It's Time for Action to Make the GOP Pay a Price for Threatening Democracy

David Bernell

 

 

A handful of Republican elected officials have spoken up. A lot more Republicans and conservatives not in elected office have spoken up. They have spoken the truth, that Trump lost and Biden won. But it’s not enough.

 

Most GOP members of Congress seem to be driven by fear (and plenty of state Republican officials too), the fear of Trump and his strongest supporters. At first giving in to their fear meant that they would just go along with the fiction that the election wasn’t settled. They said that Trump had every right to pursue legal challenges to the vote. They thought they could dodge responsibility by shifting the problem to the courts and running out the clock to January 20. That way they didn’t have to rebuke Trump directly.

 

For the Democrats and the Never-Trumpers, it’s been satisfying to watch dozens of lawsuits fail, to see a small number of principled GOP officials in places like Georgia and Michigan stand strong and not fold in the face of a lot of noise and pressure, to see Rudy Giuliani sweat his hair dye down his face, to see the Supreme Court tersely reject the challenge to Pennsylvania’s vote.

 

But Trump and his supporters didn’t fold either. They raised the bet. If they couldn’t win the legal battle, they’d play to their strengths and fight a political battle. After all, the vast majority of Trump voters – over 70 percent – believe the election was rigged, that Trump actually won, maybe even by a landslide.

 

So the Trump team pushed harder. It wasn’t enough for GOP elected officials just to avoid saying that Biden won, or that the president had a right to challenge the results. They had to actively, openly and publicly support the fiction that Trump won, or face the wrath of Trump and his voters. Some of them protested at the home of the Michigan Secretary of State, some of them with weapons, demanding that she reject the results of the election.

 

The shift in the behavior of GOP elected officials was best expressed by the Republican majority leader of the Pennsylvania Senate, Kim Ward.  She said that if she would have rejected an effort to sign a letter urging the state’s Congressional delegation to throw out Pennsylvania’s electoral votes, “I’d get my house bombed tonight.”

 

Avoidance by GOP officials is no longer an option. Trump has gotten them to take sides. He has, in effect, told them that failure to openly support the fiction means that they support the Democrats and Joe Biden.

 

The latest evidence of this changing dynamic is the lawsuit filed by the Attorney General of Texas on December 8 directly to the Supreme Court, asking it to nullify the electoral votes of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Georgia. By December 10, the Attorneys General of 18 other states, all Republicans, all in states Trump won, signed onto the lawsuit. They were followed by 106 Republican members of Congress who signed on as well.

 

The lawsuit, in which one state said it didn’t like how other states ran their elections, is weaker and more ridiculous than the many lawsuits already thrown out of court. A Trump victory in the Supreme Court is not expected. Aside from the legal flimsiness, the Court has little reason or incentive to overturn an election, especially one in which the states have already certified their results. Such a decision would be a travesty, a subversion of democracy, a threat to the very survival of the American experiment begun in 1776.

 

But that seems to be of little consequence to the people who publicly support the lawsuit, whether they believe in its merits or not, whether they believe the fiction or not. Their political calculus is not simply that Trump supporters and GOP voters won’t penalize them for attempting to subvert American democracy. Instead, their “logic” is that those voters will go after them if they fail to try subverting American democracy.

 

The best way to get people to stop engaging in bad behavior is to make them pay a price for engaging in that behavior. A price they think is too costly. So here’s how to make them pay: Republicans who disagree with what they see going on, who hate what Trump and his Republican enablers are doing, who see this effort for what it really is – a threat to American democracy – have to openly, publicly, and loudly leave the party.

 

This will not be easy. People may agree with the policies pursued by the Republican party such as tax cuts and deregulation, they may have been members of the GOP their whole lives, they may identify closely with the party. It might be part of their identity. It would hurt to leave.

 

Yes, yes, yes, and yes. But, country before party. It has to be that way. American democracy and what it represents, even in its imperfect, incomplete state, is precious. Party loyalty, especially in the face of one’s vehement disagreement with its odious character at this time, is a distant second, at best. Moreover, the GOP these people have grown to love is no longer the same party. It’s not the party of Reagan, Eisenhower, Bush I and II, Nixon and Ford.

 

Leaving the party and refusing to vote for its candidates means that Republican voters will make Republican politicians, the ones running scared right now, pay a price. They will be discredited by those who break with them and the party, and they will lose if and when they run for office again.  

 

As I’ve argued in an earlier post (see “Let’s Tell the GOP The Party’s Over”), a new political party – a new home – for conservatives and Republicans who cannot support what the GOP and its leaders are doing might be the best and strongest option for rejecting the Republican party. The Democratic party is not going to be their political home, at least not permanently. But however this happens, it has to be vocal and visible. Staying quiet on the sidelines isn’t going to stop Trump and the GOP, not now or after January 20.