January 2, 2021
Today the fight to pick up Trump’s supporters continued. Eleven senators, led by Ted Cruz (R-TX), said they would object to certifying certain state electoral votes when Congress meets on Wednesday, January 6, to count them. They want a commission appointed to audit the results. This attempt is separate from the one launched yesterday by Josh Hawley (R-MO) to object to the counting of the electoral votes from Pennsylvania, but both are a transparent attempt to court Trump voters before 2022 and 2024.
The senators signing onto the effort are: Ron Johnson (R-WI), James Lankford (R-OK), Steve Daines (R-MT), John Kennedy (R-LA), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), and Mike Braun (R-IN), and Senators-Elect Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), Roger Marshall (R-KS), Bill Hagerty (R-TN), and Tommy Tuberville (R-AL).
President-Elect Joe Biden’s transition spokesperson Michael Gwin called their efforts a “stunt.” He isn’t wrong. This plan is unfounded. Biden won the election by more than 7 million votes and by a margin of 306 to 232 in the Electoral College. The Trump campaign tried to challenge the results in the courts, and lost or had dismissed for lack of evidence 60 out of 61 cases, including two they tried to take to the Supreme Court, where three justices appointed by Trump himself sit. Although Trump supporters grabbed headlines with their accusations of irregularities and fraud when they made them in conference rooms and in parking lots in front of landscaping companies, they could produce no evidence in courtrooms, where there are penalties for lying. The suggestion that there is somehow a problem with this election, when they could produce no evidence of wrongdoing in front of judges in 60 cases, is laughable.
But there is more to their efforts than just creating a show to attract the future support of Trump voters. The attempt of these Trump Republicans to launch yet another baseless investigation is in keeping with their use of investigations to discredit Democrats since at least the 2012 attack on two U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya, which killed four Americans. Ten investigations of the circumstances that led to that attack resulted in no evidence that members of the Obama administration acted inappropriately in that crisis. But the constant repetition of accusations convinced many Americans that something had gone terribly wrong and Obama’s people, especially Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, were to blame.
As House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, then in running for Speaker of the House, said to Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity in 2015, “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she's untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought."
The repeated Republican investigations into then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails were similar. Although the State Department’s final report on Clinton’s email use, issued in October 2019, declared there was no systematic or deliberate mishandling of classified information, the constant barrage of accusations made the email story the most important story of the 2016 election. It outweighed all the scandals involving then-candidate Donald Trump: the ones involving sexual assault, financial corruption, mocking of a disabled reporter, attacks on immigrants, and so on.
A study by Duncan J. Watts and David M. Rothschild in the Columbia Journalism Review noted that in the 2016 election season there were 65,000 sentences in the media about Clinton’s email use but only 40,000 about all of Trump’s scandals combined. There were twice as many sentences about Clinton’s emails than about her policies. The authors wrote, "in just six days, the New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election.” The email scandal likely cost Clinton the 2016 election, and even now, after the State Department cleared her of wrongdoing, many Americans still think Clinton mishandled classified information in her emails.
Trump tried the same tactic in 2020. Smearing an opponent through investigations was at the heart of the Ukraine scandal of 2019. Trump pressured new Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, not to start an investigation of Hunter Biden and the company on whose board he had sat, but rather simply to announce that he was starting an investigation. An announcement would be enough to get picked up by the American news media so that story after story would convince voters that Hunter Biden and, by extension, his father, were involved in corruption, even without evidence.
Then, just before the election, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani drummed up the story that Hunter Biden had left a laptop that contained incriminating evidence against both Bidens at a repair shop, and Republican leadership clamored for investigations-- this time to no avail because the story was so outrageous.
Now, they are alleging the need for an investigation into irregularities in the 2020 election, although they have failed repeatedly to produce any evidence of such irregularities in court. Their argument is that the country needs an investigation to relieve people’s worries about the legitimacy of the election, but those worries have been created precisely by the unjustified accusations of Republican leaders. An investigation would simply convince people that the election results are questionable. They are not.
The attempt of the senators to get Congress to appoint an investigatory committee into alleged fraud in the election is dangerous and unprecedented, and they know it. In their statement, they tried to suggest they are simply following the precedent established by Congress after the chaotic 1876 election, but the two situations are very different.
In 1876, elections were organized by the parties themselves and were notoriously corrupt. Parties printed their own ballots in a distinctive color with only their own slate of electors. Men dropped the ballots for their party, unmarked, into a box, but their votes were not secret: how men voted was obvious from the colored ballots, at the very least. Politicians watching the polls knew exactly what the counts would be, and it was not unusual for ballot boxes to be either stuffed or broken open before results were reported.
In Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina in 1876, Democrats appeared to have won the election, but there was no dispute that they had terrorized Republican voters to keep them from the polls. The results were a hopeless mess: in South Carolina, for example, 101% of all eligible voters cast ballots. Florida and Louisiana both reported more reasonable numbers of voters, but they each sent competing sets of electors to Congress. In both states, different officials signed off on different certificates of election, so it was not at all clear which certificate was the official one. In this utter confusion, Congress established a committee to figure out what had actually happened.
None of that is the case today. The processes were transparent and observed by Republicans as well as Democrats. The Trump campaign had the right to challenge vote counts and did so; each turned up virtually the same result as the original count: Biden won, by a lot. Each state in the country has delivered to Congress certified results that have been signed by the state governors, who nowadays have the final say in the state certification process.
This should be a done deal. But Trump Republicans are trying to undermine the election, and Biden’s administration, with a disinformation campaign. This is about more than this particular election. It is clear that a faction of today’s Republican Party refuses to accept the legitimacy of a Democratic president, no matter how big the victory. They are working to smear Biden by investigation, as has become their signature move.
Democracy depends on a willingness to transfer power peacefully from one group of leaders to another. By revealing that they refuse to do so, the members of the “Sedition Caucus,” as they are being called on social media, are proving they are unworthy of elected office.
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Notes:
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/fake-news-media-election-trump.php
Michael Holt, By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876, p. 255.
https://www.cruz.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=5541
https://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2021/01/02/sen-toomey-speaks-out-on-electoral-college-opposition/
The use of repeated baseless investigations seems like an extension of the Karl Rove tactic of repeating a lie over and over again until it becomes accepted as truth. Rove didn’t invent it, but he certainly made extensive use of it. And it seems to work. Just look at how Republicans kept trickle down economics alive when all evidence has been to the contrary. The curious part is that the conservative base doesn’t just allow the GOP to promote false narratives, they seem to understand it’s their duty to amplify them. So there is a positive feedback loop of strategic lying taking over the conservative playbook. The bigger the lie, the louder it gets and the more it gets repeated. Unless there is a serious penalty for creating lie storms like this, they will only continue to propagate.
Once again I arise to the onset of a severe headache after reading the first paragraph or two of this column. Two points in particular set me off today.
First - Who exactly are the representatives of representative government representing? "Biden’s transition spokesperson ... called their efforts a “stunt.” He isn’t wrong." There is no public groundswell of concern about election fraud and to the best of my knowledge there never was been.
Trump introduced the notion of fraud BEFORE he was elected the first time, screaming about RIGGED elections. Had the media been more demanding of evidence at the time perhaps the "issue" would have been muted. He introduced it again well before the general election this time and again the media abetted the claim by failing to demand that he show his cards. In both cases the Democrats failed to push back forcefully, presumably because they thought he had no chance in 2016, and because they overestimated the degree of voter fatigue with his antics in 2020
So these "representatives" seem to have chosen to die on a hill of their own making, despite the 60+ legal challenges having produced nothing. Nada. Zip. Zero. They've manufactured a case, couched in the gravitas of "precedent." It's a doomed effort that benefits no one but their image in Trump's eyes. It only serves as justification for their own future forays into greater voter suppression.
Second - What cat's got the Democrats' tongues? Taking the high road is morally admirable and has yielded exactly nothing. George McGovern vs Richard Nixon? Too liberal. Jimmy Carter as contrapoint to the corrupt Richard Nixon? One and done. Michael Dukakis after 8 years of Reagan? Blown out, wins only 10 states, yet "improves upon" the results of the Democrats in the previous two elections.
The GOP has thrown chaff in the radar of Democrats' messaging for years through the dirty tactics of Lee Atwater, the groundless yet persistent hearings on Benghazi, and flooding the media with the noise of Clinton's emails. Coupled with the media vascillating between "balanced" coverage and the "entertainment value" of Trump, the Democrats have failed, yet again, to adopt tactics to parry the GOP's obstructive strategies. They seem powerless to either borrow from the GOP playbook (and its associated stench) or to just become more adept at developing aggressive approaches to counter the GOP by uncovering its individual and collective failings to serve its constituents and the country as a whole.
I could go on but it's only 5:00 AM and it's been an exhausting day already. As comedian Wanda Sykes said of Black people in America, "we need a better PR person."