No, Mitt, It's Not 'Appropriate' for the President to File Frivolous Lawsuits for a Month After the Election
This is not "part of the democratic process." It's not normal or acceptable.
_By Jack Holmes
Dec 9, 2020
There are few stronger brands in American politics these days than The Last Reasonable Republican, and no one covets the title quite like Senator Willard Mitt Romney of Utah.
The man whom just a few years ago most mainstream Democrats regarded as a symbol of the irredeemable greed and callousness of the plutocratic class is now a sort of cherished liberal character, because he's a Republican who will occasionally do the absolute bare minimum with regard to shoring up our crumbling republic.
Tuesday brought the latest iteration of the form, as Frank Thorp of NBC News recorded Romney's response to the growing noise among various congressmen from his own party about somehow challenging the Electoral College outcome in the House of Representatives.
"This is madness," Romney said, surely delighting Democrats thirsting for a Republican Voice of Reason. "We have a process, recounts are appropriate, going to the court is appropriate] & pursuing every legal avenue is appropriate, but trying to get electors not to do what the people voted to do is madness."
He continued: "It would be saying, 'Look, let's not follow the vote of the people, let's instead do it what we want, that would not be the way a democratic republic ought to work." Then he said he was confident the gambit would fail, which feels both slightly presumptuous and a sad indictment in itself.
But let's backtrack a moment. How is it in any way "appropriate" for the president and his shitbrained allies to pursue "every legal avenue" when the election was not close, the result is not in doubt, and this extended—and expensive—legalistic scam has only served to undermine American citizens' faith in democracy and to render Joe Biden an illegitimate president—to Birtherize him—in the minds of the president's most ardent supporters?
(Oh, and it's also been a pretense for Trump to grift his supporters one last time, money that will surely go towards legitimate ends.)
It is not "appropriate" to file frivolous lawsuits for a month or more after an election in which you lost the popular vote by seven million, the Electoral College by the same margin you won it four years previous, and the individual swing states by larger margins than you won them in the last cycle. This is not, as Democratic lawyer Daniel Goldman pointed out, "part of the democratic process."
One way you can tell is that no presidential candidate has ever done anything similar. The 2000 case was not comparable. That came down to one state and just north of 500 votes, and there were real disputes over open questions of which votes ought to be counted. (Another sign this year's edition was bunk is that the most accomplished Republican legal-eagle types did not answer the call-to-arms in the way they did back then, when they executed a full-court press to take Florida.)
Trump telegraphed his shtick in advance, yelling not just that mail-in ballots during a pandemic would be rife with fraud—with zero evidence—but that the election would be fraudulent if he lost. It's the same claim he made in 2016. This isn't complicated, and it isn't based on what actually happened with the vote, which you can tell because he started saying it before anyone voted.
Meanwhile, Trump's legal effort would have required overturning the result in at least three different states, an insanely high bar to clear, though one that could not entirely be ruled out in a country where one party has packed the judicial system with partisan allies.
This is the latest Trumpian temper tantrum that citizens of the United States have been forced to put up with because rank-and-file Republican officeholders are too craven or too delusional to simply say, in public, what actually happened in observable reality.
For years now we've been subjected to the same formula on repeat, where the President of the United States starts with some completely deranged conclusion and his apparatchiks mew in the press that this should all be looked into.
(That is, when they're not claiming they "didn't see the tweet."
It began with his claims that all 3 million votes that led to his defeat in the 2016 popular vote were fraudulent, which yielded a Voter Fraud Commission that disbanded in embarrassment after failing to find any evidence and repeatedly faceplanting in front of federal judges.
Sound familiar? This time around, Trump and his allies are 1-51 in court. Does that seem like a crew that is pursuing all appropriate legal avenues? Of course not. They're just pouring toxic sludge down every available tube of our constitutional system. That you can file a lawsuit does not make it "appropriate" to do so. They're lobbing baseless allegations and dressing them up in the serious-making garb of the legal system until enough supporters believe them that they can say the investigations should continue on the basis that a lot of people are concerned about the allegations.
And they get away with it because even the Brave Republican Apostates like Romney give them this leeway that no other American politician is granted. "What's the downside for humoring him?" one Republican coward asked, anonymously.
Can you imagine if Hillary Clinton had launched 52 lawsuits after she lost in 2016? Forget Fox News, what would the reaction be from NBC? Would Obama get away with this? Would Romney? It doesn't seem likely.
Things do not become "acceptable" just because they are slightly less bad than the other things the president has or might have tried. This is decades of Republicans working the refs brought to a whole new level. Even with the avalanche of criticism he gets, we are all constantly making exceptions and excuses for this large adult toddler.
No one should have granted Trump this free pass over the last few weeks to make a complete and constant mess, particularly because it serves his parallel campaign to stir up chaos in the streets off of which he thinks he might profit.
That's one of many reasons the growing conclusion among Calm Savvy Observers that this was never going to work is foolish. It has not yet failed. The president has set many vile things in motion, hoping one—or a few together— might allow him to engineer a means to once again escape accountability for what he's done, and to get something he has not earned and does not deserve. It's the story of his whole life. Why should it stop now? "Appropriate," indeed.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a349168...nl22263982
This is not "part of the democratic process." It's not normal or acceptable.
_By Jack Holmes
Dec 9, 2020
There are few stronger brands in American politics these days than The Last Reasonable Republican, and no one covets the title quite like Senator Willard Mitt Romney of Utah.
The man whom just a few years ago most mainstream Democrats regarded as a symbol of the irredeemable greed and callousness of the plutocratic class is now a sort of cherished liberal character, because he's a Republican who will occasionally do the absolute bare minimum with regard to shoring up our crumbling republic.
Tuesday brought the latest iteration of the form, as Frank Thorp of NBC News recorded Romney's response to the growing noise among various congressmen from his own party about somehow challenging the Electoral College outcome in the House of Representatives.
"This is madness," Romney said, surely delighting Democrats thirsting for a Republican Voice of Reason. "We have a process, recounts are appropriate, going to the court
He continued: "It would be saying, 'Look, let's not follow the vote of the people, let's instead do it what we want, that would not be the way a democratic republic ought to work." Then he said he was confident the gambit would fail, which feels both slightly presumptuous and a sad indictment in itself.
But let's backtrack a moment. How is it in any way "appropriate" for the president and his shitbrained allies to pursue "every legal avenue" when the election was not close, the result is not in doubt, and this extended—and expensive—legalistic scam has only served to undermine American citizens' faith in democracy and to render Joe Biden an illegitimate president—to Birtherize him—in the minds of the president's most ardent supporters?
(Oh, and it's also been a pretense for Trump to grift his supporters one last time, money that will surely go towards legitimate ends.)
It is not "appropriate" to file frivolous lawsuits for a month or more after an election in which you lost the popular vote by seven million, the Electoral College by the same margin you won it four years previous, and the individual swing states by larger margins than you won them in the last cycle. This is not, as Democratic lawyer Daniel Goldman pointed out, "part of the democratic process."
One way you can tell is that no presidential candidate has ever done anything similar. The 2000 case was not comparable. That came down to one state and just north of 500 votes, and there were real disputes over open questions of which votes ought to be counted. (Another sign this year's edition was bunk is that the most accomplished Republican legal-eagle types did not answer the call-to-arms in the way they did back then, when they executed a full-court press to take Florida.)
Trump telegraphed his shtick in advance, yelling not just that mail-in ballots during a pandemic would be rife with fraud—with zero evidence—but that the election would be fraudulent if he lost. It's the same claim he made in 2016. This isn't complicated, and it isn't based on what actually happened with the vote, which you can tell because he started saying it before anyone voted.
Meanwhile, Trump's legal effort would have required overturning the result in at least three different states, an insanely high bar to clear, though one that could not entirely be ruled out in a country where one party has packed the judicial system with partisan allies.
This is the latest Trumpian temper tantrum that citizens of the United States have been forced to put up with because rank-and-file Republican officeholders are too craven or too delusional to simply say, in public, what actually happened in observable reality.
For years now we've been subjected to the same formula on repeat, where the President of the United States starts with some completely deranged conclusion and his apparatchiks mew in the press that this should all be looked into.
(That is, when they're not claiming they "didn't see the tweet."
It began with his claims that all 3 million votes that led to his defeat in the 2016 popular vote were fraudulent, which yielded a Voter Fraud Commission that disbanded in embarrassment after failing to find any evidence and repeatedly faceplanting in front of federal judges. Sound familiar? This time around, Trump and his allies are 1-51 in court. Does that seem like a crew that is pursuing all appropriate legal avenues? Of course not. They're just pouring toxic sludge down every available tube of our constitutional system. That you can file a lawsuit does not make it "appropriate" to do so. They're lobbing baseless allegations and dressing them up in the serious-making garb of the legal system until enough supporters believe them that they can say the investigations should continue on the basis that a lot of people are concerned about the allegations.
And they get away with it because even the Brave Republican Apostates like Romney give them this leeway that no other American politician is granted. "What's the downside for humoring him?" one Republican coward asked, anonymously.
Can you imagine if Hillary Clinton had launched 52 lawsuits after she lost in 2016? Forget Fox News, what would the reaction be from NBC? Would Obama get away with this? Would Romney? It doesn't seem likely.
Things do not become "acceptable" just because they are slightly less bad than the other things the president has or might have tried. This is decades of Republicans working the refs brought to a whole new level. Even with the avalanche of criticism he gets, we are all constantly making exceptions and excuses for this large adult toddler.
No one should have granted Trump this free pass over the last few weeks to make a complete and constant mess, particularly because it serves his parallel campaign to stir up chaos in the streets off of which he thinks he might profit.
That's one of many reasons the growing conclusion among Calm Savvy Observers that this was never going to work is foolish. It has not yet failed. The president has set many vile things in motion, hoping one—or a few together— might allow him to engineer a means to once again escape accountability for what he's done, and to get something he has not earned and does not deserve. It's the story of his whole life. Why should it stop now? "Appropriate," indeed.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a349168...nl22263982
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