THE DEVIL WENT DOWN TO GEORGIA...

 

                            The devil went down to Georgia
                            He was lookin' for a soul to steal
                            He was in a bind
                            'Cause he was way behind
                            And he was willin' to make a deal...

                                                        —Charlie Daniels—

For the clear majority of Americans—even including many who were traditionally Republicans—the New Year has been postponed until January 20^th. Until then, it remains an extension of the most horrific year of Donald Trump’s four-year reign of terror. A year which may well go down in history as the one in which US democracy very nearly died.

If anyone had any doubt about that—there were those who said, back in November, “Let’s just give the president a few days to get used to the idea of losing.” (How’s that working out for you)?—Trump surely dispelled it over the New Year holiday weekend. That was when, just a little over a fortnight from when he is due to leave the White House for the last time in his term, he was on the phone to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger applying gangster-style pressure and threats to try and extort the Georgia Republican into fabricating fake results to overturn Joe Biden’s narrow win in the already thrice-counted and certified presidential election in that state.

Raffensperger wisely, and in self-defense, recorded that call and it was almost immediately leaked to the national press, sending shockwaves throughout both major political parties and the country at large. However, not even that—a clear attempt by the president to bitch-slap the Republican administration in Georgia into doing his (insane) will—could ruffle the feathers of the state’s incumbent senatorial candidate, David Perdue, who today is fighting for his political survival in a run-off vote. Trumper more than Republican and personality cultist rather than democrat to the end, Perdue was mostly just incensed and shocked that the contents of a private conversation between a Republican official and the president had been leaked to the public. But his stance was laughable and seemed to reflect his own very elastic ethical standards, because not outing Trump would have been tantamount to witnessing a crime and not reporting it.

That’s right. Once again the president has acted in a way that runs clearly and unequivocally counter to the rule of law. Under federal law, it is a felony to “intimidate, threaten, or coerce any person for exercising any powers or duties” defined for election officials (such as the secretaries of state in the fifty states). And renowned Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe has publicly named several other federal statutes that Trump’s call infringes. Says Tribe, “Awakened by the traumatic Trump experience to the more permanent frailties and limitations of our governing system, we should not waste this unique opportunity to simultaneously tackle a festering crisis of democracy itself.”

According to Georgia legal experts, meanwhile, the president’s call also violates state laws covering tampering with election results and coercing election officials, as well as the state’s legal norms on extortion. It’s highly improbable that anyone would take seriously any call to impeach a president who will be gone in two weeks, but were that not the case, intimidating a state attorney general to try to get him to throw national election results seems rather like slam-dunk grounds for impeachment and removal from office. And if the US were anything like normal right now—which, such are the deep divisions that currently reign—it clearly isn’t, Congress, the cabinet, and perhaps even the Supreme Court would very likely be looking at the president’s dodgy mental state and verging on implementing the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to force the president to step down before he does something irreparably insane in this final countdown to his leaving or being escorted out of the White House.  

The hour-long call between Trump and Raffensperger was hard to listen to. First, because of the sheer delusional quality of all of Trump’s accusations regarding the presidential election in Georgia in which he claimed to have won by “hundreds of thousands of votes” despite the fact that the results of that election in the state have been counted and recounted by machine and then recounted again by hand, in voting managed by a Republican and pro-Trump administration, which appears to have made certain pre-election day attempts at voter suppression to give Trump an edge, and even then, every time the count came back, Biden was the winner. Only outright, blatant cheating would have allowed Trump to win, and that was, indubitably, what he was seeking in this call.

It was also hard to hear because it was an abusive tirade in which, for an hour, Trump sought to brow-beat Raffensperger, attempting to wear him down and to get him to “find” (read: fabricate) nearly twelve thousand votes, which were what he would need to charge fraud and try to snatch the election out of Biden’s hands.

In the mind of someone as dishonest as Trump, it must seem unfathomable that he could lose in a “Republican state”, because in his world, if you have friends in high places, there’s nothing that can’t be fixed. But not everyone shares the president’s estrangement from truth, honesty, and the rule of law.

The dual run-off in Georgia today is obviously crucial to national governability over the next four years. President-elect Joe Biden will have a very distinct opportunity to make a significant difference if the Senate is majority Democrat than he will if it continues to be the suppress-and-bury catch-all that GOP Majority Leader Mitch “Stonewall” McConnell has made it over the past eight years in which hundreds of Democrat-sponsored bills have been unceremoniously killed before they ever reached the Senate floor. But it is also, no matter who wins the two races, a litmus test for democracy, in that the Georgia Republican administration has stood up to—and hopefully will continue to stand up to—a corrupt federal administration that has sought by every device imaginable to cheat the system and install an autocrat for a second term that he didn’t earn.

Tomorrow will be the ultimate test, when Congress meets to certify the final count of the Electoral College. This is normally ceremonial, a mere formality. But this time, undemocratic politicians, shamefully led by one-time Trump detractors now turned accomplices like Senator Ted Cruz of Texas or by diehard sycophants like Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, plan to object and call for an audit. In the end, none of the dozen main would-be coup leaders can actually believe that they will succeed in overturning the November election, so clearly, the only reason they are buying into Trump’s delusional ploy is to curry favor with him in hopes of tapping his base or of having him be their king-maker ally in future elections. No matter what their reasons, they are complicit in an attempt to subvert the election process and to undermine American democracy.

According to Professor Tribe, if Biden manages to have a majority in the Senate, he needs to move immediately to do something about this for the future.  “A norm is being broken,” says Tribe, “in which Congress does not ‘monkey’ with a presidential election absent ample evidence, which means that if Democrats control the Senate, they must consider amending the Electoral Count Act to prevent future such abuses.”

And an abuse is precisely what this, all of this, is. Democracy is hanging in the balance and there is no room for flexibility in seeking a remedy, lest it die in the darkness of the Trump era.