On Monday [September 20], we learned that after last year’s election, John
Eastman, a well-connected lawyer advising former president Donald Trump,
outlined a six-point plan to overturn the outcome of the election and install
Trump as America’s leader. They planned to cut the voters’ actual choice,
Democrat Joe Biden, out of power: as Trump advisor Steve Bannon put it, they
planned to “kill the Biden presidency in the crib.” This appears to have been
the plan that Trump and his loyalists tried to execute on January 6.
That is, we now have written proof of an attempt to destroy our
democracy and replace it with an autocracy.
This was not some crazy plot of some obscure dude in a shack in
the mountains; this was a plan of the president of the United States of
America, and it came perilously close to succeeding. The president of the
United States tried to overturn the results of an election—the centerpiece of
our democracy—and install himself into power illegitimately.
If this is not a hair-on-fire, screaming emergency, what is?
And yet, Republican lawmakers, with the notable exceptions of
Representatives Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), have largely
remained silent about the fact that the head of their party tried to destroy
our democracy.
The best spin on their silence is that in refusing to defend the
former president while also keeping quiet enough that they do not antagonize
the voters in his base, they are choosing their own power over the protection
of our country.
The other option is that the leaders of the Republican Party
have embraced authoritarianism, and their once-grand party—the party of Abraham
Lincoln, the party that saved the United States in the 1860s, the party that
removed racial enslavement from our fundamental law—has become an existential threat
to our nation.
Democracy requires at least two healthy parties capable of
running a government in order to provide oversight for those currently in
control of the government and to channel opposition into peaceful attempts to
change the country’s path rather than into revolution. But Republicans appear
to believe that any Democratic government is illegitimate, insisting that
Democrats’ calls for business regulation, a basic social safety net, and
infrastructure investment are “socialism” that will destroy the country.
With Democrats in charge of the federal government, Republicans
are cementing their power in the states to support a future coup like the one
Eastman described. Using “audits” of the 2020 elections, notably in Arizona but
now also in Pennsylvania and Texas, Trump loyalists have convinced their
supporters to distrust elections, softening the ground to overturn them in the
future. According to a new poll by NORC at the University of Chicago, 26% of
Americans now believe that “[t]he 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump
and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president,” and 8% believe that "[u]se of
force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency."
Arguing that they have to stop the voter fraud they have falsely
claimed threw the election to Biden, Republican lawmakers in 18 states have
passed more than 30 laws to cut down Democratic voting and cement their own
rule. Trump supporters have threatened election workers, prompting them to
quit, and have harassed school board members and local officials, driving them
from office.
Although attorneys general are charged with nonpartisan
enforcement of the law, we learned earlier this month that in September 2020,
32 staff members of Republican attorneys general met in Atlanta, where they
participated in “war games” to figure out what to do should Trump not be
reelected. The summit was organized by the Rule of Law Defense Fund, the
fundraising arm of the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), which
sent out robocalls on January
5 urging recipients to march to the Capitol the following
day “to stop the steal.” In May, RAGA elevated the man responsible for those
robocalls to the position of executive director, prompting others to leave.
In states where Republicans have rigged election mechanics,
party members need to worry about primary challengers from the right, rather
than Democratic opponents. So they are purging from the party all but Trump
loyalists, especially as the former president is backing challengers against
those who voted in favor of his impeachment in the House in January 2021. Last week, one of those people, Representative
Anthony Gonzalez (R-OH), announced he was retiring, in part because of
right-wing threats against his family.
Trump loyalists are openly embracing the language of
authoritarianism. In Texas, Abbott is now facing a primary challenger who today tweeted: “Texans deserve a strong and robust
leader committed to fighting with them against the radical Left. They deserve a
leader like Brazil has in Jair Bolsonaro…..” Bolsonaro, a right-wing leader
whose approval rating in late August was 23%, is threatening to stay in power
in Brazil against the wishes of its people. He claims that the country’s
elections are fraudulent and that “[e]ither we’ll have clean elections, or we
won’t have elections.”
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) today used language fascists have used in the past
to stoke hatred of their political opponents, tweeting that “ALL House
Democrats are evil and will kill unborn babies all the way up to birth and then
celebrate.” Yesterday,
the leader of Turning Points U.S.A., Charlie Kirk, brought the movement’s white
nationalism into the open when he told a YouTube audience that Democrats were
backing “an invasion of the country” to bring in “voters that they want and
that they like” and to work toward “diminishing and decreasing white
demographics in America.” He called for listeners to “[d]eputize a citizen
force, put them on the border, give them handcuffs, get it done.”
Today,
we learned that the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) will
be held in Budapest, Hungary, where leader Viktor Orbán, whom Fox News Channel
personality Tucker Carlson has openly admired, is dismantling democracy and
eroding civil rights. When former vice president Mike Pence spoke in Budapest
earlier this week at a forum denouncing immigration and urging traditional
social values, he told the audience he hoped that the U.S. Supreme Court would
soon outlaw abortion thanks to the three justices Trump put on the court.
Establishment Republicans who are now out of power are not on
board the Trump train. They are quietly backing anti-Trumpers like
Representative Cheney. Former House speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan, former
Florida governor Jeb Bush—who was widely expected to win the Republican
nomination in 2016, only to be shut out of it by Trump—and former president
George W. Bush's former adviser Karl Rove have all donated money to Cheney to
help her stave off a challenge from a Trump loyalist in the 2022 election. Next
month, former president Bush himself will hold a fundraiser for Cheney in
Texas.
Other establishment Republicans currently in power might be
staying quiet about the party’s slide toward authoritarianism because they are
simply hoping that the Trump fire will burn itself out. The former president is
no longer commanding the crowds he once did, and his increasing legal woes as
well as the investigation into the insurrection will almost certainly take up
his time and energy. The mounting coronavirus deaths among his unvaccinated
supporters also stand to weaken support for his faction.
But the fact that Republican lawmakers have ignored the Eastman
memo, which outlines the destruction of our democracy, suggests that the party,
which organized in the 1850s to protect the nation against those who would
destroy it, has come full circle.
—Heather Cox Richardson
Notes:
https://bbj.hu/politics/foreign-affairs/world/budapest-to-host-cpac-in-2022
https://bbj.hu/politics/foreign-affairs/world/budapest-to-host-cpac-in-2022
https://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/wireStory/pence-hopeful-supreme-court-restrict-abortion-us-80185222
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/16/us/politics/anthony-gonzalez-ohio-trump.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/07/23/brazil-bolsonaro/
"...The profound disagreement between the Republicans and the Democrats over the role of government has led to a profound crisis in our democracy. Democrats’ argument that the government should work for ordinary Americans is popular, so popular that Republicans have apparently given up convincing voters their way is better. Through voter suppression, gerrymandering, the filibuster, and the Electoral College, and now with new election laws in 18 states, they have guaranteed that they will retain control no matter what voters actually want. Their determination to keep Democrats from power has made them abandon democracy.
ReplyDelete"For their part, Democrats are trying to protect the voting rights at the heart of our democracy, believing that if all eligible Americans can vote, they will back a government that works for the people..." -Heather Cox Richardson