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(CNN) – The only questions now are how many more times does President Donald Trump wish to lose the election to President-elect Joe Biden and whether his Republican acolytes on Capitol Hill will wake up and acknowledge reality.
Trump’s dangerous delusions about a stolen election represent the most blatant attempt in modern history by a president to overturn voters’ decision. But they have reached a point of no return after the conservative-majority Supreme Court largely crushed any hallucinatory hopes of reversing Trump’s remaining defeat.
The court’s devastating first response to the post-election skirmish sent a clear signal that the higher court disdains the frivolous and risky cases that have already been roundly rejected by the lower courts.
The denial of the request by Pennsylvania Republicans to block the certification of their state’s results, for which there were no glaring disagreements, was a humiliating repudiation of Trump’s fundamental misunderstanding that three justices he installed on the Court would lead him to a disputed election. It also showed that conspiracy theories without evidence could excite the president’s base and his propagandists in the media, but they do not succeed in court.
The matter is over. The president of the United States has no other recourse, “said Laura Coates, former federal prosecutor and senior legal analyst at CNN.
Biden spokesman Mike Gwin said: “This election is over. Joe Biden won and will be sworn in as president in January.
Court response
The Supreme Court intervened just hours after the president’s latest delusional claims that he won the election, prevailed in the swing states, and was the victim of a massive operation orchestrated by Democrats to commit fraud against the electorate.
“Hopefully the next administration is the Trump administration, because you can’t steal hundreds of thousands of votes,” the president said, sending multiple lies on Tuesday about the election result.
For the record, there is no question who will form the next administration. Biden won 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. He conquered five swing states that Trump had won in 2016. Trump’s campaign has produced no evidence of fraud or wrongdoing in court and his cases have been thrown out by multiple deeply critical judges in a number of states.
The president’s corrosive attempts to erode the legitimacy of American elections, the cornerstone of a system based on the consent of the governed, have come at the same time that he largely ignores the real threat facing the nation: a pandemic that It has killed nearly 300,000 Americans and it has been exacerbated by its negligence.
A power play that will continue
But any expectation that reality, facts and evidence will begin to shape the behavior of the president, and of his supporters who still refuse to admit that Biden won the election, would run counter to the events of the past four years.
He would also ignore the way that Trump is using his fraud claims to ease his own ego after losing the election, to raise money to stay in the political spotlight after he leaves office, and to destroy Biden’s presidency before he came. let it begin.
Just Tuesday, the highest-ranking Republicans in Congress, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, voted against a resolution naming Biden. as president-elect.
Republicans refuse to accept Biden
Some Republicans have refused to say they will agree to Biden becoming the 46th president even after Electoral College votes confirming his victories end in the states on Dec. 14. In a show of deeply unconstitutional behavior, the president called on Republican lawmakers for help in reversing his rival’s victories in key states. And his legal team, which has two attorneys, Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, who have covid-19, pledged Tuesday to fight until noon on the day of the inauguration, January 20. The statement rejected Tuesday’s constitutional milestone date – the so-called safe harbor – when legal challenges over the elections must end.
The refusal of Washington Republicans to accept the obvious election outcome contrasts with the obedient courage of many Republican officials in battlefield states who have defied extreme pressure from Trump and threats from his party colleagues to certify the election. that Biden won.
A political calculation
Clearly, Trump supporters in a party that transformed its own populist nationalist image after forging an astonishing connection with the rank and file are acting out of their own political interests. Anyone who wants a future in the Republican Party cannot stand up to the president. But his conduct also suggests that much of the Republican Party, the former home of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, has simply become a vessel for Trump’s personal crusades. The relentless pursuit of power, instead of the principles that once made the Republican Party the most fertile party of ideas in Washington, are now its organizing principle.
This trend suggests that the president’s honed constitutional nihilism will remain a potent force in the Republican Party when he leaves the White House, and will complicate Biden’s hopes of unifying a divided nation, which critics in his own party consider naive.
Stuart Stevens, former chief strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, said the party had squandered a legacy of respect for democratic values.
I think this is very difficult to undo. It’s that old cliché. It’s hard to build something and easy to tear it down. They are burning faith in democracy, ”Stevens told CNN’s Don Lemon on Monday.
“I spent years, decades working for the Republican Party. We had ideological differences, but right now, I think the difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party is that one is for democracy and the other is not for democracy.
Republicans race to get closer to Trump
Since the elections, and until this very Tuesday, Republicans have shown that they have little intention of adapting to the new balance of power in Washington in which a Democratic White House hopes to do its bidding.
No Biden officials were invited to Trump’s “vaccine summit” at the White House on Tuesday, even though they will be responsible for distributing the vaccines that will hopefully end the pandemic next year.
Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton asked the Supreme Court to invalidate the results of the elections in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin and Michigan, all of which Biden won.
“The idea that a Texas attorney general is going to try to deprive voters of four other states of the laws that were in effect on Election Day is not in the least meritorious,” Ben Ginsberg, a veteran Republican election attorney, Tuesday.
But the fact that Paxton sued, and that Republican Senator Ted Cruz from Texas offered to defend Trump’s cases in the Supreme Court, shows the value party members place in winning the president’s favor, no matter how fantastic or damaging their false narratives are for American democracy.
Armed protesters
In recent days an armed mob has also been seen appear in front of the home of a senior Democratic official in Michigan involved in the elections. Another senior official, Gabriel Sterling in Georgia, a Republican who said he voted for Trump, has warned the president to defuse tensions before someone dies.
And Trump’s Republican allies have said they plan to hold a House debate on his unsubstantiated claims that his election was stolen when Electoral College votes are counted to confirm Biden’s victory in January.
None of this will prevent Biden from becoming president. But it is likely to do serious damage to the legitimacy of the next president and to the health of US government institutions that Trump has insistently worked to tarnish.
