Sorry I’ve been away for a while. It’s not that I haven’t missed you all. I have. And I’ve wanted to write. I’ve just been forcing myself not to. I knew, if I started spending time here again, I’d eventually begin writing about Trump, and I didn’t want to do that. After Biden’s victory, I didn’t see any justification for it. Before then, I could argue that my writing about Trump here was beneficial. “By obsessively documenting every assault of the Trump administration,” I told myself, “I’m helping to motivate people to volunteer for Democratic candidates, to get out and vote, and to contribute financially.” Now that Biden has won, though, I don’t really see what’s to be gained by talking about our failed despot. It’s much better, I’ve thought, to just stay quiet, and allow him to fade away. Today, though, I felt as though I had to say something.
First, just to recap… All of the states have now certified their election results. In the end, Joe Biden secured 306 electoral votes to Donald Trump’s 232, making him the next President of the United States. Donald Trump, of course, has tried to make the case that there was rampant voter fraud, and that he had, in fact, won the election. His attorneys brought 60 cases across the United States alleging fraud, of which 59 have already been thrown out, in many cases by judges that he himself had placed on the bench. This, of course, is not surprising, given that Trump and his team offered no actual proof of widespread voter fraud. For all their talk of fraud, they’ve still demonstrated none. And in each of the states where they’ve claimed fraud to have taken place have, the election results have now been certified. And this is true even in states like Georgia, where Republicans control the legislature. Donald Trump, as we now know beyond a shadow of a doubt, lost the electoral vote overwhelmingly, and the popular vote by approximately 7 million votes. This is just a fact.
In spite of this, several elected Republican Senators have made it known that, on January 6, they intend to vote against certifying the 2020 election results at the federal level, joining around 140 Republican members of the House of Representatives in their attempt to overturn the results of a free and fair election. “We intend to vote on January 6 to reject the electors from disputed states as not ‘regularly given’ and ‘lawfully certified’ (the statutory requisite), unless and until that emergency 10-day audit is completed,” the eleven Republican Senators and Senators-Elect wrote in a statement yesterday. Like everything else that Trump and his allies have attempted, this will not work. [They don’t have the votes to actually stop the process from moving forward.] But that’s not the point. [Ironically, it should be pointed out that many of these Senators won in elections they’re claiming to have been fraudulent.]
We know why these people are doing this. It’s not that they believe an election was stolen, but that they want to inherit the mantle of Donald Trump, and they don’t care about the ramifications. They don’t care about the long term consequences of telling the American people that an election has been stolen when it hasn’t. As Mitt Romney just said, “The egregious ploy to reject electors may enhance the political ambition of some, but dangerously threatens our Democratic Republic… I could never have imagined seeing these things in the greatest democracy in the world. Has ambition so eclipsed principle?” [Former House Speaker Paul Ryan joined Romney in speaking out today, saying, “Under our system, voters determine the president… Joe Biden’s victory is entirely legitimate.”]
Republican political strategist Steve Schmidt took things a little further in his Twitter feed today, where he said the following about the Republicans, like Ted Cruz, who have made it known they they intend to help Donald Trump perpetuate the lie that the election was stolen from him. [I guess the Harvard-educated Cruz, who once swore that he would never be Trump’s “servile puppy dog,” has had a change of heart.]
2021 will be a hard year in the life of the American nation. There is a great struggle that lies before us and our disbelief at its arrival must not blind us to the lethal danger it poses to the American experiment. The poisonous bounty of Trump’s catastrophic Presidency is ready for harvest and the whole world will get to watch his seditious antics play out during a joint session of Congress on January 6th. It will play out as a farce and it will fail. Nearly 100 years on America will have it’s version of the Beer Hall Putsch. The danger lies in the act, not the outcome. We are in a dangerous moment and I’d like to try my best to explain how I see it.
Before I start, there is an important matter of fact which unfortunately needs restating. Joe Biden won the Presidential election decisively. The election was free, fair and legitimate. There is no evidence of any wide spread fraud. Allegations of fraud are premeditated lies being made by a rancid assortment of Trump’s stooges and propagandists. With the exception of a few of the more addled House GOP members like Louis Gohmert, every single House Member and every US Senator that participates in denying this reality and thus the legitimacy of our election does so as a cynical act which they know for certain has no legitimate basis. Such actions are a grievous sin against America democracy and a brutal betrayal of their oaths of office and duty. They will be desecrating the blood sacrifices of 13 generations of American Patriots of all creeds and origins who died so that our children could be free. They are fighting to maintain the power of a defeated President against the sovereign will of the American people as lawfully exercised under the Constitution of the United States. They are fighting to establish a tyranny. They are deliberately poisoning Faith and Belief in American democracy.
Democratic Republic’s cannot survive such a collapse. The system is rooted in the willingness of one side to cede power to another at the will of the people. There are no other systems of government except for this type that are free. The legitimacy of that system is being strangled by Trumps lies and the lies of his movement. That movement is an autocratic one with fascistic markers. It is hostile to the American Constitution, the rule of law and the highest ideas and ideals of American liberty.
January 6, will be a historic day in America. The battle lines will be drawn. The Autocrats will step forward into the light. They will include a majority of the House GOP Conference. After the 6th, Kevin McCarthy will be the leader of House Autocrats, and Liz Cheney will be the Leader of House Conservatives. They will include a substantial number of GOP Senators and almost all of the known GOP Presidential aspirants.
The Rubicon will be crossed on the 6th. The ruthless and amoral cynicism of Senators Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, James Lankford and Josh Hawley will be on appalling display. It must be opposed fiercely. It must be recognized for what it is. Another storm is gathering in the constant struggle between liberty and her enemies. Trump has unleashed the furies and has found his following. It will be a long fight. At the hour of his defeat and defenestration Trump has done his greatest damage. This is a movement that is fueled by lies, conspiracies, corruption, greed, extremism, racism, grievance, resentment, cynicism and a profound absence of love for America. It is right to feel anger and contempt towards its leaders and enablers. There is only one proposition that America’s pro-democracy coalition can offer to these people. “We win – you lose.” It’s that simple. Sedition is the precise word and the right word to describe what we have been witnessing. Never before have so many American leaders betrayed their country. We will watch their eternal disgrace on live TV. The evidence of their ignominy will exist forever as will the memory of their monumental betrayal. Shame on them all.
Here are the names of those Republican Senators and Senators-Elect who have signed-on to join Ted Cruz in his attempt to stop the results of our last election from being accepted. They are Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, James Lankford of Oklahoma, Steve Daines of Montana, John Kennedy of Louisiana, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, and Mike Braun of Indiana, and Senators-Elect Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama. Remember their names. By refusing to accept the results of our free and fair election, they are guilty of sedition, at the very least, and they should held accountable.
If any of you have any question at all as to what the above mentioned Senators and Senators-Elect have agreed to support when signing on to this document, I’d encourage you to listen to the following audio of President Donald Trump, recorded recently, threatening Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to, in the words of Senator Dick Durbin, “deliberately change and misrepresent the legally confirmed vote totals” in that state.
“It’s gonna be costly to you,” Trump says to Raffensperger on the call, when the Secretary of State refuses to “find 11,780 votes” for him. [Trump had tried to call Raffensperger 18 times before the Secretary of State took the call. He clearly knew the President was going to try to shake him down, the same way he did the President of Ukraine. Thankfully he had the presence of mind to record the entire call. As one of Raffensperger associates told Politico today, “It’s nice to have something like this, hard evidence, to dispute whatever he’s claiming about the secretary. Lindsey Graham asked us to throw out legally cast ballots. So yeah, after that call, we decided maybe we should do this.”] This is the kind of criminal activity one sees from a mob boss. The members of the U.S. Senate named above know it. And yet they continue to go along. It is pathetic, grotesque and dangerous. And all of their political careers should end immediately.
update: The snow person featured above was created by Arlo and I this morning in Riverside Park. I was going to use a photo of Donald Trump, but this made me happier.
