The Republican war on democracy moves on to new fronts

This is unusually pointed — in a good way — for a news article:

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.

Many regular Republicans supported this effort, too — a sign that Mr. Trump has not just bent the party to his will, but pressed a mainstay of American politics for nearly two centuries into the service of overturning an election outcome and assaulting public faith in the electoral system. The G.O.P. sought to undo the vote by such spurious means that the Supreme Court quickly rejected the argument.

Even some Republican leaders delivered a withering assessment of the 126 G.O.P. House members and 18 attorneys general who chose to side with Mr. Trump over the democratic process, by backing a lawsuit that asked the Supreme Court to throw out some 20 million votes in four key states that cemented the president’s loss.

The complicity of most elite Republicans with Trump’s attempts to steal the election is something that cannot be quickly swept away. And before we heap too much praise on the Supreme Court, remember that it will be perfectly fine with all of the vote suppression measures Republicans will be even more enthusiastic to enact in order to avenge The Donald:

Republican state legislators across the country are already contemplating new laws to make voting harder, as they continue to falsely portray the expansion and ease of mail-in voting during the pandemic as nefarious. Many of them view this year’s expanded voting ranks as bad for their party, despite Republican successes further down the ballot. Their consideration of new voting restrictions amounts to an ongoing attack on the integrity of the voting system, involving still more false and debunked claims.

“There is an anti-democratic virus that has spread in mainstream Republicanism, among mainstream Republican elected officials,” said Dale Ho, director of the Voting Rights Project at the A.C.L.U. “And that loss of faith in the machinery of democracy is a much bigger problem than any individual lawsuit.”

John Roberts and his Republican colleagues played a huge role in making Republican opposition to democracy go viral, even if they refused to carry their logic to the fullest extreme.

…in related news:

President Donald Trump’s campaign plans to buy ads on unspecified cable television networks to promote his effort to overturn the election he lost, highlighting claims that have been refuted by elections officials and dismissed by judges across the country.

One commercial claims that mail-in ballots were “a recipe for fraud” and urges viewers to “contact your legislators today.” Trump has sought to persuade Republican state lawmakers in several battleground states to override voters and award him their states’ Electoral College votes.