RINO Redux: An Experiment

After my last Blog, announcing the closure of RINOcracy.com, I was touched by kind and generous comments from many readers. There were also many who urged me to continue the blog in one form or another. While I am not sure that will work, I have become tempted to try an experiment.

As I explained to some of you, my essential reason for closing the blog was a sense that I was spending far too much time reading and attempting to understand depressing material only to produce blogs that were themselves often depressing. I am not sure there is a solution to that problem. Much of the news, and the current circumstances of our country are indeed depressing and, so far as I can tell, show little promise of significant improvement any time soon. And yet, perhaps we all have some obligation to try to understand our grim challenges and, in our own small ways, to grapple with them.

In the few weeks that have passed since my last blog, I have stepped back a bit from the daily outpourings of the media, trying to survey them more selectively and less intensely. Nevertheless, I have been unable to ignore the news, and I continue to have views, reactions, and possibly insights, that I feel might be worth sharing with others. To that end, I have decided to try a somewhat different schedule and format. Blogs would be posted less frequently, perhaps only every few weeks, and may be freighted with fewer factual details, citations and quotations. (Such blogs may be somewhat less valuable as a resource, but may be easier to read.) Future blogs might be devoted to a single subject or comment briefly on several. At the moment, there is one subject about which I feel very strongly.

The Republicans’ Continuing Attack on Democracy and Democrats’ Failure to Mount an Effective Defense

The foundation of Republicans’ continuing attacks on democracy is Donald Trump’s Big Lie—that he actually won the 2020 election and that Joe Biden is an unlawful occupant of the White House. It is a bewildering and alarming fact that, according to polls, Trump’s canard is embraced by a substantial majority of Republican voters. That embrace, in turn, animates many elected Republicans, not only in the Senate and the House, but in state capitols around the country. And it paralyzes other Republicans who know better but are terrified to speak out. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger have constituted a small minority with the courage to do so. (Kinzinger’s announcement that he will not seek reelection represents a serious loss to Congress and the country.) The silence of the GOP lambs casts a very dark shadow over the coming elections in 2022 and 2024.

There are three levels to the problem with Republicans. The first level lies in efforts by Republican legislatures in voter suppression, making voting more difficult by, for example, heightened requirements for voting by absentee ballots, reducing the period for early voting, and limiting use of drop boxes. While such measures are unfortunate, the threat they pose may be exaggerated.

The second level, however, is more serious; it involves Republican-sponsored legislation to replace local election officials with partisan appointees who might affect election outcomes in a variety of ways. (Recall Trump’s plea to the Georgia Secretary of State to “find” an additional 11,000 votes for him). At the same time, election officials around the country have been subjected to intimidation by vicious abuse including death threats. Vivid testimony describing such vile tactics was presented just this week at a Senate hearing chaired by Senator Amy Klobuchar.

The third, and perhaps most serious threat may arise, if despite such measures, the Democratic candidate in 2024, wins a narrow popular vote in several states. In that case, Republican legislatures may dispute the results and appoint their own set of electors. Such appointments could provide the basis for the Congress, in the purported exercise of its ballot counting function, to recognize the Republican appointees or to disqualify all electors from such states. A major reason Pence concluded that there was nothing he could do to help Trump on January 6 was that there were no competing slates of electors; Republicans are not likely to make that mistake again. Moreover, by 2024, both Houses of Congress may well be controlled by Republicans.

In the context of all that, it is remarkable that Democrats, from Biden on down, seem largely asleep at the switch. On Capitol Hill, the Freedom To Vote Act, introduced by Senators Klobuchar and Manchin, among others, would have provided some useful protection for voters and election officials, but that bill has been blocked by Republicans. Election experts have urged rewriting of the notoriously murky provisions of the Electoral Count Act, but that is hardly likely to happen in the current Congress or the Congress elected in 2022. So the defense of democracy will have to be more political than legal.

Democrats should be preparing to make the preservation of democracy a central issue in 2022, not only in Congressional races, but in state and local elections as well. Unfortunately, however, there is precious little evidence that they have the appetite to do anything of the sort. And that may be a tragic failing.

Donald Trump has made it clear that he intends to use his dominant influence over the Republican Party to use the 2022 Congressional races as a forum to re-litigate the 2020 election. For Trump, endorsement of the Big Lie is a litmus test that will determine his support of, or opposition to, candidates in every primary race he becomes aware of. Democrats should take Trump’s strategy not as a threat to be feared, but an opportunity to be seized. While Trump may arouse fervor and generate cash from his fevered base, his delusional rants should create a strongly negative reaction among sentient Independents and at least some fraction of Republicans. Republican candidates at every level should be forced to state whether they reject the Big Lie and whether they acknowledge that the January 6 outrage at the Capitol was a serious attack on democracy. The defense of democracy demands and deserves no less.