Kelly Loeffler disqualified herself at Sunday night’s
debate
Opinion by
Columnist
Dec. 7, 2020 at 10:40 a.m. EST
Of all
the vile ways that Republicans have sought to justify President Trump’s effort
to overturn his election loss, one of the worst is the ubiquitous claim that
Trump is merely pursuing his legal right to contest the
results.
Sen.
Kelly Loeffler, who is campaigning in one of the two Georgia runoffs, repeated
this assertion at a debate on Sunday night. But the
circumstances under which Loeffler said this reveal what’s really at the core
of this notion in all its corrupt and anti-democratic glory.
What
Loeffler really demonstrated is that many elected Republicans are absolutely
fine with Trump’s ongoing effort to steal the election
through extralegal means.
Republicans
aren’t merely refusing to bow to reality, or humoring Trump’s refusal to come
to terms with a loss, or any number of euphemisms we keep hearing. Let’s not
sugarcoat this: Republicans such as Loeffler tacitly support Trump’s efforts to
steal the election outright.
We know
this because of the nature of the “recourse” Trump is taking right now: He
is urging Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp to persuade
GOP state legislators to hold a special session to appoint
pro-Trump electors to the electoral college, in direct defiance of the state’s
popular vote outcome.
To
fake-justify this, Trump has employed the lie that the state’s vote count,
which has been officially certified and put President-elect Joe Biden ahead by
around 12,000 votes, was not legitimate. But again and again, the “evidence”
for this has turned out to be utter nonsense.
At the
debate, this tactic, and not just Trump’s rhetorical refusal to
accept the results, is what Loeffler was asked to comment upon. Reporter Greg
Bluestein pressed Loeffler on whether she supports
Trump’s demand that Kemp “call a special session to seek to overturn those
results.”
“The
president has every right to every legal recourse,” Loeffler replied.
At
another point, when Loeffler was asked whether Trump was “wrong” to attack Kemp
for refusing to facilitate this scheme, she generally sided with Trump and
repeated her canned language about him exercising his “legal recourse.”
This is
not Trump’s ‘legal recourse’
But
this effort is not “legal.” It’s extralegal. Kemp, a Republican,
has released a statement clarifying that under state
law, the legislature can only “direct an alternative method for choosing
presidential electors if the election was not able to be held” on Election Day.
Kemp
noted that the legislature already decided back in the 1960s that the electors
are chosen by the state’s popular vote and added that under the law, a special
session to appoint different electors is “not an option.”
In
other words, Trump is calling on the state legislature to go outside of
state law to subvert the state’s popular vote and decree him the
winner. This is what Loeffler described as an effort by Trump
to exercise all “legal recourse.”
More
broadly, how many Republican elected officials have openly and explicitly
condemned this particular tactic, which Trump and his co-conspirators tried to
employ in numerous other states as well?
A few
have. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska has blasted efforts to get legislatures to go
rogue as “unprecedented” and “inconsistent” with democracy. But, while it’s
good that a handful of GOP state legislators rebuffed these efforts, what’s
distressingly unavoidable is how rare this sort of thing is
from elected Republicans.
Yes,
it’s possible that if Trump’s efforts to get one or more state legislatures to
overturn the results had come closer to succeeding, maybe more Republicans
would have objected at that point. But why should we assume this? Until
Republicans actually do condemn this tactic en masse, we should instead assume
that they would have been fine with it succeeding.
Trump
wants to remain in power illegitimately
Much of
the debate about Trump’s efforts seems strangely divorced from the unvarnished
reality of what it is he’s actually attempting to do. There’s been a loud
argument over whether the extended legal losses and all around clownish
incompetence of Trump’s team render it absurd to call this an attempt at a “coup.”
But as Zeynep Tufekci points out, the debate over
semantics and over the Trump team’s failures must not overshadow the core
overriding fact of this current situation, which is that Trump is attempting to
invalidate an election in order to stay in power illegitimately:
The technical term for
attempting to stay in power illegitimately — such as after losing an election —
is self-coup or autocoup — sometimes autogolpe.
… The U.S. president is trying to steal the election, and, crucially, his party
either tacitly approves or is pretending not to see it.
Indeed,
it’s arguably worse than this. In addition to tacitly approving, Loeffler and
other Republicans are actively and instrumentally working
to exploit the passions Trump has unleashed to their advantage,
to mobilize the GOP base in Georgia. They fear the base will be demobilized
unless Trump, or at least the opportunity to avenge this fictional injustice
done to him, is felt in some sense to be on the ballot.
Loeffler
is standing up for Trump’s alleged “right” to overturn the will of her own
state’s voters — the same ones she is purportedly seeking to represent in the
Senate. She is essentially defending what Trump is doing as a legitimate
tactic.
Though
the state’s Republican lean makes it more likely than not that a majority of
Georgia voters will disagree on this, and may even reward Loeffler’s corrupt
support for Trump’s efforts — which itself has all sorts of unsettling future
implications — that should be seen as disqualifying.