This article contains liberal commentary.
In a debate between Georgia senate candidates on Sunday, December 6, 2020, GOP Sen. Kelly Loeffler “repeatedly refused … to acknowledge … Trump lost re-election in November … and hammered [her Democratic opponent] as a socialist who would ensure everything from a government takeover of the U.S. healthcare system to the seizure of Americans’ guns,” the Associated Press reported. (Read story here.) C’mon.
As CNN contributor Dean Obeidallah wrote (here),
“It’s been over a month since Donald Trump was soundly defeated in the 2020 election. Since then, Trump has had numerous days in court … yet he has lost again and again. The Trump-requested recounts in Wisconsin and Georgia … failed to change the election results. … Trump’s own notoriously loyal Attorney General … had not found election fraud ‘on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.’
“Yet on Saturday, The Washington Post reported that of the 249 Republicans in the House and the Senate, only 27 acknowledged Joe Biden won the election. … The traditional narrative … is that GOP-elected officials … remain silent now in the face of Trump’s un-American efforts to overturn the election [because they] fear Trump’s base turning on them, [but] the reality is that … if Trump was somehow able to wrest the presidency away from Biden by undemocratic means, they would be all too happy to accept and wield that power. This is not just my view. As experts on authoritarianism have recently explained, over the years the GOP has increasingly rejected democratic norms and embraced autocratic tactics to acquire and retain power.”
In other words, I’m not alone in thinking the GOP is an anti-democracy party. Trump, in particular, exhibits behavior characteristic of autocrats, and this is fine with his supporters and the elected officials of his party. Apart from Trump’s personal behavior, the GOP for decades has used voter suppression, gerrymandering, and other tactics to thwart the majority.
The result, in some states, is unrepresentative legislatures (e.g., in 2018 the GOP won 64% of Wisconsin’s Assembly seats with 44% of the vote; and a similar situation exists in Pennsylvania, where the GOP won a 110-93 lower-house majority even though Democratic candidates received 55% of the votes); and civilized discourse has disappeared from American politics. The GOP is synonymous with dirty tricks, political lies, and demonizing opponents.
Biden won Wisconsin’s and Pennsylvania’s electoral votes by safe margins, but now Trump is trying to flip those electoral votes in those unrepresentative legislatures. This is unlikely to succeed, for various reasons, but Republican legislators had no business meeting with him to discuss this scheme. It’s not democratic principles that’s stopping them from taking it further, but laws and the certain vetoes of Democratic governors. The indications are they would do it if they could.
Meanwhile, a Florida lawyer told a local Republican group he plans to vote for Loeffler and Perdue (Georgia’s other Republican senator) in the January 5th runoff election by registering to vote at his brother’s home in Georgia, and invited them to do the same. Because he did register to vote in Georgia, using his brother’s address, he’s now under investigation. Read about him here.
His stated reason for cheating in that election is that Democrats “are coming for your property, for whatever guns you keep.” That’s not true. During the presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly called Biden and the Democrats “the radical left,” and during a campaign swing through Ohio, he called referred to the Democratic platform as “a communist agenda.” Read about that here. That’s a lie, too. But many of his supporters swallow such rhetoric whole like these people.
The term “communism” is an epithet in our country. The word stirs fear and hatred because communists are totalitarians who seize power by force and keep it through brutal repression. Around the world, they’ve murdered over 100 million people. Communists are rightfully loathed. Democratic and Republican presidents alike opposed communism, and Americans spilled their blood in Korea and Vietnam to prevent its spread. Calling someone a “communist,” who isn’t, goes beyond hyperbole. Demonizing political opponents in this manner has been held to be actionable libel and U.S. courts have awarded damages for that in numerous cases.
Socialism as a political system isn’t usually as totalitarian or murderous as communism, but at best is a very inferior economic system. Socialist economies don’t come close to the innovation, productivity, and prosperity of capitalist economies. They’re characterized by capital flight, inefficiency, and shortages. But capitalism isn’t perfect either; unregulated, it’s prone to excesses and economic injustices, and works better with some regulation and a social safety net. The Democratic Party embraces a regulated form of capitalism and supports (and wants to expand) America’s social safety net. That’s neither communism nor socialism.
Campaign rhetoric isn’t new, and both parties do it (that’s why elections are called “the silly season”), but political dishonesty can go too far. Extreme rhetoric can undermine our institutions, lead to political dysfunction, and endanger our democracy. That’s where we are today. In Sunday’s debate, Loeffler said,
Loeffler: “You know, what’s at stake is the Senate majority. This will determine who brings bills to the Senate floor …. We have to continue to make sure that we open up our economy. The Democrats want to keep this lockdown. They want to radically change our country … our very way of life here in Georgia and across the country is under attack by the left.”
(Read story here.) Reasonable people could argue her priorities are wrong, but in any case, her assertion about “this lockdown” is false (we’re not in a lockdown, and Biden has said there won’t be a national lockdown), and her claims about “radical change” and “our way of life is under attack” by liberals is superheated nonsense (for more about that, read this article). But no lies are more corrosive than those which undermine trust in our elections, and it’s not overstating to say Loeffler and others like her are playing with fire by baselessly attacking the integrity of our elections..
Successful democracy depends on an informed electorate. That’s part of why we invest so much public resources in education. (Having a skilled workforce is the other major reason.) Democracy doesn’t work as well to govern an ignorant rabble, and if that’s what we become, we could lose our democracy, and our prosperity and freedom with it. I don’t believe in regulating political speech; that’s a slippery slope, and violates our basic notions of freedom. But with freedom comes responsibility.
No one can force anyone to be a responsible citizen; it’s up to us individually. But choices have consequences. Did Covid-19 need to kill 282,312 of us (and counting), or could many of those deaths have been avoided with more responsible leadership? The Covid-19 death toll, and the economic devastation of the pandemic, likely were deciding factors in Trump’s election defeat. With things out of control, America’s voters voted for a change in leadership. They had every right to do so.
We have an orderly system for conducting elections, and by all accounts it’s secure. Biden won because 80 million of us voted for him. That’s democracy, not fraud. It’s disturbing that Republicans like Loeffler and others refuse to acknowledge those votes.
Trump has a right to challenge results in courts, and that’s fair. But if he can’t prove his allegations, he’s not entitled to relief, and the courts have dismissed his lawsuits for lack of evidence. No credible evidence of cheating has surfaced. There’s no factual or rational basis for anyone to believe this election was “stolen” through “fraud.”
Trying to overturn Biden’s victory in unrepresentative legislatures is of a different character. Whether constitutional or not, it’s illegitimate. (It’s not legal, because it’s blocked by federal and state laws.) And it’s wrong in principle; this is the stuff of banana republics. If the American people can’t vote a president out of office, under the existing system for doing so, we’re not a free people anymore. No one in the Republican Party should have anything to do with this, yet those who aren’t actively promoting it aren’t speaking out against it. That’s a problem.
This goes to what the GOP is, and will be in the future. A growing body of evidence supports the argument that Republicans, from the grassroots to the party leadership, are drifting from being an anti-democracy party to becoming a totalitarian party. If Loeffler isn’t fully on board with this, she’s at least a fellow traveler. For that reason alone, apart from her stock trading scandal and reactionary politics, Georgia’s voters should vote her out of office on Jan. 5. And yes, anyone like that Florida attorney who commits non-imaginary voting fraud should be investigated and prosecuted.
Click on cartoon to enlarge.
Are trump’s cult followers mentally ill? No matter the facts being proven, no matter the hard evidence, some trump followers persist in their conspiracy lies without evidence. What does continuing the lies without proof bring of value to trump followers and to our country? What do these lies of voter fraud without evidence do to our country? Why does trump and his followers hate America?
They don’t hate their version of America, only our version of America, which explains why they think any election we win is illegitimate. When I was an observer in past elections, I saw Republican observers freak out over normal vote counting procedures, because they didn’t know the process and made no effort to learn. That’s how GOP lawyers come up with these crazy “witnesses” and lurid affidavits.
Accountability. Print out the tally of votes, from the ballot counter. The number of voters that printed out match the number of people who signed the voter registration book.
BEFORE a ballot could be given, ID was required. Then they sign in to the precinct.
Two hundred ballots given, must match 200 vote tally from the voter ballot counter.
There were 3 poll workers for each precinct, Democrat, Republican, and Independent.
All watching one another. Along with Inspectors of 3 parties to audit. view the tabulation print out from the ballot counter, inspecting the sign in.
ID was necessary,
Ballot distribution numbers must match.
The ballots are numbered and each ballot must be accounted for.
It went smoothly and the audit was inspected by all parties and signed off on.