I really hoped I was done with writing about our current political insanity. I really wanted to move on to problems like what to do about Hanukkah, a holiday that snuck up on me so quietly that I didn’t even have chocolate gelt in the house!
I figured that with the Electoral College meeting on Monday surely the craziness was over.
But I reckoned without Donald Trump. Even though his campaign has now lost — what is it, 50? 60? — lawsuits on the election, he and his zombie lawyers keep churning them out. And the greatest of all, aimed straight at the Supreme Court, was State of Texas v. Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
According to everything I’d read, it didn’t stand a chance in the highest court. It boiled down to “we here in Texas don’t like how Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin ran their elections, so you need to invalidate their results.” What Texas really didn’t like, of course, was that Donald Trump had lost them all.
On Friday, Dec. 11, the Supreme Court sent Texas packing. In a brief unsigned order, they said: “The State of Texas’s motion for leave to file a bill of complaint is denied for lack of standing under Article III of the Constitution. Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections.”
In other words, there is no way under the U.S. Constitution that Texas can sue other states over how they ran their own elections and there is nothing here for us to do.
It’s the end of the road for all the “legal measures” President Trump wanted to explore.
Does he accept that fact?
Of course not.
There are a few facts I am having trouble with myself.
I have been forced to realize that although Donald Trump did not win the election, an enormous number of Americans still voted for him — almost half of an historic turnout.
I would be willing to live and let live.
The problem is his people do not want to be lived with.
And I don’t know how to live with that. Or with them.
This president has cheered on many kinds of violence. There is one example, in particular, that I can’t forget.
Shortly before Election Day, there was a Biden-Harris campaign bus full of staff and volunteers on a highway in Texas, where it found itself surrounded by cars bearing Trump flags. The cars tried to stop short in front of it and otherwise run it off the road. The bus did, in fact, end up pulling over, and two events had to be canceled.
People could easily have been killed.
When President Trump found out about this, did he chide his supporters? Did he say “violence is never acceptable”?
Of course not. He said: “I love Texas!”
There are many theories about what’s going on with Republicans: that they’re just humoring big baby Trump, that they just want access to his fans, that they’re afraid of him, or that in the words of columnist Paul Waldman, “hatred of liberals is all that’s left of conservatism.”
But Sen. Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, thinks something even worse is going on: “This is a party that has a whole bunch of enemies of democracy inside its top ranks,” he says.
“As we speak, a whole lot of flag-waving Republicans are nakedly trying to invalidate millions of legal votes, because that is the only way that they can make Donald Trump president again — because he didn’t win.”
Murphy calls it treachery, saying simply, “You cannot, at the same time, love America and hate democracy.”
Besides the attorneys general of 17 states, there were 126 Republican members of Congress who signed on to the Texas lawsuit.
Having sworn to uphold the Constitution, they joined an extreme attempt to overturn a perfectly legal election (probably violating the 14th Amendment in so doing). Treachery or not, it is certainly the act of extremists who refuse to see reason.
For years our leaders have warned us not to negotiate with terrorists. But what do you do when the call for extremism is literally coming from inside the House? How can we negotiate with that?
How can you split the difference between comprehensive health care for all on the one hand and people who will happily push your bus off the road and see you dead on the other?
We can’t. We are not Schrödinger’s Cat. We cannot exist as a nation half dead and half free.
Whatever the way forward is from here, I do not think it should include 126 members of Congress who do not believe in the democratic system.
