There’s no room for complacency about our post-election crisis
I am not surprised that most national Republicans are too cowardly to challenge Trump’s attempt to usurp our democracy. In a Post survey of GOP members of Congress, only 27 admitted that Joe Biden won the election, two said that Trump won, and 220 avoided the question.
And I am not surprised that many rank-and-file Republicans are eager to follow Trump into coup-coup land. In polls, many Republicans say that the election was rigged despite the Trump campaign’s inability to document a single case of fraud.
I’m only surprised that Trump’s tactics are failing so miserably. His campaign is 1-48 so far in court and the election results have already been certified by all of the battleground states. It seems a foregone conclusion that on Jan. 20 Biden will be inaugurated as president.
In June, I took part in post-election “wargames” organized by the nonpartisan Transition Integrity Project. We foresaw Trump’s attempts to steal the election and even the mechanisms that he would use to do so. What we didn’t expect was that his power grab would fall so flat. As Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown Law, who was one of the organizers of this project, wrote in The Post, most of the exercises “reached the brink of catastrophe, with massive disinformation campaigns, violence in the streets and a constitutional impasse.”
What did we miss? How have we avoided catastrophe so far?
There have been some happy surprises that we did not anticipate. Take, for example, William P. Barr — the most relentlessly partisan attorney general since John Mitchell. Barr mangled the findings of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, appointed a special counsel to investigate the FBI and forced prosecutors to go easy on Trump’s cronies: Roger Stone and Michael Flynn. Yet, even he refuses to lend the Justice Department imprimatur to Trump’s fraudulent claims of fraud. Barr may leave office early as a result of incurring Trump’s displeasure. Barr’s recent actions suggest he is motivated by an extreme devotion to presidential power rather than by devotion to Trump.
Most local Republican officials have also been surprisingly resistant to Trump’s pressure. Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, has been one of the heroes of this drama: He has stood up for the integrity of his state’s vote in the face of death threats from Trumpites. Another once-obscure hero has been Aaron Van Langevelde, one of two Republican members of the four-person Michigan board of state canvassers. The other Republican on the board abstained, but Van Langevelde voted to certify the Michigan election results (Biden won by more than 154,000 votes) and delivered a “Mr. Smith Goes to Lansing” oration to explain why: “As John Adams once said, we are a government of laws, not men. This board needs to adhere to that principle here today. This board must do its part to uphold the rule of law and comply with our legal duty to certify this election.”
Republican judges at both the state and federal level have been surprisingly staunch in refusing to intervene to save Trump from defeat. Even jurists appointed by Trump have ruled against him, and the Supreme Court so far hasn’t come to his rescue as he expected. Say what you will about the Federalist Society, but its members have shown greater devotion to the Constitution than 90 percent of Republican members of Congress.
So was the Transition Integrity Project overly alarmist? I don’t think so. If Biden hadn’t won with 306 electoral votes and more than 81 million popular votes, the odds are that the crisis we foresaw would have happened.
Imagine if, as Bill Kristol has speculated, 6,000 votes had flipped in Arizona and Georgia and 11,000 in Wisconsin. Trump would be at 269 electoral votes — one short of victory — and the pressure would be ratcheted up to the red zone on Republican officials and judges to deliver just one more state for the maximum leader. I suspect that more GOP officials would be willing to sacrifice their reputations and our democracy in a winning cause than in a losing one.
There is no room for complacency about our post-election crisis. Democracy has almost certainly survived, but it was, as the Duke of Wellington said of the battle of Waterloo, “the nearest run thing you ever saw.”
Next time we may not be so lucky. And given how closely our country remains divided politically, and how readily so much of the GOP has embraced authoritarianism (some Trump supporters are even calling for him to impose martial law), the odds are that there will be another election crisis in our future.
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