By Peter Berger
By Peter Berger
Sometimes it feels like I’m living in a Perils of Pauline film festival. Pauline was a silent picture heroine who was always facing perils orchestrated by her evil guardian. Fortunately for her fans and people who enjoy watching the same storyline over and over, she was always rescued in time to face her next peril in the next episode.
In our present-day national serial perils, Rudy Giuliani commandeers the nearest microphone to announce he’s headed to court. It’s part of his crusade to stop Joe Biden from allegedly stealing the election, a feat Rudy expects to accomplish by helping Donald Trump actually steal the election. At the end of every episode, Rudy gets laughed out of court in time to announce he’ll be filing his next fanciful lawsuit somewhere else.
It would be funny if it weren’t true.
Giuliani isn’t the only menace. In addition to his co-counselors, he’s got elected officials like Matt Gaetz backing him up. You remember Matt Gaetz. He’s the vocal member of Congress who demonstrated his disdain for the pandemic by parading around the House of Representatives wearing a gas mask. On the Gaetz timeline of significant contributions to American democracy, the gas mask episode took place after he rallied a battalion of fellow Republicans to “storm” an impeachment hearing that most could have simply walked into, but before he tested positive for Covid-19. He’s also distinguished himself by tweeting that Donald Trump should pardon his entire administration, as well as his whole family.
Most recently Congressman Gaetz signed on to the lawsuit initiated by Texas’ attorney general. The Texas suit, which Donald Trump identified as “the big one,” asked the Supreme Court to throw out the 2020 presidential election results in Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania, all of which Donald Trump lost and none of which are Texas, a point the Supreme Court highlighted when it unanimously dismissed the suit as none of Texas’ constitutional business.
Gaetz disagrees. He argues that the Constitution grants the authority to administer elections to state legislatures, but since other state agencies and officials in the states named in the suit, like their governors and secretaries of state, were the ones who’d revised their state’s election procedures, the election results should be overturned.
As an elected official and states’ rights advocate, Congressman Gaetz should understand that the constitutional point of giving procedural authority over elections to state legislatures was to not give it to the national legislature, also known as Congress, and that state legislatures routinely can and do by statute, regulation, or governing structure delegate their authority to local and state officials.
For example, it was Texas’ governor, not its legislature, that changed Texas’ early voting deadline and the number of ballot drop-off boxes in each Texas county. In fact, the same Texas attorney general who filed the suit to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania, the suit Gaetz supported, also went to court in 2020 to defend his governor’s right to change the rules in Texas.
Gaetz should also understand, as he decries the Supreme Court’s decision and its “blow to the power of state legislatures,” that states’ rights doesn’t mean the right of one state to usurp the constitutional authority of four other states.
It would be funny if it weren’t true.
The Supreme Court, with its conservative Republican majority, has twice ruled against Donald Trump.
More than 50 state and federal courts, comprising both Republicans and Democrats, have ruled against him.
Judge after judge found no evidence of election fraud.
State and local officials, both Republicans and Democrats, including secretaries of state, found no evidence of fraud.
Trump’s own appointed infrastructure specialist at the Department of Homeland Security found no evidence of fraud.
Trump’s own attorney general found no evidence of fraud.
Even his own Giuliani-led lawyers in their multiple court appearances have presented no evidence of fraud, prompting judges to observe that simply “calling an election unfair does not make it so,” and that Donald Trump has repeatedly lost in court based “on the merits” of his case.
And yet knowing all that, 18 Republican state attorneys general and 126 Republican members of Congress, including Gaetz, signed on as friends of the court in support of Donald Trump’s “big one” to “overturn” the election results.
Nothing about this is funny. And it is true.
It’s long past time when anyone can credibly and reasonably pretend that the election was fraudulent. It wasn’t. Seven million more American voters simply voted for Joe Biden than for Donald Trump. Donald Trump simply doesn’t like that.
Being a 9-year-old narcissist, he’s denying that he lost. Being a 74-year-old bully, he’s intimidating and otherwise forcing other people to take his side. And he’s taking names. Literally. He dispatched one of his congressional sycophants to bring him a list of the Republicans who signed on to his “big one” lawsuit.
Every member of Congress takes an oath, centered on the promise to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
There is nothing more central to American constitutional self-government than free and fair elections and the peaceful transfer of power based on the result of those elections.
Donald Trump is lying, delusional, or both. The election wasn’t rigged. The ballot boxes weren’t stuffed. The judges aren’t cowards. Joe Biden is the legitimately elected president.
Every member of Congress who signed on to “the big one” knows all this. Yet each, whether out of fear or ambition, has chosen to overturn an election they know to be legitimate.
They are complicit in court, where their arguments failed, and in the streets, where the doubts they feed have festered into unrest and violence.
Conspiring, secretly or openly, to remove a legitimately elected president and install someone else in his place borders on sedition. By their intentional act each conspirator becomes a domestic enemy. In plain English, overturning the election means overthrowing the government.
We are a troubled people.
It’s customary to wish ourselves well with the incantation, “God bless America.”
But in this time of trial, I find it more fitting to borrow a prayer from our British cousins.
God save the United States.
Peter Berger has taught English and history for 30 years. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.
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