Republican Madness Spiraling Into Open War On America

We all knew trump would never admit he lost. We knew trump would rail and rant about everybody else treating him unfairly, that he would claim he won despite all the numbers against him, that he would never concede.

What we didn't know was how deep into that denial and madness the rest of the Republican Party would follow. It turns out, they're willing to violate all the norms, all the laws, all the rights of all Americans just to score cheap political points and worst of all to tear the nation asunder. This latest lawsuit filed by the Texas Attorney General - and signed off with 17 other state Attorneys General, including the partisan hacks here in Florida - is the most blatant attack on America by the Republicans to date (per Mark Stern at Slate): 

This case, Texas v. Pennsylvania, is so ridiculous that it is not worth exploring its legal claims in any depth. Paxton’s suit asks the Supreme Court to throw out every vote in four states won by Joe Biden—Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—then direct each state’s legislature to declare Trump the winner. This act would constitute the single biggest incident of voter nullification in American history. Paxton alleges that all four states illegally expanded mail voting, permitted egregious fraud, then concealed evidence that Democrats stole the election. There is no basis in truth for his factual claims and no basis in law for his legal theories. Indeed, it seems likely that Paxton, who is reportedly under FBI investigation for corruption, is more interested in obtaining a preemptive pardon from Trump than presenting a coherent legal argument.

What’s not as clear is why 17 state attorneys general, all Republican, decided to join Paxton’s humiliating crusade. Their brief, spearheaded by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, parrots Paxton’s false assertions about widespread fraud, urging SCOTUS to take up the case. They accuse the four defendant states of repeatedly violating the Constitution by allowing more people to vote by mail during the pandemic. And they claim that, by allowing voters to cure faulty absentee ballots, the states violated the equal protection clause. To remedy this alleged problem, they suggest, the Supreme Court must wipe out every vote cast in all four states, clearing the way for each state legislature to assign their electors to Trump.

The argument to nullify every vote cast in ONLY these states is selective bias on the part of the Republicans: They could easily accuse every Blue State of these charges and nullify theirs as well. They just want enough of the states to flip - or equally not submit Electoral Votes at all to force the results into the House where the Republicans hold a states delegation edge - so they can get their win and never worry about actually proving any of their false claims about fake voters. They want to appease trump's Id at all costs.

We are officially at the point where the Republican AGs are no longer interested in just suppressing the votes in their own states, they are desperate enough to suppress the votes in states they can't control.

Back to Stern:

How did we get here? To start, at least 13 of the 17 attorneys general on the motion are affiliated with the Federalist Society, a powerful and lavishly funded network of conservative attorneys. The Federalist Society has achieved unprecedented success under Trump: He has nominated its members to serve as judges, political appointees, and, of course, his own personal lawyers. A huge portion of election-related litigation over the last few months has been driven by Federalist Society members eager to toss out as many Democratic ballots as possible. All the while, the conservative legal movement has insisted that it is dangerous and unacceptable for anyone to criticize any attorney who chooses to support Trump in court...

Wednesday’s motion is a logical extension of this theory. The attorneys general who signed it are in the mainstream of the conservative legal movement. They are not lunatics. They have simply been given permission by their colleagues to do anything to help Trump retain the presidency. Asking the nation’s highest court to steal an election for Trump is not off limits because nothing is off limits. These attorneys general seem to think their states’ citizenry demands intervention on Trump’s behalf—mass voter suppression included. We can safely assume that these lawyers will continue to fight for the law of Trumpism long after Jan. 20. Remarkably, most of the states siding with Trump are members of the former Confederacy. We may soon experience a kind of cold Civil War, in which the Republican leaders of former Confederate states attempt to sabotage democracy in order to install a new GOP president in 2024. (On Wednesday, “Civil War” trended on Twitter and Rush Limbaugh advocated for secession on his radio program.)

If you follow Adam Silverman at Balloon-Juice, you'll note he's claimed we've been in this Cold Civil War for decades now. What we're at now is the 2020 equivalent of 1860, where the sides are forming up and the partisan demagogues on the wingnut side - the racist slaveowners then, the racist immigrant bashers today - are fomenting enough rage to make the war go hot.

So why even wait for 2024? trump is unwilling to leave office now and he's making damn sure the Republican Party that has sworn fealty to him is ramping up the likelihood of a political split of state against state.

In short, these Republican Attorneys General want open civil war, and they want it now. They want to finally seize the power of defining who gets to be an American citizen (anyone White and Male and Conservative) or not (anyone Black, Female, Young and Liberal). They want to roll back every legal right to vote to how things were in 1850 (before Blacks and Latinos could vote, before Women could vote, before 18-year-olds could vote). They want to certify that the courts - shaped by trump and Mitch McConnell's court-packing the past four years - will make their efforts to retain Minority Rule (and to punish everyone else for voting against them) are as legal as possible.

And while the Supreme Court may well dismiss this effort - it's a last-minute attempt to get a legal argument before SCOTUS before the Electoral College votes this Monday December 14 - we can't ignore the possibility that the majority conservative bench will answer to their Federalist Society overlords and give trump the excuse he needs to steal the election himself.

We can't ignore the damage this fight has already done. A solid majority of Republican voters openly buy trump's conspiracy lie that the Democrats stole the election from him, even with the reality that every court case arguing that lie failed to work. We are at the point where almost half the nation believes Biden is illegitimate all because a goddamned con artist told them so.

We can't convince those people otherwise. The Far Right voting base exists in its own wonderful Narrative bubble forged over the decades into believing Democrats are Un-American Monsters. Nothing - not the facts, not the courts requiring actual evidence of fraud and not finding one whiff of it, not their own family members and former friends who know they voted Biden - will shake them of that belief.

It's the kind of madness that festered in this country with the Sovereign Citizen movement, a cult-like effort to ignore existing laws to uphold their own "common" laws (which usually meant the Sovereign people get to do whatever the hell they wanted, seizing property under false liens for example, while everyone paid their costs). Only now it's a trump-led cult of MAGA truthers numbering in the millions, convinced that they alone are the true patriots and that everyone else is "antifa" and deserving of attack.

Even if this lawsuit fails, even if the Electoral College plays its role and elects Biden and Harris into office as President and Veep, this isn't going to end. This will continue to spiral downward into deeper madness until things are literally on fire due to trump's cruel whims and his fanbase's eager rage.

And by the way, while all of this is happening, the COVID-19 pandemic is still spiking upwards into millions of infected and with over 3,000 people dying within a day now. The pandemic is more lethal in a day than 9/11 was, and our Republican leaders from trump down to his toadying GOP Governors are failing to curb this disaster.

This is not going well, this will not end at all well.