Red Mosquito

verb_to_trust wrote:Dan Gable is a midget

The Supreme Court repudiation of President Trump’s desperate bid for a second term not only shredded his effort to overturn the will of voters: It also was a blunt rebuke to Republican leaders in Congress and the states who were willing to damage American democracy by embracing a partisan power grab over a free and fair election.

The court’s decision on Friday night, an inflection point after weeks of legal flailing by Mr. Trump and ahead of the Electoral College vote for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Monday, leaves the president’s party in an extraordinary position. Through their explicit endorsements or complicity of silence, much of the G.O.P. leadership now shares responsibility for the quixotic attempt to ignore the nation’s founding principles and engineer a different verdict from the one voters cast in November.

With direct buy-in from senior officials like Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and the Republican leader in House, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the president’s effort required the party to promote false theory upon unsubstantiated claim upon outright lie about unproved, widespread fraud — in an election that Republican and Democratic election officials agreed was notably smooth given the challenges of the pandemic.

And it meant that Republican leaders now stand for a new notion: that the final decisions of voters can be challenged without a basis in fact if the results are not to the liking of the losing side, running counter to decades of work by the United States to convince developing nations that peaceful transfers of power are key to any freely elected government’s credibility.

Whatever their primary sources of information, Republicans overwhelmingly view the election as fatally flawed; a Quinnipiac University poll released on Thursday found that only 23 percent of registered Republican voters — and slightly less than half of all white men who are registered to vote — said they believed Mr. Biden’s victory was legitimate.

Those doubters do not represent a majority of Americans; 60 percent of registered voters overall said they accepted the results. But they form the core of the Republican base, and the party’s leaders have proven continually unwilling to go against them — especially with a critical runoff looming in Georgia that will determine partisan control of the Senate.

Higgs wrote:

BurtReynolds wrote:Faithless electors are always good for a clickbait story or two around this time in the process.

BurtReynolds wrote:It's a pillar of our democracy!

elliseamos wrote:

BurtReynolds wrote:It's a pillar of our democracy!

Bad headlines or blaming journalists?

96583UP wrote:

elliseamos wrote:

BurtReynolds wrote:It's a pillar of our democracy!

Bad headlines or blaming journalists?

deep state keeping watch