of a sitting president normally leads to a struggle to claim the party’s mantle, so far no Republican has been able to challenge Trump’s grip on Republican voters: not Sen. Josh Hawley, not Sen. Tom Cotton, not Tucker Carlson, not Gov. Ron DeSantis. It is still all about Trump. The fact that he is not in office means that the United States is “a territory controlled by enemy tribes,” writes one conservative intellectual. The government, as one Trump supporter put it, “is monopolized by a Regime that believes [Trump voters] are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to keep them [from] getting it.” If so, the intellectual posits, what choice do they have but to view the government as the enemy and to become “united and armed to take care of themselves as they think best”?

The Trump movement might not have begun as an insurrection, but it became one after its leader claimed he had been cheated out of reelection. For Trump supporters, the events of Jan. 6 were not an embarrassing debacle but a patriotic effort to save the nation, by violent action if necessary. As one 56-year-old Michigan woman explained: “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.”

The banal normalcy of the great majority of Trump’s supporters, including those who went to the Capitol on Jan. 6, has befuddled many observers. Although private militia groups and white supremacists played a part in the attack, 90 percent of those arrested or charged had no ties to such groups. The majority were middle-class and middle-aged; 40 percent were business owners or white-collar workers. They came mostly from purple, not red, counties.

Most Trump supporters are good parents, good neighbors and solid members of their communities. Their bigotry, for the most part, is typical white American bigotry, perhaps with an added measure of resentment and a less filtered mode of expression since Trump arrived on the scene. But these are normal people in the sense that they think and act as people have for centuries. They put their trust in family, tribe, religion and race. Although zealous in defense of their own rights and freedoms, they are less concerned about the rights and freedoms of those who are not like them. That, too, is not unusual. What is unnatural is to value the rights of others who are unlike you as much as you value your own.

As it happens, however, that is what the American experiment in republican democracy requires. It is what the Framers meant by “republican virtue,” a love of freedom not only for oneself but also as an abstract, universal good; a love of self-government as an ideal; a commitment to abide by the laws passed by legitimate democratic processes; and a healthy fear of and vigilance against tyranny of any kind. Even James Madison, who framed the Constitution on the assumption that people would always pursue their selfish interests, nevertheless argued that it was “chimerical” to believe that any form of government could “secure liberty and happiness without any virtue in the people.” Al Gore and his supporters displayed republican virtue when they abided by the Supreme Court’s judgment in 2000 despite the partisan nature of the justices’ decision. (Whether the court itself displayed republican virtue is another question.)

The events of Jan. 6, on the other hand, proved that Trump and his most die-hard supporters are prepared to defy constitutional and democratic norms, just as revolutionary movements have in the past. While it might be shocking to learn that normal, decent Americans can support a violent assault on the Capitol, it shows that Americans as a people are not as exceptional as their founding principles and institutions. Europeans who joined fascist movements in the 1920s and 1930s were also from the middle classes. No doubt many of them were good parents and neighbors, too. People do things as part of a mass movement that they would not do as individuals, especially if they are convinced that others are out to destroy their way of life.

It would be foolish to imagine that the violence of Jan. 6 was an aberration that will not be repeated. Because Trump supporters see those events as a patriotic defense of the nation, there is every reason to expect more such episodes. Trump has returned to the explosive rhetoric of that day, insisting that he won in a “landslide,” that the “radical left Democrat communist party” stole the presidency in the “most corrupt, dishonest, and unfair election in the history of our country” and that they have to give it back. He has targeted for defeat those Republicans who voted for his impeachment — or criticized him for his role in the riot. Already, there have been threats to bomb polling sites, kidnap officials and attack state capitols. “You and your family will be killed very slowly,” the wife of Georgia’s top election official was texted earlier this year. Nor can one assume that the Three Percenters and Oath Keepers would again play a subordinate role when the next riot unfolds. Veterans who assaulted the Capitol told police officers that they had fought for their country before and were fighting for it again. Looking ahead to 2022 and 2024, Trump insists“there is no way they win elections without cheating. There’s no way.” So, if the results come in showing another Democratic victory, Trump’s supporters will know what to do. Just as “generations of patriots” gave “their sweat, their blood and even their very lives” to build America, Trump tells them, so today “we have no choice. We have to fight” to restore “our American birthright.”

Where does the Republican Party stand in all this? The party gave birth to and nurtured this movement; it bears full responsibility for establishing the conditions in which Trump could capture the loyalty of 90 percent of Republican voters. Republican leaders were more than happy to ride Trump’s coattails if it meant getting paid off with hundreds of conservative court appointments, including three Supreme Court justices; tax cuts; immigration restrictions; and deep reductions in regulations on business. Yet Trump’s triumph also had elements of a hostile takeover. The movement’s passion was for Trump, not the party. GOP primary voters chose Trump over the various flavors of establishment Republicanism (Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio), and after Trump’s election they continued to regard establishment Republicans as enemies. Longtime party heroes like Paul Ryan were cast into oblivion for disparaging Trump. Even staunch supporters such as Jeff Sessions eventually became villains when they would not do as Trump demanded. Those who survived had a difficult balancing act: to use Trump’s appeal to pass the Republican agenda while also controlling Trump’s excesses, which they worried could ultimately threaten the party’s interests.

That plan seemed plausible in 2017. Unlike other insurgent leaders, Trump had not spent time in the political wilderness building a party and surrounding himself with loyalists. He had to choose from an existing pool of Republican officials, who varied in their willingness to do his bidding. The GOP establishment hoped that the presence of “adults” would restrain him, protecting their traditional agenda and, in their view, the country’s interests, from his worst instincts.

This was a miscalculation. Trump’s grip on his supporters left no room for an alternative power center in the party. One by one, the “adults” resigned or were run off. The dissent and contrary opinions that exist in every party — the Northeast moderate Republicans in Reagan’s day; the progressives in today’s Democratic Party — disappeared from Trump’s Republican Party. The only real issue was Trump himself, and on that there could be no dissent. Those who disapproved of Trump could either keep silent or leave.

The takeover extended beyond the level of political leadership. Modern political parties are an ecosystem of interest groups, lobby organizations, job seekers, campaign donors and intellectuals. All have a stake in the party’s viability; all ultimately depend on being roughly aligned with wherever the party is at a given moment; and so all had to make their peace with Trump, too. Conservative publications that once opposed him as unfit for the presidency had to reverse course or lose readership and funding. Pundits had to adjust to the demands of their pro-Trump audiences — and were rewarded handsomely when they did. Donors who had opposed Trump during the primaries fell into line, if only to preserve some influence on the issues that mattered to them. Advocacy organizations that had previously seen their role as holding the Republican Party to certain principles, and thus often dissented from the party leadership, either became advocates for Trump or lost clout.

It was no surprise that elected officials feared taking on the Trump movement and that Republican job seekers either kept silent about their views or made show-trial-like apologies for past criticism. Ambition is a powerful antidote to moral qualms. More revealing was the behavior of Republican elder statesmen, former secretaries of state in their 80s or 90s who had no further ambitions for high office and seemingly nothing to lose by speaking out. Despite their known abhorrence of everything Trump stood for, these old lions refused to criticize him. They were unwilling to come out against a Republican Party to which they had devoted their professional lives, even when the party was led by someone they detested. Whatever they thought about Trump, moreover, Republican elders disliked Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the Democrats more. Again, this is not so unusual. German conservatives accommodated Adolf Hitler in large part because they opposed the socialists more than they opposed the Nazis, who, after all, shared many of their basic prejudices. As for conservative intellectuals, even those who had spent years arguing that Woodrow Wilson was a tyrant because he created the Federal Reserve and supported child labor laws seemed to have no concerns about whether Trump was a would-be despot. They not only came to Trump’s defense but fashioned political doctrines to justify his rule, filling in the wide gaps of his nonexistent ideology with an appeal to “conservative nationalism” and conservative populism.Perhaps American conservatism was never comfortable with the American experiment in liberal democracy, but certainly since Trump took over their party, many conservatives have revealed a hostility to core American beliefs.

All this has left few dissenting voices within the Republican ecosystem. The Republican Party today is a zombie party. Its leaders go through the motions of governing in pursuit of traditional Republican goals, wrestling over infrastructure spending and foreign policy, even as real power in the party has leached away to Trump. From the uneasy and sometimes contentious partnership during Trump’s four years in office, the party’s main if not sole purpose today is as the willing enabler of Trump’s efforts to game the electoral system to ensure his return to power.

With the party firmly under his thumb, Trump is now fighting the Biden administration on separate fronts. One is normal, legitimate political competition, where Republicans criticize Biden’s policies, feed and fight the culture wars, and in general behave like a typical hostile opposition.

The other front is outside the bounds of constitutional and democratic competition and into the realm of illegal or extralegal efforts to undermine the electoral process. The two are intimately related, because the Republican Party has used its institutional power in the political sphere to shield Trump and his followers from the consequences of their illegal and extralegal activities in the lead-up to Jan. 6. Thus, Reps. Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik, in their roles as party leaders, run interference for the Trump movement in the sphere of legitimate politics, while Republicans in lesser positions cheer on the Jan. 6 perpetrators, turning them into martyrs and heroes, and encouraging illegal acts in the future.

This pincer assault has several advantages. Republican politicians and would-be policymakers can play the role of the legitimate opposition. They can rediscover their hawkish internationalist foreign policy (suspended during the Trump years) and their deficit-minded economics (also suspended during the Trump years). They can go on the mainstream Sunday shows and critique the Biden administration on issues such as Afghanistan. They can pretend that Trump is no longer part of the equation. Biden is the president, after all, and his administration is not exactly without faults.

Yet whatever the legitimacy of Republican critiques of Biden, there is a fundamental disingenuousness to it all. It is a dodge. Republicans focus on China and critical race theory and avoid any mention of Trump, even as the party works to fix the next election in his favor. The left hand professes to know nothing of what the right hand is doing.

Even Trump opponents play along. Republicans such as Sens. Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse have condemned the events of Jan. 6, criticized Trump and even voted for his impeachment, but in other respects they continue to act as good Republicans and conservatives. On issues such as the filibuster, Romney and others insist on preserving “regular order” and conducting political and legislative business as usual, even though they know that Trump’s lieutenants in their party are working to subvert the next presidential election.

The result is that even these anti-Trump Republicans are enabling the insurrection. Revolutionary movements usually operate outside a society’s power structures. But the Trump movement also enjoys unprecedented influence within those structures. It dominates the coverage on several cable news networks, numerous conservative magazines, hundreds of talk radio stations and all kinds of online platforms. It has access to financing from rich individuals and the Republican National Committee’s donor pool. And, not least, it controls one of the country’s two national parties. All that is reason enough to expect another challenge, for what movement would fail to take advantage of such favorable circumstances to make a play for power?

Today, we are in a time of hope and illusion. The same people who said that Trump wouldn’t try to overturn the last election now say we have nothing to worry about with the next one. Republicans have been playing this game for five years, first pooh-poohing concerns about Trump’s intentions, or about the likelihood of their being realized, and then going silent, or worse, when what they insisted was improbable came to pass. These days, even the anti-Trump media constantly looks for signs that Trump’s influence might be fading and that drastic measures might not be necessary.

The world will look very different in 14 months if, as seems likely, the Republican zombie party wins control of the House. At that point, with the political winds clearly blowing in his favor, Trump is all but certain to announce his candidacy, and social media constraints on his speech are likely to be lifted, since Facebook and Twitter would have a hard time justifying censoring his campaign. With his megaphone back, Trump would once again dominate news coverage, as outlets prove unable to resist covering him around the clock if only for financial reasons.

But this time, Trump would have advantages that he lacked in 2016 and 2020, including more loyal officials in state and local governments; the Republicans in Congress; and the backing of GOP donors, think tanks and journals of opinion. And he will have the Trump movement, including many who are armed and ready to be activated, again. Who is going to stop him then? On its current trajectory, the 2024 Republican Party will make the 2020 Republican Party seem positively defiant.

Those who criticize Biden and the Democrats for not doing enough to prevent this disaster are not being fair. There is not much they can do without Republican cooperation, especially if they lose control of either chamber in 2022. It has become fashionable to write off any possibility that a handful of Republicans might rise up to save the day. This preemptive capitulation has certainly served well those Republicans who might otherwise be held to account for their cowardice. How nice for them that everyone has decided to focus fire on Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin.

Yet it is largely upon these Republicans that the fate of the republic rests.

Notes of the vote count taken by the staff of the House impeachment mangers are seen after the Senate voted to acquit former president Donald Trump on Capitol Hill in Washington on Feb. 13. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

Seven Republican senators voted to convict Trump for inciting an insurrection and attempting to overturn a free and fair election: Richard Burr, Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Romney, Sasse and Patrick J. Toomey. It was a brave vote, a display of republican virtue, especially for the five who are not retiring in 2022. All have faced angry backlashes — Romney was booed and called a traitor at the Utah Republican convention; Burr and Cassidy were unanimously censured by their state parties. Yet as much credit as they deserve for taking this stand, it was almost entirely symbolic. When it comes to concrete action that might prevent a debacle in 2024, they have balked.

Specifically, they have refused to work with Democrats to pass legislation limiting state legislatures’ ability to overturn the results of future elections, to ensure that the federal government continues to have some say when states try to limit voting rights, to provide federal protection to state and local election workers who face threats, and in general to make clear to the nation that a bipartisan majority in the Senate opposes the subversion of the popular will. Why?

It can’t be because they think they have a future in a Trump-dominated party. Even if they manage to get reelected, what kind of government would they be serving in? They can’t be under any illusion about what a second Trump term would mean. Trump’s disdain for the rule of law is clear. His exoneration from the charges leveled in his impeachment trials — the only official, legal response to his actions — practically ensures that he would wield power even more aggressively. His experience with unreliable subordinates in his first term is likely to guide personnel decisions in a second. Only total loyalists would serve at the head of the Justice Department, FBI, CIA, National Security Agency and the Pentagon. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs will not be someone likely to place his or her own judgment above that of their civilian commander in chief. Nor would a Republican Senate fail to confirm Trump loyalists. In such a world, with Trump and his lieutenants in charge of all the levers of state power, including its growing capacity for surveillance, opposing Trump would become increasingly risky for Republicans and Democrats alike. A Trump victory is likely to mean at least the temporary suspension of American democracy as we have known it.

We are already in a constitutional crisis. The destruction of democracy might not come until November 2024, but critical steps in that direction are happening now. In a little more than a year, it may become impossible to pass legislation to protect the electoral process in 2024. Now it is impossible only because anti-Trump Republicans, and even some Democrats, refuse to tinker with the filibuster. It is impossible because, despite all that has happened, some people still wish to be good Republicans even as they oppose Trump. These decisions will not wear well as the nation tumbles into full-blown crisis.

It is not impossible for politicians to make such a leap. The Republican Party itself was formed in the 1850s by politicians who abandoned their previous party — former Whigs, former Democrats and former members of the Liberty and Free Soil parties. While Whig and Democratic party stalwarts such as Henry Clay and Stephen Douglas juggled and compromised, doing their best to ensure that the issue of slavery did not destroy their great parties, others decided that the parties had become an obstacle to justice and a threat to the nation’s continued viability.

Romney & Co. don’t have to abandon their party. They can fashion themselves as Constitutional Republicans who, in the present emergency, are willing to form a national unity coalition in the Senate for the sole purpose of saving the republic. Their cooperation with Democrats could be strictly limited to matters relating to the Constitution and elections. Or they might strive for a temporary governing consensus on a host of critical issues: government spending, defense, immigration and even the persistent covid-19 pandemic, effectively setting aside the usual battles to focus on the more vital and immediate need to preserve the United States.

It takes two, of course, to form a national unity coalition, and Democrats can make it harder or easier for anti-Trump Republicans to join. Some profess to see no distinction between the threat posed by Trump and the threat posed by the GOP. They prefer to use Trump as a weapon in the ongoing political battle, and not only as a way of discrediting and defeating today’s Republican Party but to paint all GOP policies for the past 30 years as nothing more than precursors to Trumpism. Although today’s Trump-controlled Republican Party does need to be fought and defeated, this kind of opportunistic partisanship and conspiracy-mongering, in addition to being bad history, is no cure for what ails the nation.

Senate Democrats were wise to cut down their once-massive voting rights wish list and get behind the smaller compromise measure unveiled last week by Manchin and Sen. Amy Klobuchar. But they have yet to attract any votes from their Republican colleagues for the measure. Heading into the next election, it is vital to protect election workers, same-day registration and early voting. It will also still be necessary to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which directly addresses the state legislatures’ electoral power grab. Other battles — such as making Election Day a federal holiday and banning partisan gerrymandering — might better be postponed. Efforts to prevent a debacle in 2024 cannot. Democrats need to give anti-Trump Republicans a chance to do the right thing.

One wonders whether modern American politicians, in either party, have it in them to make such bold moves, whether they have the insight to see where events are going and the courage to do whatever is necessary to save the democratic system. If that means political suicide for this handful of Republicans, wouldn’t it be better to go out fighting for democracy than to slink off quietly into the night?

The Times piece is the first major treatment of this ugly game by a news organization I’ve seen (though your humble blogger has been obsessing over it). Here’s a remarkable tidbit:

Lawmakers in at least 33 states have cited low public confidence in election integrity in their public comments as a justification for bills to restrict voting, according to a tally by The New York Times. In several states — including Arizona, Florida, Georgia and Iowa — the bills have already been signed into law, and legislation in Texas is very close to passage.

This absurdity — that suppression is needed in the name of “election integrity,” to restore “confidence” in our system — has been employed in nearly three dozen states. Of course, if anyone does “lack confidence” in our elections, that’s because Trump and Republicans made it so by deceiving their voters about the 2020 outcome for months on end.

What’s really happening here is that Republicans, having executed a monstrous crime against our democracy, are now spending the booty from the crime hand over fist while busily covering up their tracks to erase their culpability for all of it.

A crime against democracy

The crime was to go all in with Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, which included mass support for a lawsuit to invalidate millions of votes based on fictions and 147 House Republicans voting to invalidate President Biden’s electors. The relentless GOP feeding of Trump’s lies helped inspire the insurrectionist mob assault on the Capitol.

Meanwhile, other Republicans are claiming there’s no proof the rioters were Trump supporters. And as the Post fact-checking team documents in detail, Republicans are widely claiming leftist violence is the real problem (to muddy up culpability for the insurrection) and that Trump himself isn’t responsible for the attack.

Remarkably, this comes after numerous Republicans themselves admitted just after the assault (when they were still shellshocked into fleeting honesty) that he was indeed responsible for it. All this is now being erased entirely.

McCarthy’s claim might seem like disingenuous, mock-worthy clowning. But it’s symptomatic of a much broader, deeper and more comprehensive deception campaign. We can’t allow it to prevail.

Sen. Lister Hill (D-Ala.) denounced the act as a “head-on rush to the destruction of the basic rights of the individual states and the liberties of the American people to satisfy the demands, the clamor, and the expediency of the day.” He continued: “Never in my more than 40 years in Congress have I seen a measure come before this body that has had such built-in potential for the destruction of our constitutional system and the breakdown of law and order as the pending bill.”

The Voting Rights Act passed the Senate in May 1965, and the House followed suit on July 9, 1965. Ninety-sevenSouthern federal lawmakers voted no.

Fast-forward to 2021.

House Democrats had compiled compelling evidence that the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision eviscerating the Voting Rights Act prompted states with discriminatory records, that were previously covered by the law, to enact measures that restricted voting. Theyhad also collected data showing that Republican-led state legislatures have been passing restrictive election laws that disproportionately impacted Black and brown voters.

Confronted last Tuesday with the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would help correct those wrongs, House Republicans fell back on Thurmond and Hill’s line of attack.

“If you vote for this legislation, you are voting for a federal takeover of elections,” said Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.). “You are removing the people elected at the state and local level to run elections from making decisions about how elections are run, including voter ID laws, and putting an unaccountable, unelected election czar at the DOJ, the attorney general, in charge of all election decisions in this country.”

Said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio): “This bill is not about expanding voting rights; it is about Democrats consolidating their political power. That is why they are focused on this. They are focused on consolidating their power and, I think, taking it away from the states.”

“[The Lewis bill] is a radical, unprecedented federal power grab by unaccountable bureaucrats in Washington that every conscientious American ought to oppose,” said Mike Johnson (R-La.).

“This bill would comprehensively transfer the power to govern elections in this country from the sovereign states to the federal government permanently and everywhere,” said Dan Bishop (R-N.C.).

Hill, who never supported a civil rights bill during his 45 years in Congress, couldn’t have said it any better.

Still, for the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, worse days may be yet to come.

Recall what happened earlier this month, when Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) sought last-minute unanimous consent to have the Senate debate — not pass, but just consider — the For the People Act. Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz took to the Senate floor to thwart it. “This bill would constitute a federal government takeover of elections,” Cruz said.

Other Republican senators haven’t had to say much about the act yet, because they don’t have to — they’ve got Mitch McConnell.The Senate Republican leader from Kentucky has already voiced his opposition to the John Lewis bill, calling it “unnecessary.” He echoes the cry of Thurmond, Hill and present-day House Republicans who charge that voting rights legislation gives Washington too much power when it comes to determining voting and election systems. And McConnell plans to use the filibuster, if necessary, to kill the Lewis bill in its tracks.

Who will be in the corner of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act when the roll is called in the Senate?

President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., a phalanx of civil rights groups and Americans aroused by injustice were on hand in 1965.

Where stands America now?

Recently, he had been asked by a hopeful voter whether the courts might overturn the results of last year’s elections. There was a simple and truthful answer to that: No. Mr. Youngkin didn’t give it. Instead, he lamented that the “court system is moving slowly and it’s unclear,” adding a confection of words designed to give GOP partisans the impression that he also harbored such hopes.

Another voter asked the candidate about ballots cast by dead people, one of many such evidence-free conspiracy theories peddled by Mr. Trump and his acolytes. Again, Mr. Youngkin offered his sympathy and tacit agreement, suggesting that tighter rules were required to avoid a recurrence of such fraud. “When I’m governor,” he said, “we’ll be able to make some reforms.” He added: “We don’t trust our election process. We need to.”

It is precisely such weasel words, in deference to lies, that have sown the distrust in elections among Republican voters. Since becoming the gubernatorial nominee, Mr. Youngkin has acknowledged that Mr. Biden won the presidency legitimately. But he subverts that message by rolling with the fabrication of a rigged election, and proposing phony “election integrity” measures that masquerade as “reforms.”

It’s not worthwhile to speculate about whether Mr. Youngkin knows better. His background as a private equity executive contains nothing to suggest his analytical faculties were colored by a fondness for make-believe. But Mr. Youngkin, a first-time candidate, is crafting his public persona on the stump. By playing footsie with the “big lie,” he is helping to undermine faith in democracy.

The Times piece is the first major treatment of this ugly game by a news organization I’ve seen (though your humble blogger has been obsessing over it). Here’s a remarkable tidbit:

Lawmakers in at least 33 states have cited low public confidence in election integrity in their public comments as a justification for bills to restrict voting, according to a tally by The New York Times. In several states — including Arizona, Florida, Georgia and Iowa — the bills have already been signed into law, and legislation in Texas is very close to passage.

This absurdity — that suppression is needed in the name of “election integrity,” to restore “confidence” in our system — has been employed in nearly three dozen states. Of course, if anyone does “lack confidence” in our elections, that’s because Trump and Republicans made it so by deceiving their voters about the 2020 outcome for months on end.

What’s really happening here is that Republicans, having executed a monstrous crime against our democracy, are now spending the booty from the crime hand over fist while busily covering up their tracks to erase their culpability for all of it.

A crime against democracy

The crime was to go all in with Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, which included mass support for a lawsuit to invalidate millions of votes based on fictions and 147 House Republicans voting to invalidate President Biden’s electors. The relentless GOP feeding of Trump’s lies helped inspire the insurrectionist mob assault on the Capitol.

Meanwhile, other Republicans are claiming there’s no proof the rioters were Trump supporters. And as the Post fact-checking team documents in detail, Republicans are widely claiming leftist violence is the real problem (to muddy up culpability for the insurrection) and that Trump himself isn’t responsible for the attack.

Remarkably, this comes after numerous Republicans themselves admitted just after the assault (when they were still shellshocked into fleeting honesty) that he was indeed responsible for it. All this is now being erased entirely.

McCarthy’s claim might seem like disingenuous, mock-worthy clowning. But it’s symptomatic of a much broader, deeper and more comprehensive deception campaign. We can’t allow it to prevail.