So our Supreme Court has decided not to hear a case from a Trump supporter to overturn the results of the election in Pennsylvania and award its Electoral College votes to Trump. That’s good and should not be a surprise given that the Constitution allows each state to decide how to award its Electoral College votes. It’s simply not a matter for the U.S. Supreme Court. Like almost all states, Pennsylvania decided to give all its Electoral Votes to whoever wins a plurality of the votes cast.
Still, you never know and it’s unlikely the court has received its last plea to change the election results. Now Texas wants the court to overturn the four swing states (Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia) electoral votes too, and hopefully that’s as unlikely to get a hearing for the same reason.
In fact, “Safe Harbor Day” (December 8) has passed, meaning Congress must presume the certified Electoral College votes from the states are not to be questioned. This means, absent a coup, Joe Biden will be our 46th president. He’ll be it because (duh!) he won a majority of the Electoral College votes, or will when they are officially cast on December 14th in state capitols. It would seem then that if you want your party to win the presidency, you should figure out how to lawfully collect a majority of the Electoral College votes cast in free and fair elections.
If this were eight years ago, the Republican Party would do a post mortem and would figure out what it figured out then: we need to expand our base and maybe move toward the middle so we attract more voters. Of course, in 2016, the Republican Party did just the opposite but won the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote by three million votes.
In 2020, the Republican Party seems to be even more obstinate. It’s clear they won’t try to broaden their coalition since compromise and coalition building cannot be tolerated. Instead, their take away seems to be they must cheat instead. They did their best in this election but somehow it failed them. The most likely lesson that they’ll take away is to double down on the cheating. For one thing, their conservative courts are not nearly conservative enough since a large number of their judges, particularly in the hinterlands, haven’t gotten the message and have (gasp!) followed the rule of law instead.
The lesson they seem to be taking away is that they can’t allow democracy to happen unless they can ensure they control democracy. In that sense they have plenty in common with the Chinese government and also Henry Ford, who famously declared you could buy his Model T in any color you want, as long as it was black.
This seems to be the enduring legacy of Trumpism: a party that will no longer feel the need to be moored to the Constitution because, well, their being in charge ultimately trumps a silly constitution. Unless things fracture within the party, as I hoped, that seems to be their driving concern: to take by force that which they believe must be theirs, because they can no longer stand the idea that they can’t be in charge.
God help us.
Occam's Razor 