STRAINING DEMOCRACY TO THE LIMIT

 

 The United States judiciary has emerged as the only one of the three branches of government to stand as the last line of defense against tyranny. While many observers have dubbed “a clown show” the blatant attempts of the Trump-led GOP to steal this past November’s election from the American people—while falsely claiming that the Democrats were doing the same—in terms of the assault on democracy that it has represented, the entire process has been serious as a heart attack.

Clearly, the Executive Branch in cahoots with the vast majority of Republican members of the Legislature have been complicit in repeated attempts to thwart the democratic process and scavenge power from wherever they could find it in order to suppress and overturn the results of voting that a heroically honest Trump-appointed member of the Department of Homeland Security described as the most secure election in US history. Even Trump-surrogate Attorney General William Barr, following initial attempts to do his boss’s bidding in seeking dirt with which to invalidate the election process, has had to admit that, in all honesty, there is no there-there—no widespread, systematic voter fraud, no rigged voting software, no “voting dead” or multiple ballots cast by single voters, no anything of import.

Obviously, in Trumpland, where The Big Lie is the sole prevailing policy of state, telling the truth cost the DHS’s Christopher Krebs his job and put the attorney general in the hot seat. But Krebs is now a hero among small-d democrats, and perhaps Barr can go home after all this without having entirely bled-out every last shred of his reputation on the sacrificial altar of Trumpism.

Trumpland, where telling the truth is heroism

Just before the weekend this past week the Supreme Court again put a stop to a bogus claim of election irregularities entered by team Trump, this time through the State of Texas, whose attorney general, Ken Paxton, allowed the Lone Star State to be used as a Trumpian shill by filing a baseless claim of unconstitutionality against election processes in four swing states: Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It is, perhaps, worth noting that Attorney General Paxton is currently reported to be under FBI investigation for allegedly placing the power of his office at the service of a political donor. This report is what has been giving rise to speculation that he might have also placed himself at Trump’s disposal to whip up a last-ditch spurious case to bring before the Supreme Court so as to try and assure himself of a slot on the president’s good-bye pardon list. If so, it was a cheap vow he made to the president, since legal observers tended to agree from the outset that the Texas brief would never fly in the US Supreme Court, because Texas had no authority to question election laws in other states.

Barr...heading home

In its rejection of the Texas presentation, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case on the grounds that, “Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections.” That was the extent of the Court’s brief unsigned opinion, which spoke louder with what it didn’t say than what it did, since the dismissal was brief, dry and definitive—devastatingly so, because it didn’t even permit the case to be filed, let alone heard. Only two justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, questioned, not the substance but the form of the Court’s refusal to hear the case. They indicated that it was their understanding that the Supreme Court could not refuse to permit the filing of a complaint by one state against another on its docket, but added that if it had indeed been filed, they too would have voted to refuse to hear it on the grounds stated by the Court as a whole.

This was not, as you may know, the first time that the Supreme Court basically told Trump and his zany surrogates to go pound salt. The other filing was sponsored by Trump-or-bust Congressman Mike Kelly against his home state, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, for supposedly violating its own election laws. That time, earlier this month, the Court responded with a terse one-line refusal: “The application for injunctive relief presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the Court is denied.”

Whatever the headings placed on these two attempts at filing with the Supreme Court as a ruse to shove a stick into the spokes of presidential transition, a proper choice to title them would have been “Trump v America” or “Trump v Democracy”. No matter how much we may make light of Team Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s dye-dripping meltdown, or the insane ravings of that legal team’s former member Sidney Powell about long-dead Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez’s having something to do with sabotaging the 2020 US elections, there is no way to stress enough how serious and tragic the administration’s multiple attempts to spuriously invalidate the final outcome—which could not have been clearer or more transparent—really are. Because, make no mistake, one state seeking to violate the states rights of four other states by attempting to dictate how they should run their elections, for the sole purpose of overturning free and fair voting results, in order to favor the defeated incumbent over the victorious challenger, couldn’t be more un-American. Nor could there be any more direct assault on democracy.

Rudy...meltdown

Texas (or at least its attorney general) was, quite obviously, acting as a surrogate for the forty-fifth president, whose wounded inner-child psyche can’t believe—privileged  enfant terrible that he has always fancied himself—that he could actually lose and is attempting to make the founding principles of American democracy pay the price for his self-righteous disappointment.

The only thing that could be worse than seeing the final deterioration of a mentally unstable (and I’m being kind here) US president is to see a significant number of other representatives of the American people indulging or, indeed, buying into a rogue leader’s madness. And that, sadly, tragically, devastatingly, is precisely what we are witnessing. As such, what we are also witnessing is, perhaps, the second worse threat to American democracy in the history of the United States.

Sidney...space cadet

This is not merely my own assessment, but that of journalist and historian Jon Meacham as well. Meacham, you may recall, is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, American Lion, Andrew Jackson in the White House. He is also the historian whom the Bush family chose to write the authorized and definitive biography of George H.W. Bush, entitled Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush.

Some see Meacham as a conservative, others as a liberal. He himself has been quoted as saying, “I’m not really sure where the split is between liberal and conservative. I tend to write about people who you would think the right would be very interested in, but if I meet [readers] they’re probably on the left. Does that make sense? The Andrew Jackson book—you’d think that would be Republican, but if I walk into a bookstore somewhere, seventy percent of the crowd is going to be ‘NPR people’.”

Perhaps that’s because the definition of the right in America has suffered a quantum leap from the original meaning of “liberal democracy” toward the ever tighter embracing of authoritarian principles on the right. And old-time center-right conservatives like Meacham (indeed, like Dwight Eisenhower as well, I’m convinced) are now being seen more and more by the right as “dangerous leftists”.

Meacham...searching for "better angels"

Meacham’s most recent historical work is The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels. He published the book in 2018, but even then, he saw the writing on the wall. Donald Trump was becoming ever more toxic for American unity and, indeed, for American democracy. But in his historical writings, Meacham tends to be an optimist, and, above all, to believe in the inviolability of American principles. Hence the title, which refers to a quote by Abraham Lincoln at the time of the Civil War.

To wit: “We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

In that book, Meacham posited, mid-way through the Trump presidency, that the climate of partisan fury we were witnessing was not new. He sought to show that what Abraham Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature” have repeatedly won the day, despite the horrors of the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era and because of the struggles and sacrifice of the earliest Suffragettes, the stubborn will of civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and John Lewis, and the humanity of someone like Eleanor Roosevelt. In The Soul of America, he looks at how American democracy has survived—thanks to the general quality of its leadership and the patriotic spirit of its people—such turning points as the Civil War, the so-called Lost Cause, the backlash against immigrants during World War I, the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, the demagoguery of the far-right America First movement in the run-up to World War II, the lawless reigns of political bosses like Huey Long, and the witch-hunts led by Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare of the nineteen-forties and fifties. In a quote from that book, he says that while things may look gloomy, “The good news is that we have come through such darkness before,” as a result of Lincoln’s “better angels” finding a way to prevail.

But in recent statements, even an American optimist like Meacham is hardly sounding bullish. In a brief interview with CNN late-night host Don Lemon, he recently referred to the GOP as “a party dissociated from reality” as it does the bidding of an off-kilter president who is using its members to try and overturn the results of a free and fair election. He confirmed that what’s happening is unprecedented in American politics and a clear and present danger to democracy. The only comparable phenomenon he could offer was when Lincoln won the presidential election of 1860 and eleven states seceded from the Union to form the Confederacy.

According to Meacham, what was happening right now—a president and his party seeking to disenfranchise well over half the country and impose a virtually authoritarian regime—was not about two parties debating two opposing sides of an argument. Rather, he said, it was two parties “speaking two entirely different languages.” And Jon Meacham is not wrong. The vast majority of the Republican Party—which should, perhaps, considering the current reality, change its name to the “Trumpian Party”—is speaking the language of authoritarianism, while both large-D and small-d democrats are speaking the language of freedom, equality and democracy.

To believe that the president and his party are, by any stretch of the imagination, posing legitimate questions about the outcome of an election that is now over and decided—except for the formality of the Electoral College vote—is ludicrous. Anyone who still believes that this is anything but a mentally disturbed leader’s attempt to steal the election with the shameful aid of hundreds of GOP politicians is simply in denial.

Days before the election, iconic American intellectual and political observer Noam Chomsky described Trump to an interviewer as “a president who has said if he doesn’t like the outcome of an election, he’ll simply not leave office.” Professor Chomsky went on to say that this imminent potential threat to democracy had been “taken seriously enough that, for example, two high-level, highly respected, retired military officers—one of them very well known, Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl—actually went to the extent of writing an open letter to General Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reminding him of his constitutional duties to send in the American military to remove the President from office if he refuses to leave.”

And clearly, as we now know, both Chomsky and the military were right to consider this contingency, when, having lost more than fifty court actions brought by Team Trump since the election in attempts to overturn the results, only one has been even remotely considered by the various judges to present any validity whatsoever. And yet, Trump and the vast majority of GOP politicians in Congress continue to actively seek to erode confidence in the validity of this election—one might argue to their own detriment in the case of GOP senators and representatives who were on the down-ballot in November and won, since if the ballots were invalid in Trump’s case, they were invalid in theirs as well. But we are living in an era of ruling party lies and magical thinking in which logic plays no part.

Most people are by now convinced that Joe Biden is the president-elect and that he will be sworn in as such next month. The rejection of Texas’s bid to get a Supreme Court hearing and hold up certification of the 2020 election is being seen as the failed last attempt—among myriad others—of the Trump regime to snatch the election out of the hands of American voters. But what do we do with the undeniable fact that not only an administration beholden to Trump, but also dozens upon dozens of elected senators and representatives of the people of the United States have willingly and knowingly been part of a plot to overturn the results of one of the most transparent elections in history? How do we deal with the fact that these politicians, who, if they could have found a way, would have willfully and knowingly undermined democracy and the Constitution of the United States simply to maintain their grip on power, will be remaining in office for at least the coming term with their anti-democratic and, dare I say, un-American ideology accompanying them?

On Monday the Electoral College will vote and, if representative democracy has survived in America, the tragicomedy of errors known as the Trump administration should be officially over. All electors except those from Nebraska and Maine, are bound by state law to cast their votes in accordance with the outcome of the presidential voting results in their states. This should, then, be a mere formality, and, in accordance with certified election results, Joe Biden should receive three-hundred six electoral votes, and Donald Trump two hundred thirty-two, giving President-elect Biden a comfortable win of seventy-four EC votes.

But in the last four years, we’ve become more than accustomed to shocking and unpleasant surprises—violations of American traditions and principles that most of us never would have believed were possible. So while there now seems to be little doubt that the democratic process will survive (thanks almost entirely to American Justice), only time will tell what other outrages we might have to endure from here until January 20, 2021, and beyond. Hopefully, in the new year, all of these machinations will only be like the memory of a four-year nightmare.