IF I LET YOU GET AWAY WITH IT ONCE, YOU'LL DO IT EVERY TIME

In his first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln said this: “Plainly, the central idea of secession, is the essence of anarchy...Whoever rejects [majority rule constrained by constitutional checks and limitations] does of necessity fly to anarchy or despotism.”

Once again, a gaggle of secessionists are about to fly to anarchy or despotism.  We haven’t had a physical act of war yet, but Trump’s zombie army of inept attorneys have basically mounted a philosophical argument against federalism.  The argument has repeatedly failed to pass constitutional muster, but that doesn’t matter to Trump and his followers. 

Take Ken Paxton, for instance.  A reasonable person might wonder why the Attorney General of Texas thought he had the right to tell Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania how to run their elections.  The case was so weak that the Supreme Court refused to hear it.  Since there is clearly no legal authority for the Texas suit, something else must be going on.  Actually, two something elses are going on – one personal, the other political.

The personal motive is easy to discern.  Call me a cynic, but I have to wonder if Paxton’s sudden interest in how other states run their elections has anything to do with the fact that he is under indictment for felony securities fraud.  When the long arm of the law has you dead to rights, who you gonna call?  Why, the Grand Old Pardoner himself, of course. 

But Donald Trump’s window for exercising his pardon power is closing fast, and apart from his inner circle, no one rides for free.  Paxton knew he was in a pay-to-play situation; the simplest explanation for the Texas lawsuit is that Paxton figures that if he helps Trump fundraise off MAGA rubes for another week or two, Trump will owe him.  If that’s his plan, I hope he got something in writing, because Trump rarely pays his debts, and he’ll be especially pissed off now that the Supreme Court has told Paxton to buzz off.    

But the politics behind the Texas suit are more sinister.  Up until now, the only interest Texas Republicans ever took in election fraud was to encourage it.  Republicans like election fraud.  It’s the only way they can win national elections.  No, the political goal for Texas and its Republican allies wasn’t to stop election fraud, or even to win the suit they filed.  They aren’t that stupid, even if their followers are.  They were laying down a marker, a declaration that Republicans aren’t obliged to respect the results of any election they lose. 

They will certainly keep pushing their “one law for them and another law for us” position once Joe Biden is president.  The question is whether they’ll get away with it.  One thing that would slow them down is a vigorous investigation and prosecution of Republican crimes during the Trump years.

I know.  The usual suspects are already doing the “Look forward, not backward” dance. “Don’t give him the spotlight he craves.  Don’t make a martyr out of him.”  Those arguments have a certain logic to them.  President Biden will have a lot on his plate without the added melodrama of a new Trump investigation.

On the other hand, there’s something to be said for not letting criminals get away with their crimes.  As for making Trump a martyr, that train left the station a long time ago.  The party that once scorned minorities for “playing the victim card” has dealt itself in.  Donald Trump spelled it out last weekend in Georgia: “We’re all victims.  Everybody here, all these thousands of people here tonight, they’re all victims.  Every one of you.” 

Self-pity much, MAGA folks?

The thing is, we have a considerable body of evidence that suggests that looking forward not backward only encourages Republican misbehavior.  Every Republican president since Ford pardoned Nixon has left office with potential legal exposure, primarily because they ignored laws limiting their ability to meddle in the affairs of foreign countries.  Iran/Contra, arms for hostages, the misbegotten wars in the Middle East – all Republican scandals.  And every time, their Democratic successors did the “look forward, not backward” dance.  And the next Republican presidential scandal was worse.

Donald Trump’s thorough trashing of the Constitution is the logical culmination of the Republican Party’s drift towards authoritarianism that began with the nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964.  Trump and his enablers are doing their best to establish a “stab in the back” narrative that will keep their deluded followers in a state of permanent outrage.  MAGA vigilantes have already threatened violence against local election officials who refuse to falsify results.  Sooner or later, this vigilantism is going to get somebody killed.

Those deaths will be over and above the 300,000 somebodies who have already died due to Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic.  The Thanksgiving superspreader holiday is having predictable results two weeks later, boosting us to new daily records for COVID fatalities.  Two more superspreader holidays – Christmas and New Year’s Eve – are coming right up.  By the time Joe Biden takes the oath of office, the COVID death toll on Trump’s watch may approach 500,000.    

Naturally, today’s anti-maskers will be tomorrow’s anti-vaxxers.  With luck, they’ll mostly infect each other, which might be considered poetic justice if they’d all agree to face death stoically at home, like John Wayne would have.  But no, these COVID denialists will clog our already overburdened health care system, wheezing about their “rights” with their dying breath.  They’ll die owning the libs, though, so I guess that’s something.

Speaking of dying breaths, all that Republican support for the frivolous Texas lawsuit makes it clear that there’s no  going back to a pre-Trump “normal” GOP.  75% of all states with Republican governors joined Paxton’s suit, as did 126 Republican members of the House – well over half their caucus.  There was even a right-wing joker claiming to represent the “State of New California and New Nevada,” who filed a brief with the Supreme Court in support of Paxton.  We’ve yet to hear from Atlantis and Narnia. 

Right on cue, Rush Limbaugh (who would better spend his remaining time in prayerful repentance) has injected secession into the conversation.  We’ll hear more secession talk, and most of it will be performative bluster.  Like Allen West, chair of the Republican Party of Texas, who issued a press release stating “Perhaps law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the constitution.” 

I hate to break it to him, but that very sentence is unconstitutional.  Not to mention that it’s already been tried.

After five years of Trumpism, it has come to this.  The majority of people who call themselves Republicans now refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of any election they lose.  Either the GOP is full of cynical hacks who don’t care about American democracy, or the GOP is full of cynical hacks who are actively trying to destroy American democracy.   

This might all be amusing, except for the fact that feral Trumpers are impressionable sorts.  They take Trump and his minions both seriously and literally.  Out of Trump’s millions of heavily armed followers, there are bound to be a few who’d love to go down in history as the guy who fired the shot that sparked the Big Boogaloo.

Nothing good will come of allowing this to fester.  I say, crack down hard on hooliganism (all across the political spectrum), and investigate Trump and everyone in his orbit.  Follow the evidence wherever it leads – into Congress, into statehouses and legislatures.  Let the punishment fit the crime, but let’s not pretend that crimes weren’t committed. 

What we need is a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that might help rehabilitate Republicans who have seen the error of their ways.  What we’ll get instead is a Republican Party split between a large and very loud Trump Uber Alles faction and a smaller (and very quiet) group of establishment Republicans.  The latter group will often claim to be concerned and occasionally even troubled by the excesses of their Trumpier colleagues. In the end, of course, they’ll do whatever Mitch McConnell tells them to do.

I hold out some hope that Trump’s inner circle will eventually pay some sort of price for their crimes.  Even if Trump pardons everyone in sight (up to and including Ghislaine Maxwell) for their federal crimes, many of them will still be on the hook for breaking state laws. 

Whatever else the Biden Justice Department decides to do, my hope is that they will release the unredacted case files of everyone who accepts a pardon from Donald Trump.  And while they’re at it, let the public see all the parts of the Mueller Report that Bill Barr covered up. 

I’d love to see videos of Bill Barr busting rocks on a chain gang, but I’d settle for an honest accounting of what he and his co-conspirators did while they were in power.  Surely we’re entitled to that.