Today’s news of a call between President Trump and Georgia’s secretary of state, in which the president suggested that the latter needed to find the votes in Georgia that would allow him to win the already-decided election, is only the latest reason why the Democratic Party cannot continue to behave as if the GOP is fully committed to the constitution or the rule of law. The president’s words, captured in a recording obtained by the Washington Post, are hardly an isolated incident, but are of a piece with his efforts long before November to subvert the election results — efforts that have been either actively abetted or tacitly approved by the great majority of Republican senators and representatives.
A few days from now, on January 6, a dozen GOP senators and 140 representatives plan to challenge the final results of the electoral college vote, in an act of sedition against the November election results exceeded only by the secession of southern states at the start of the Civil War. It is highly likely that all of them fully understand that the president lost the election fair and square; it is just as likely that they see this effort as a necessary step in undermining future presidential elections that the GOP, having won the popular vote just once in the past 32 years, is quite likely to again lose. As historian and expert on authoritarianism Timothy Snyder writes, “A faith-based challenge to a democratic election amounts to an attempt to undo democracy itself.”
The president’s recorded call, and the conspiracy among so many elected Republicans to play along with the false claims of election fraud to which the president clings like a survivor hanging on to the debris of a sinking ship, are parts of the same corrupt whole. Large swathes of the Republican Party have made clear their open opposition to democracy by these false claims of election fraud. These allegations are the thinnest of covers for simply refusing to recognize the presidential election results. In doing so, even if their current efforts fail, they are working to convince millions of Republican voters, and potentially millions of other Americans, that they, too, should not accept the election results. In doing so, they are actively seeking to re-write the rules of our political system so that conspiracy and propaganda take the places of free and fair elections.
In pushing against the boundaries of American politics, they pose an enormous danger to the country. Too many Democrats, including President-elect Biden, seem to think that if they hold their fire, the GOP will return to a more democracy-friendly stance after Biden is sworn in. But this dismisses the reality that the attack on democracy is happening now, that in these days of interregnum the GOP is advancing its anti-democratic cause at little cost to itself. This passive stance makes no sense, either for the good of the country or the good of the Democratic Party. What’s more, by asserting rules that fly in the face of our common understanding of American democracy, Republicans have also made themselves politically vulnerable. The Democrats should be absolutely crucifying the GOP for its daily descent into authoritarianism; yet they often appear desperate to avoid a fight that is already upon them. The GOP has already declared war on them and our democracy. Pretending otherwise doesn’t change the reality, it only means that the Democrats are failing to do their duty. Talk of healing and finding common ground are meaningless when your opponents are actively recruiting millions of American to take their side in a war against democracy.
The potential gains of a more aggressive push-back against the GOP, and the folly of not doing so, could not be clearer in the juxtaposition of the president’s treasonous Georgia phone call and the determination of so many GOP senators and representatives to contest the electoral college results. The president has been caught on tape engaging in an impeachable effort to cheat his way to election victory; this, after weeks of claiming that the Democrats are the ones who did the cheating. All those GOP elected officials have already committed themselves to Trump’s side and the treasonous idea that the president was actually re-elected; and now we have irrefutable evidence that he is the cheater, which means they have now committed themselves to the president’s cause of cheating to overthrow the election results. In such a cut-and-dried scenario, in which the GOP has essentially built the gallows and measured out the rope for its own public hanging, why would the opposition party not ensure that the Republicans pay a maximal price in public opinion for such treasonous behavior? What bizarre definition of national unity requires Democrats to stand down when these congressional Republicans have exposed themselves not simply as frauds, but as traitorous fools?