Republicans’ Embarrassing Failure of Moral Leadership Continues
By: Dr. Thomas J. West Iii
Tags: Politics, Senate, Elections, Republicans, Election 2020

Republicans’ Embarrassing Failure of Moral Leadership Continues

The GOP continues to show how humiliatingly low they have fallen in their loyalty to Trump.

One would think, after four years of watching the GOP leadership humiliate itself in sycophantic service to Trump, abandoning almost all semblance of being a party that stands for conservative values — limited government, free markets, individual responsibility — that I would be immune from outrage or embarrassment on their behalf. However, their collective actions in the aftermath of the 2020 election, which saw Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by sizable margins in both the battleground states key to the Electoral College and in the nationwide popular vote, have shown that there are still depths to which they will sink. No matter the cost to our democracy or to their party’s future, they’re willing to continue hitching themselves to Trump’s wagon.

Despite the fact that all but one of the Trump campaign’s lawsuits were tossed out of court, 126 sitting Republican members of Congress signed onto an amicus brief supporting the ridiculous and frivolous lawsuit filed by Texas — and joined by numerous other states — calling for the Supreme Court to overturn the results in the four states that were key to Biden’s victory: Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. The fact that it was doomed to failure, and subsequently declined by SCOTUS, doesn’t mitigate the fact that this was an embarrassing failure of leadership on the part of elected Republican officials.

It would have been bad enough for House members to engage in this kind of chicanery. After all, the House of Representatives tends to be a bit more raucous and bomb-throwing than the Senate but then we had to endure the Senate hearing on “election irregularities,” yet another empty display designed to soothe Trump’s bruised ego and keep their (his) base angry and outraged enough to be willing to show up to the polls in Georgia.

All, despite the fact that Mitch McConnell, Trump’s enabler-in-chief, has already signaled his acceptance of Biden’s victory and has discouraged members of his caucus from protesting the counting of the votes in January.

To some degree, I expected this nonsense. Ron Johnson has, for some time now, been in the process of completely transforming himself into a Trump crony (clearly, he’s trying to outdo Lindsey Graham, the lickspittle-in-chief). Who could ever forget his drive to do Trump’s dirty work of digging up information about Hunter Biden, making use of Russian disinformation as he did so? Or the time that he disseminated false and misleading information about COVID-19?

Given this history, it’s no wonder that he would do the same when it came to “election fraud,” that perpetual bogeyman of the GOP. As has become par for the course among many elected Republicans, he claimed that there was election fraud of of an interminable scale and that it was his sworn duty to investigate them. Of course, it doesn’t seem to matter to him that there is no evidence of such fraud and that, as the Democrats on the committee reminded him, he was doing active damage by continuing to give oxygen to these types of conspiracy theories.

But Johnson wasn’t alone in embarrassing himself . Rand Paul, never at a loss for words (unfortunately), said there was fraud in the election and that it was, in many ways, stolen, a sentiment that earned him an approving Trump tweet (the one true coin of the realm in Republican circles these days). There are even rumors that he might join with some members of the House in contesting the counting of the electoral votes in January. Though such an action would surely be pointless in terms of changing the final outcome, it would certainly continue to inflict damage on voters’ belief in the structural integrity of the electoral system

Which is exactly what seems to already be happening, as Missouri Senator Josh Hawley’s ridiculous anecdote makes clear: “Yesterday I was talking with some of the constituents back at home — a group of about 30 people — every single one of them, every one of them, told me that they felt they had been disenfranchised, that their votes didn’t matter, that the election had been rigged. These are normal, reasonable people, these are not crazy people.” Setting aside for the moment his dubious claim about whether such people are, in fact, reasonable, the larger point is that it is Hawley’s job to lead. If his constituents believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the election was stolen from them, it’s his job and responsibility, as someone who truly knows the truth of matters, to tell his voters the truth, rather than to continue to pander to their delusions. Just as importantly, it’s worth pointing out the logical fallacy at the heart of his story: just because people believe something, doesn’t make it true, no matter how many of them there are.

As craven and sycophantic as they might be in some ways, Hawley and his fellows — such as Florida Senator Rick Scott, who said that his constituents were drawing comparisons between the United States and Maduro’s Venezuela— understand something fundamental about their voters. After all, as Adam Serwer documents in The Atlantic, in the mindset of many Trump voters (who are also Hawley and Scott voters), those who don’t vote the way they do are, by definition, illegitimate. Rather than even trying to convince their voters to accept that sometimes one’s chosen candidate loses, Hawley and company have given up even the pretense of moral leadership, and all of us are going to pay the price.

As Thomas Paine notably said, these are the times that try men’s souls. It’s deeply unfortunate — even tragic — that Republicans have managed to fail so catastrophically at their most basic and important duty: defending the Constitution. Rather than taking on the burden of moral leadership, they have once again bent to the supposed expediency of political necessity. However, that argument can only get them so far. At some point, either now or in the future, the chickens are going to come home to roost, and history will not look kindly on those who burned down the republic in their pursuit of power. Even if the GOP doesn’t have the good grace to be embarrassed about its behavior, the rest of us certainly do.