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      What Republicans Might Gain if They Lose Georgia

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyWhat Republicans Might Gain if They Lose GeorgiaThey have survived Trump for the last four years. But disentangling from him might get easier if his latest sabotage succeeds.Opinion ColumnistJan. 5, 2021Defeats for Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue would show there is a real political cost to endorsing not just President Trump but also his fantasy politics.Credit…Damon Winter/The New York TimesAt this time of year, normally a sleepy, unremarkable period, I often write a column summing up the things that I got wrong in the previous year’s worth of punditry. Given that everything is rather more harrowing than usual this year, the habit feels a little self-indulgent — except that one important and mostly falsified hypothesis that I once held, not just for 2020 but across the entire Trump era, is about to be put to one last test.The hypothesis was that by nominating Donald Trump for the presidency and lashing itself so closely to his unique mixture of corruption, incompetence and malice, the Republican Party set itself up for a sweeping political repudiation — on the order of what it faced in 1964, after Watergate and in the last two elections of the George W. Bush era.I was wrong about this in 2016, but after the pandemic arrived in 2020 and Trump responded so Trumpishly, I suspected that the reckoning had finally arrived — that the president was sinking himself and that his party would likely go down with him.Trump did sink, but not as deeply as I anticipated — and meanwhile, the G.O.P. kept bobbing, its House caucus actually increasing, its hold on a few crucial Senate seats surprisingly maintained.Where did I go wrong? Despite making it a frequent theme, I probably underestimated the public’s reluctance to hand a self-radicalizing liberalism full control of government, given its matchless power in other institutions. I also probably underestimated the stabilizing effect of the economic relief efforts on people’s finances, which made the pandemic year less devastating and the anti-incumbent mood less intense. And I suspect there was more lockdown fatigue, more wariness of the Democratic Party’s preferred public-health regime, than the coronavirus polling captured.Add up all those factors, and you have a decent explanation for both the slightly higher-than-expected Trump vote and the voters who wanted to be rid of him but preferred divided government, in numbers that helped keep the Republican Party afloat.Pundits are supposed to learn from the past, and learning from the Republican overperformance in November 2020 would lead one to expect that the G.O.P. will keep its two Georgia Senate seats in today’s runoffs. After all, Trump himself has been defeated (his unwillingness to admit as much notwithstanding), the Georgia suburbs boast plenty of the kind of mildly conservative voters who voted for Joe Biden but also might like to see his presidency held in check, and David Perdue, one of the two Republican senators on the ballot, ran ahead of the president nine weeks ago. A Republican Party that survived the Trump era without the kind of shellacking I kept expecting should surely be able to win the first Senate races of the Biden era.Except that this isn’t the Biden era, is it? Not for two more weeks; for now, it’s still the Trump era, the Trump show, the last crazy act (until he runs in 2024, that is), with everything dialed up as far as he can take it: the wildest conspiracy theories, the most perfect phone calls to beleaguered state officials and the most depressing sort of voter-fraud pandering from the irresponsibility caucus among congressional Republicans. And all of it happening while the Covid curve bends upward, a new strain spreads and the vaccine rollout falls well short of Trump administration predictions — not that the president shows any evidence of caring.This context makes prediction a fool’s errand. You can’t use historical case studies to model pandemic-era runoff elections in which the president is making war on the officials of his own party and some of his fiercest online supporters are urging a boycott of the vote.But since prediction is often just an expression of desire, I’ll tell you what I want to happen. Even though the party richly deserved some sort of punishment, I didn’t want the G.O.P. to be destroyed by its affiliation with Trump, because I’m one of those Americans who don’t want to be ruled by liberalism in its current incarnation, let alone whatever form is slowly being born. But now that the party has survived four years of Trumpism without handing the Democrats a congressional supermajority, and now that Amy Coney Barrett is on the Supreme Court and Joe Manchin, Susan Collins and Mitt Romney will hold real power in the Senate, whatever happens in Georgia — well, now I do want Perdue and Kelly Loeffler to lose these races, mostly because I don’t want the Republican Party to be permanently ruled by Donald J. Trump.Obviously, a runoff-day defeat won’t by itself prevent Trump from winning the party’s nomination four years hence or bestriding its internal culture in the meantime. (Indeed, for some of his supporters it would probably confirm their belief that the presidential election was stolen — because look, the Democrats did it twice!) But the sense that there is a real political cost to slavishly endorsing not just Trump but also his fantasy politics, his narrative of stolen victory, seems a necessary precondition for the separation that elected Republicans need to seek — working carefully, like a bomb-dismantling team — between their position and the soon-to-be-former president’s, if they don’t want him to just claim the leadership of their party by default.That kind of Trump-forever future is what Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz and others are making possible, with their ambitious pandering. Hawley and Cruz both want to be Trump’s heir apparent (as though he doesn’t already have several in his family), but the deeper they go into the Trumpian dreampolitik, the more they build up the voter-fraud mythos, the more likely it becomes that they’ll just be stuck serving him for four more years — or longer.So there needs to be some counterpressure, some sense that dreampolitik has costs. And defeat for two Republicans who have cynically gone along with the president’s stolen-election narrative, to the point of attacking their own state’s Republican-run electoral system, feels like a plausible place for the diminishment of Trump to start.I don’t think that diminishment is necessary to save the American republic from dictatorship, as many of Trump’s critics have long imagined, and with increasing intensity the longer his election challenge has gone on. Whatever potentially crisis-inducing precedents Republican senators are establishing this month, the forces and institutions — technological, judicial, military — that could actually make America into some kind of autocracy are not aligned with right-wing populism, and less so with every passing day.But Trump’s diminishment is definitely necessary if the American right is ever going to be a force for something other than deeper decadence, deeper gridlock, fantasy politics and partisan battles that have nothing to do with the challenges the country really faces.Or to distill the point: You don’t have to see Trump as a Caesar to recognize his behavior this month as Nero-esque, playing a QAnon-grade fiddle while the pandemic burns. We imported at least one of the new variants of the coronavirus from overseas in the past few weeks — like the pandemic itself, the kind of thing a populist-nationalist president is supposed to try to slam the door against — but instead of shutting down flights from Britain or South Africa, he’s been too busy pushing the stupidest election challenge in recorded history, while slipping ever-closer to blaming the lizard people for his defeat.I don’t know how any of this ends. But somewhere between the wipeout of the Republican Party that I once expected and the 2024 Trump restoration that I fear, there’s a world where the party spends the next four years very gradually distancing and disentangling itself from its Mad Pretender and his claims.And since that scenario becomes a little more likely if Georgia goes for the Democrats, I think that not only liberals, but also those Republicans who want a conservatism after Trump, should welcome that result.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Can Only Republicans Legitimately Win Elections?

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyCan Only Republicans Legitimately Win Elections?Trump and many of the G.O.P.’s leaders seem to think so, with ominous consequences for the future.Opinion ColumnistJan. 5, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETTwilight at a Trump rally in Georgia on Jan. 4.Credit…Erik S Lesser/EPA, via ShutterstockOf the many stories to tell about American politics since the end of the Cold War, one of growing significance is how the Republican Party came to believe in its singular legitimacy as a political actor. Whether it’s a hangover from the heady days of the Reagan revolution (when conservatives could claim ideological hegemony) or something downstream of America’s reactionary traditions, it’s a belief that now dominates conservative politics and has placed much of the Republican Party in opposition to republican government itself.It’s a story of escalation, from the relentless obstruction of the Gingrich era to the effort to impeach Bill Clinton to the attempt to nullify the presidency of Barack Obama and on to the struggle, however doomed, to keep Joe Biden from ever sitting in the White House as president. It also goes beyond national politics. In 2016, after a Democrat, Roy Cooper, defeated the Republican incumbent Pat McCrory for the governorship of North Carolina, the state’s Republican legislature promptly stripped the office of power and authority. Wisconsin Republicans did the same in 2018 after Tony Evers unseated Scott Walker in his bid for a third term. And Michigan Republicans took similar steps against another Democrat, Gretchen Whitmer, after her successful race for the governor’s mansion.Considered in the context of a 30-year assault on the legitimacy of Democratic leaders and Democratic constituencies (of which Republican-led voter suppression is an important part), the present attempt to disrupt and derail the certification of electoral votes is but the next step, in which Republicans say, outright, that a Democrat has no right to hold power and try to make that reality. The next Democrat to win the White House — whether it’s Biden getting re-elected or someone else winning for the first time — will almost certainly face the same flood of accusations, challenges and lawsuits, on the same false grounds of “fraud.”It’s worth emphasizing the bad faith and dishonesty on display here. At least 140 House Republicans say that they will vote against counting certain electoral votes on Wednesday. Among them are newly seated lawmakers in Georgia and Pennsylvania, two states whose votes are in contention. But the logic of their objection applies to them as well as Biden. If his state victories are potentially illegitimate, then so are theirs. Or take the charge, from Ted Cruz and 10 other Senate Republicans, that multiple key swing states changed (or even violated) their election laws in contravention of the Constitution. If it’s true for those cases, then it’s also true of Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, unilaterally expanded voting, however meagerly. And yet there’s no drive to cancel those results.The issue for Republicans is not election integrity, it’s the fact that Democratic votes count at all.That said, not every Republican has joined the president’s crusade against self-government. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas shares the presidential ambitions of Cruz and Josh Hawley and others who want to disrupt the electoral vote count. But where they see opportunity, he sees blowback. Here he is in a statement released by his office:If Congress purported to overturn the results of the Electoral College, it would not only exceed that power, but also establish unwise precedents. First, Congress would take away the power to choose the president from the people, which would essentially end presidential elections and place that power in the hands of whichever party controls Congress. Second, Congress would imperil the Electoral College, which gives small states like Arkansas a voice in presidential elections. Democrats could achieve their longstanding goal of eliminating the Electoral College in effect by refusing to count electoral votes in the future for a Republican president-elect.So do seven of his Republican colleagues in the House, who similarly argue that this stunt will undermine the Republican Party’s ability to win presidential elections:From a purely partisan perspective, Republican presidential candidates have won the national popular vote only once in the last 32 years. They have therefore depended on the Electoral College for nearly all presidential victories in the last generation. If we perpetuate the notion that Congress may disregard certified electoral votes — based solely on its own assessment that one or more states mishandled the presidential election — we will be delegitimizing the very system that led Donald Trump to victory in 2016, and that could provide the only path to victory in 2024.But even as they stand against the effort to challenge the results, these Republicans affirm the baseless idea that there was fraud and abuse in the election. Cotton says he “shares the concerns of many Arkansans about irregularities in the presidential election,” while the House lawmakers say that they “are outraged at the significant abuses in our election system resulting from the reckless adoption of mail-in ballots and the lack of safeguards maintained to guarantee that only legitimate votes are cast and counted.” Even as they criticize an attempted power grab, they echo the idea that one side has legitimate voters and the other does not.It’s hard to say how anyone can shatter this belief in the Republican Party’s singular right to govern. The most we can do, in this moment, is rebuke the attempt to overturn the election in as strong a manner as possible. If President Trump broke the law with his phone call to Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state of Georgia — in which he pressured Raffensperger to “find” votes on his behalf — then Trump should be pursued like any other citizen who attempted to subvert an election. He should be impeached as well, even if there’s only two weeks left in his term, and the lawmakers who support him should be censured and condemned.There’s no guarantee that all this will hurt the Republican Party at the ballot box. But I think we’re past that. The question now is whether the events of the past two months will stand as precedent, a guide for those who might emulate Trump.The door to overturning a presidential election is open. The rules — or at least a tortured, politically motivated reading of the rules — make it possible. Moreover, it is a simple reality of political systems that what can happen eventually will happen. It may not be in four years, it may not be in eight, but if the Republican Party continues along this path, it will run this play again. And there’s nothing to say it can’t work.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Has Georgia Reached a Turning Point for Democrats? The Senate Is at Stake

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyHas Georgia Reached a Turning Point for Democrats? The Senate Is at StakeThe growth of the Atlanta area and the efforts to protect African-Americans’ voting rights have transformed the state’s political landscape.Mr. Sokol, a professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, is the author of three books on the civil rights movement, most recently “The Heavens Might Crack: The Death and Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.”Jan. 5, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETCredit…Jim Watson/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn Georgia’s Senate runoff elections, Republicans are banking on a strategy that generations of segregationist politicians perfected: Array the voters in rural counties, overwhelmingly white and conservative, against those in the Atlanta area. From the Jim Crow era to our day, the antagonism between rural enclaves and greater Atlanta has shaped Georgia’s politics.The Republican senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, have decided that the key is turning out their rural base. Yet the rapid growth of metropolitan Atlanta, combined with tireless efforts to protect African-Americans’ voting rights, has transformed the state’s political landscape.Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia was especially meaningful not only because it upended decades-long trends in party politics but also because it represented a possible turning point in a much longer racial history. Mr. Biden is the first Democrat to carry Georgia since Bill Clinton in 1992. Mr. Clinton, though, won the state with only 43.5 percent of the vote, and he performed well among white voters in rural areas. Mr. Biden put together a very different political coalition — more urban and suburban, more multiracial and more progressive. It is this coalition that the Democratic Senate candidates, Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock, are counting on.Politicians in Jim Crow Georgia possessed a tool that Mr. Perdue and Ms. Loeffler would have envied: the county-unit system. The winner of each county received all of its unit votes. The eight largest counties had six unit votes apiece, 30 counties possessed four unit votes each, and the smallest 121 counties held two unit votes apiece. In 1950, Georgia’s three least-populous counties — with 9,267 total residents — combined for six unit votes, the same as Fulton County, with 473,572 residents. This system of malapportionment empowered demagogues, none more successful than Eugene Talmadge.Wealthy executives bankrolled Talmadge’s numerous political campaigns, while many white farmers supplied the votes. (He served three terms as the state’s governor — two from 1933 to 1937 and one from 1941 to 1943.) Talmadge was a vocal opponent of the New Deal, yet he depended on the support of those impoverished Georgians who stood to benefit from many federal programs. The journalist Robert Sherrill, in his book “Gothic Politics in the Deep South,” explained why “the people” still stood by Talmadge: “Old Gene had never done anything for them, but he made them feel like people, fit for laughter, supreme over the black man at least, and sharing with him the sly knowledge that since only the rich could profit from government, the poor man was foolish to take government seriously.”In many ways, Talmadge — though he was a Democrat and his party backed the social programs of the early New Deal — created a blueprint for today’s Republican Party. He combined racial animus with anti-government rhetoric, piled up votes among rural whites and exploited a system that gave those voters disproportionate power.In the Georgia Senate races, the Republicans’ most insistent line of attack is that a Democratic-controlled Senate will lead America to socialism. Ms. Loeffler’s opponent, Mr. Warnock, would become Georgia’s first African-American senator. In one debate, Ms. Loeffler referred to “radical liberal Raphael Warnock” no fewer than 13 times. (Mr. Warnock responded that his economic philosophy derived from Matthew 25.) This is not so different from the way Talmadge raged against the New Deal as a socialist-inspired plot that would bring racial equality to Georgia.Talmadge defended white supremacy and encouraged his supporters to use intimidation and violence to keep Black voters away from the polls. After losing a bid for re-election in 1942, he ran again for governor in 1946. He whipped white Georgians into a frenzy. Just before a Democratic primary in July, Talmadge told a crowd, “If I’m your governor, they won’t vote in our white primary.” In Butler, a veteran named Maceo Snipes cast his ballot in that primary election, becoming the first African-American to vote in Taylor County. The next day, four white men went to Snipes’s home and shot him. Snipes died days later.Roughly 85,000 Black Georgians voted in that election, though tens of thousands were disenfranchised — by either voter purges or outright intimidation. An estimated 98 percent of African-Americans voted for Talmadge’s opponent James Carmichael, a businessman and more moderate Democrat. Carmichael won the popular vote by more than 16,000, but Talmadge won a solid majority of county-unit votes — and he thus won the primary election. (Talmadge also won the general election but died before his inauguration.)As Jim Crow began to crumble in the 1960s, so did the county-unit system. The Supreme Court’s 1962 decision in Baker v. Carr established the principle of one person, one vote, and its 1963 ruling in Gray v. Sanders outlawed Georgia’s system.The state’s politics have since been reshaped by demographic change. Democrats now perform poorly in white rural areas but rely on the expanding suburbs. Two counties tell this tale: Bacon County, in rural southeastern Georgia, and Cobb County, in suburban Atlanta. Bacon County was Talmadge country. In 1946, Talmadge defeated Carmichael by 1,317 votes to 277. Cobb County went strongly for Carmichael, and it formed part of the urban-suburban coalition that gave Carmichael a popular-vote victory.In 2020, the old Talmadge strongholds were President Trump’s territory. He won Bacon County by a margin of more than 70 percentage points, but suburban areas like Cobb County powered Mr. Biden’s victory. Cobb was a Republican bastion from the 1960s through 2012, but in the past decade, the county has grown even more racially diverse and decidedly Democratic, supporting Mr. Biden by a margin of more than 14 points.Mr. Biden won 30 counties in Georgia, and Trump won the other 129. Mr. Biden’s coalition encompassed the suburbs together with Atlanta, and Mr. Warnock and Mr. Ossoff are mobilizing voters in those places. Even if the architects of the county-unit system could not have fathomed the dramatic changes that have remade the Atlanta area, this was the kind of urban-suburban coalition that they feared. For those who believe the nation can achieve a multiracial democracy, the same coalition holds their most fervent hopes.Jason Sokol (@jasokol) is a professor of history at the University of New Hampshire and the author of three books on the civil rights movement, including “The Heavens Might Crack: The Death and Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Republicans, Fearing Trump’s Wrath, Splinter Over Bid to Overturn Election

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesElectoral College ResultsBiden’s CabinetInaugural DonationsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRepublicans, Fearing Trump’s Wrath, Splinter Over Bid to Overturn ElectionFacing a consequential test, Republicans staked out dueling positions over whether to join an insurgency in their ranks pushing to invalidate President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victoryRepresentative Elise Stefanik of New York, a rising star in the Republican Party, announced that she would join the effort to object to the certification on Wednesday.Credit…Anna Moneymaker/The New York TimesCatie Edmondson and Jan. 4, 2021Updated 10:17 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — Republican divisions deepened on Monday over an effort to overturn President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory, as lawmakers weighed their fear of alienating President Trump and his supporters against the consequences of voting to reject a democratic election.With a Wednesday vote looming on whether to certify the election results, the last-ditch bid to deny Mr. Biden the presidency has unleashed open warfare among Republicans, leaving them scrambling to stake out a defensible stance on a test that carried heavy repercussions for their careers and their party. On Monday, as Mr. Trump ratcheted up his demands for Republicans to try to block Mr. Biden’s election, elder statesmen of the party and some rank-and-file lawmakers rushed to provide political cover for those disinclined to go along.In the House, seven Republicans, some of whom are part of the conservative Freedom Caucus that normally aligns with Mr. Trump, released a statement arguing at length against the effort.“The text of the Constitution is clear,” the lawmakers, led by Representative Chip Roy of Texas, wrote. “States select electors. Congress does not. Accordingly, our path forward is also clear. We must respect the states’ authority here.”Chief executives and other leaders from many of America’s largest businesses also weighed in, urging Congress to certify the electoral vote.“Attempts to thwart or delay this process run counter to the essential tenets of our democracy,” they said in a statement signed by 170 people, including Laurence D. Fink of BlackRock, Logan Green and John Zimmer of Lyft, Brad Smith of Microsoft, Albert Bourla of Pfizer and James Zelter of Apollo Global Management.And John C. Danforth, a former Republican senator and paragon of the party establishment, denounced the electoral challenge, calling it part of a “populist strategy to drive America even farther apart by promoting conspiracy theories and stoking grievances.”“Lending credence to Trump’s false claim that the election was stolen is a highly destructive attack on our constitutional government,” Mr. Danforth, a mentor to Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, the instigator of the effort in the Senate, said in a statement. “It is the opposite of conservative; it is radical.”Yet the effort won a high-profile convert on Monday, when Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia announced just hours before Mr. Trump appeared at a rally on her behalf that she, too, would vote against certifying the election results.Complicating the calculation for fretful Republicans were fresh revelations about Mr. Trump’s own efforts to subvert the election results by pressuring Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” him enough votes to overturn Mr. Biden’s win. Proponents of the electoral challenge, who have sought to portray their position as principled and apolitical, conceded on Monday that leaked audio of the call has made their task more difficult.Mr. Trump used his Twitter bully pulpit on Monday to hammer at Republicans who declined to back the doomed effort, labeling them the “Surrender Caucus” and singling out Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas.“How can you certify an election when the numbers being certified are verifiably WRONG,” Mr. Trump wrote, repeating a false claim. “Republicans have pluses & minuses, but one thing is sure, THEY NEVER FORGET!”The gambit is all but guaranteed to prolong what is typically a brief and routine recap of each state’s electoral votes, set to begin at 1 p.m. on Wednesday, prompting a bitter, hourslong debate that will culminate in a vote — or perhaps several — on whether to certify Mr. Biden’s election. Democratic leaders, on a private caucus call Monday, counseled lawmakers to avoid focusing on Mr. Trump during the discussion and instead highlight the lack of evidence of fraud.“I don’t think we need to go all night,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the majority leader. “We have members from each state who are ready to discuss, you know, the status of their state, what happened and what the courts said.”Still, more Republicans announced on Monday that they would back the objections to certifying the results. Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, a rising star in the party who led Republican efforts to recruit women to Congress over the past two years, said she owed it to voters who believe the election was rigged to support the challenge.“To the tens of thousands of constituents and patriots across the country who have reached out to me in the past few weeks — please know that I hear you,” Ms. Stefanik said in a statement.Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, and his deputies have made clear to colleagues that they strongly oppose the effort to reverse the election results, but Mr. Hawley has said he will force a vote and at least 12 other Republican senators plan to back him. The party fissures have extended to the House, where the top Republican, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, has not revealed how he plans to vote on Jan. 6 but has said he is supportive of those who want to have a debate, while Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 Republican, has argued vociferously against the move.That has created something of a free-for-all in the House. Lawmakers have been left to weigh on their own whether to vote to protect the sanctity of the election and risk incurring the wrath of their constituents, or move to overturn the results in a doomed loyalty test that could badly damage their party.Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, said in an interview that he and the other conservatives who came out on Monday against the challenge were hoping to put forward a “constitutionally grounded” argument from a “pro-Trump perspective” that their colleagues could adopt.“I think there are a lot of people of the same mind as us, but they were looking for some kind of grounding or maybe some kind of cover,” Mr. Massie said. “I feel like there are people getting sucked into the other vortex as the hours go by.”Other Republicans, including some of the president’s most ardent defenders, were plainly uneasy about the coming vote, prompting a series of tortured statements seeking to justify the most basic of democratic positions: a vote to respect the outcome of an election.“The easiest vote for me politically would be to object to everything and vote for every objection,” Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota, said on Sunday. On Monday, Mr. Cramer issued a statement saying he would not object, adding “objecting to the Electoral College votes is not an appropriate or effective way to change the results.”Senator Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican who is up for re-election in 2022, said in a lengthy statement that he voted for Mr. Trump but could not object to certifying the election results, citing his opposition to a similar, Democratic-led effort in 2005.“I stood in opposition to Democrats then, saying Congress should not ‘obstruct the will of the American people,’” Mr. Portman said. “I was concerned then that Democrats were establishing a dangerous precedent where Congress would inappropriately assert itself to try to reverse the will of the voters. I cannot now support Republicans doing the same thing.”Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, said he could not object to certifying the election results.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesBy Monday afternoon, Mr. McConnell had dialed dozens of senators to try to map out the process on Wednesday, but remained in the dark about how many would lodge objections and to which states, according to people familiar with the discussions.Even the 11 senators who signed onto the effort, led by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, were debating how far to push their objections, according to a person familiar with their discussions. Some of them were unsure of how to defend their position in interviews, the person said, and were looking to Mr. Cruz to serve as the spokesman for the group.“None of us want to vote against electors, but we all want to get the facts out there,” said Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma, one of the 11 who signed onto a statement over the weekend pledging to oppose certifying Mr. Biden’s win unless an independent commission was formed to audit the election results. “There are lots of folks in my state that still want those answers to come out, and so at least one of the electors I would vote against at that point, once we get to that moment. And it’s a statement to be able to say, ‘We got to get this done.’”He repeatedly declined to say which state’s electors he would object to on Wednesday, even as he conceded that the establishment of a commission was “highly unlikely.”As the vote approached, some Republicans said they were alarmed at a process that appeared to be spiraling out of control. Mr. Massie said he was frustrated with conservative groups that have promoted the effort to reject the election results — including exhorting followers to travel to Washington for a “Stop the Steal” rally near the Capitol on Wednesday — and called some of the messaging “disingenuous.”“They are not telling the base, some of whom are getting on buses and coming to D.C. right now, that it’s mathematically impossible to overturn the election,” he said. “I have great respect for my colleagues on the other side of this debate and I see where they’re coming from, but the people who are agitating for constituents to come here are also concealing from them that there is no way to win.”Opponents of the electoral challenge were hopeful that Mr. Trump’s call with Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, would turn away lawmakers who had been mulling joining the bid.Even senators who supported it conceded that the recording had hurt their cause.“One of the things, I think, that everyone has said,” Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, said on “Fox & Friends,” “is that this call was not a helpful call.”Luke Broadwater More

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      Trump, in Georgia Before Tuesday’s Election, Can’t Let Go of the Last One

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      .Hybrid .nytslm_li a:hover,
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      Georgia Runoff

      Full Results

      Electoral College Votes

      Biden Transition Updates

      “),e+=””+b+””,e+=””,d&&(e+=””,e+=””,e+=”Live”,e+=””),e+=””,e}function getVariant(){var a=window.NYTD&&window.NYTD.Abra&&window.NYTD.Abra.getAbraSync&&window.NYTD.Abra.getAbraSync(“STYLN_elections_notifications”);// Only actually have control situation in prd and stg
      return[“www.nytimes.com”,”www.stg.nytimes.com”].includes(window.location.hostname)||(a=”STYLN_elections_notifications”),a||”0_control”}function reportData(){if(window.dataLayer){var a;try{a=dataLayer.find(function(a){return!!a.user}).user}catch(a){}var b={abtest:{test:”styln-elections-notifications”,variant:getVariant()},module:{name:”styln-elections-notifications”,label:getVariant(),region:”TOP_BANNER”},user:a};window.dataLayer.push(Object.assign({},b,{event:”ab-alloc”})),window.dataLayer.push(Object.assign({},b,{event:”ab-expose”})),window.dataLayer.push(Object.assign({},b,{event:”impression”}))}}function insertNotification(a,b){// Bail here if the user is in control
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      @media (pointer: coarse) {
      .nytslm_outerContainer {
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      height: 45px;
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      display: flex;
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      .electionNavbar__logoSvg {
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      Georgia Runoff

      Full Results

      Electoral College Votes

      Biden Transition Updates

      “),e+=””+b+””,e+=””,d&&(e+=””,e+=””,e+=”Live”,e+=””),e+=””,e}function getVariant(){var a=window.NYTD&&window.NYTD.Abra&&window.NYTD.Abra.getAbraSync&&window.NYTD.Abra.getAbraSync(“STYLN_elections_notifications”);// Only actually have control situation in prd and stg
      return[“www.nytimes.com”,”www.stg.nytimes.com”].includes(window.location.hostname)||(a=”STYLN_elections_notifications”),a||”0_control”}function reportData(){if(window.dataLayer){var a;try{a=dataLayer.find(function(a){return!!a.user}).user}catch(a){}var b={abtest:{test:”styln-elections-notifications”,variant:getVariant()},module:{name:”styln-elections-notifications”,label:getVariant(),region:”TOP_BANNER”},user:a};window.dataLayer.push(Object.assign({},b,{event:”ab-alloc”})),window.dataLayer.push(Object.assign({},b,{event:”ab-expose”})),window.dataLayer.push(Object.assign({},b,{event:”impression”}))}}function insertNotification(a,b){// Bail here if the user is in control
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      var c=document.querySelector(“.nytslm_innerContainer”);if(c&&1 30 * 60 * 1000) return restoreMenuIfNecessary();
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      // if (Cookie.get(‘stylnelecs’) === data.timestamp) return;
      {expireLocalStorage(“stylnelecs”),currentNotificationContents=a.text;// Construct URL for tracking
      var b=a.link.split(“#”),c=b[0]+”?action=click&pgtype=Article&state=default&module=styln-elections-notifications&variant=1_election_notifications&region=TOP_BANNER&context=Menu#”+b[1],d=formatNotification(c,a.text,a.kicker,a.image);insertNotification(d,function(){var b=document.querySelector(“.nytslm_notification_link”);return b?void(b.onclick=function(){window.localStorage.setItem(“stylnelecs”,a.timestamp)}):null})}})}(function(){navigator.userAgent.includes(“nytios”)||navigator.userAgent.includes(“nyt_android”)||window.stylnelecsHasLoaded||(// setInterval(getUpdate, 5000);
      window.stylnelecsHasLoaded=!0)})(),function(){try{if(navigator.userAgent.includes(“nytios”)||navigator.userAgent.includes(“nyt_android”)){var a=document.getElementsByClassName(“nytslm_title”)[0];a.style.pointerEvents=”none”}}catch(a){}}(); More

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      @media (pointer: coarse) {
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      overflow-x: scroll;
      -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;
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      box-shadow: -6px 0 white, 6px 0 white, 1px 3px 6px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.15);
      padding: 10px 1.25em 10px;
      transition: all 250ms;
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      margin: unset;
      display: flex;
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      .nytslm_innerContainer {
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      padding-right: 1em;
      border-right: 1px solid #ccc;
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      .nytslm_title {
      max-width: none;
      font-size: 1.0625rem;
      line-height: 1.25rem;
      }
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      .nytslm_spacer {
      width: 0;
      border-right: 1px solid #E2E2E2;
      height: 45px;
      margin: 0 1.4em;
      }

      .nytslm_list {
      font-family: nyt-franklin, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;
      display: flex;
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      #nytslm .nytslm_li a:hover,
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      content: ‘LIVE’
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      border: 1px solid #d0021b;
      color: #d0021b;
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      padding: 4px 6px 2px 6px;
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      display: inline-block;
      letter-spacing: 0.03rem;
      font-weight: 700;
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      .nytslm_li_upcoming_loud:before {
      content: ‘Upcoming’
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      .nytslm_li_loud a:hover,
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      border-bottom: 2px solid;
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      .nytslm_li_updated {
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      #masthead-bar-one {
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      .electionNavbar__logoSvg {
      width: 80px;
      align-self: center;
      display: flex;
      }

      @media(min-width: 600px) {
      .electionNavbar__logoSvg {
      width: 100px;
      }
      }

      .nytslm_notification {
      border-left: 1px solid #ccc;
      font-family: nyt-franklin, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;
      padding-left: 1em;
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      font-size: 0.6875rem;
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      letter-spacing: 0.02em;
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      .nytslm_notification_headline {
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      line-height: 1.0625rem;
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      .nytslm_notification_image_wrapper {
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      margin-left: 10px;
      flex-shrink: 0;
      }

      .nytslm_notification_image {
      max-width: 100%;
      }

      .nytslm_notification_image_live_bug {
      position: absolute;
      text-transform: uppercase;
      bottom: 7px;
      left: 2px;

      font-size: 0.5rem;
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      padding: 4px 4px 2px 4px;
      font-weight: 700;
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      /* No hover state on in app */
      .Hybrid .nytslm_li a:hover,
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      .Hybrid #TOP_BANNER_REGION {
      display: none;
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      .nytslm_st0 {
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      .nytslm_st1 {
      fill: #ffffff;
      }

      .nytslm_st2 {
      fill: #2b8ad8;
      }

      Georgia Runoff

      Full Results

      Electoral College Votes

      Biden Transition Updates

      “),e+=””+b+””,e+=””,d&&(e+=””,e+=””,e+=”Live”,e+=””),e+=””,e}function getVariant(){var a=window.NYTD&&window.NYTD.Abra&&window.NYTD.Abra.getAbraSync&&window.NYTD.Abra.getAbraSync(“STYLN_elections_notifications”);// Only actually have control situation in prd and stg
      return[“www.nytimes.com”,”www.stg.nytimes.com”].includes(window.location.hostname)||(a=”STYLN_elections_notifications”),a||”0_control”}function reportData(){if(window.dataLayer){var a;try{a=dataLayer.find(function(a){return!!a.user}).user}catch(a){}var b={abtest:{test:”styln-elections-notifications”,variant:getVariant()},module:{name:”styln-elections-notifications”,label:getVariant(),region:”TOP_BANNER”},user:a};window.dataLayer.push(Object.assign({},b,{event:”ab-alloc”})),window.dataLayer.push(Object.assign({},b,{event:”ab-expose”})),window.dataLayer.push(Object.assign({},b,{event:”impression”}))}}function insertNotification(a,b){// Bail here if the user is in control
      if(reportData(),”0_control”!==getVariant()){// Remove menu bar items or previous notification
      var c=document.querySelector(“.nytslm_innerContainer”);if(c&&1 30 * 60 * 1000) return restoreMenuIfNecessary();
      // Do not update DOM if the content won’t change
      if(currentNotificationContents!==a.text&&window.localStorage.getItem(“stylnelecs”)!==a.timestamp)// Do not show if user has interacted with this link
      // if (Cookie.get(‘stylnelecs’) === data.timestamp) return;
      {expireLocalStorage(“stylnelecs”),currentNotificationContents=a.text;// Construct URL for tracking
      var b=a.link.split(“#”),c=b[0]+”?action=click&pgtype=Article&state=default&module=styln-elections-notifications&variant=1_election_notifications&region=TOP_BANNER&context=Menu#”+b[1],d=formatNotification(c,a.text,a.kicker,a.image);insertNotification(d,function(){var b=document.querySelector(“.nytslm_notification_link”);return b?void(b.onclick=function(){window.localStorage.setItem(“stylnelecs”,a.timestamp)}):null})}})}(function(){navigator.userAgent.includes(“nytios”)||navigator.userAgent.includes(“nyt_android”)||window.stylnelecsHasLoaded||(// setInterval(getUpdate, 5000);
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      To Defend Democracy, Investigate Trump's Georgia Call

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyTo Defend Democracy, Investigate TrumpThere needs to be a cost to trying to overthrow an election.Opinion ColumnistJan. 4, 2021Credit…Pete Marovich for The New York TimesAccording to Title 52, Section 20511 of the United States Code, anyone who “knowingly and willfully deprives, defrauds, or attempts to deprive or defraud the residents of a state of a fair and impartially conducted election process” for federal office can be punished by up to five years in prison.Donald Trump certainly seems to have violated this law. He is on tape alternately cajoling and threatening Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find 11,780 votes,” enough to give him a winning margin in a state that he lost. He may have also broken federal conspiracy law and Georgia election law.“This is probably the most serious political crime I’ve ever heard of,” Michael Bromwich, a former inspector general for the Department of Justice, told me. “And yet there is the high likelihood that there will be no accountability for it.”At this point, demanding such accountability feels like smashing one’s head into a brick wall, but our democracy might not be able to stagger along much longer without it. Republicans already often treat victories by Democrats as illegitimate. Their justification for impeaching Bill Clinton was flimsy at the time and looks even more ludicrous in light of their defenses of Trump. Trump’s political career was built on the racist lie that Barack Obama was a foreigner ineligible for the presidency.Now Trump and his Republican enablers have set a precedent for pressuring state officials to discard the will of their voters, and if that fails, for getting their allies in Congress to reject the results.It isn’t working this time for several reasons. Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory wasn’t close. Republican state officials like Raffensperger behaved honorably. Democrats control the House, and some Senate Republicans retain a baseline commitment to democracy.None of those conditions are likely to be permanent, though. Minimally decent Republicans are particularly endangered. Expect Trumpists to mount primary challenges to them and replace them with cynics, cranks and fanatics.True democracy in America is quite new; you can date it to the civil rights era. If Trump’s Republican Party isn’t checked, we could easily devolve into what political scientists call competitive authoritarianism, in which elections still take place but the system is skewed to entrench autocrats.Some are trying to constrain Trump’s lawlessness. Two Democratic members of the House, Ted Lieu and Kathleen Rice, asked the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray, to open a criminal probe. In Atlanta, the Fulton County district attorney has expressed openness to bringing a case, saying, “Anyone who commits a felony violation of Georgia law in my jurisdiction will be held accountable.”But there is little appetite in the House for impeaching Trump again, though he transparently deserves it. (“We’re not looking backwards, we’re looking forward,” Hakeem Jeffries, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said on Monday.) Joe Biden doesn’t seem to want his attorney general to investigate Trump, though he’s also said he wouldn’t stand in his or her way. And experts point to numerous reasons federal prosecutors might decline to bring a case.The first is what we might call the psychopath’s advantage: Prosecutors would have to prove that Trump knew that what he was doing was wrong. “You’re not dealing with your ordinary fraudster or your ordinary criminal or even your ordinary corrupt politician,” said Bromwich. “He seems to believe a lot of the lies that he’s telling.”There’s also the sheer political difficulty of prosecuting a former president. “My guess is that in the weeks and months that a prosecutor takes to develop a case like that, they’re at the end of the day going to say, ‘The guy’s not in office, nothing happened, we’re not spending our resources on it,’” the Republican election lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg told me. “Which doesn’t take away from the really immoral nature of the call.”Taken on their own, most excuses for not investigating or prosecuting Trump make at least some sense. Launching an impeachment less than three weeks before Biden’s inauguration might appear futile. It could even feed right-wing delusions by creating the impression that Democrats think Trump might be able to stay in office otherwise. Both the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress will be fully occupied dealing with the devastation to public health and the economy that Trump is leaving behind. Beyond its legal challenges, a federal prosecution of Trump would maintain his toxic grip on the country’s attention.Yet if there is no penalty for Republican cheating, there will be more of it. The structure of our politics — the huge advantages wielded by small states and rural voters — means that Democrats need substantial majorities to wield national power, so they can’t simply ignore the wishes of the electorate. Not so for Republicans, which is why they feel free to openly scheme against the majority.During impeachment, Republicans who were unwilling to defend the president’s conduct, but also unwilling to penalize him, insisted that if Americans didn’t like his behavior they could vote him out. Americans did, and now Trump’s party is refusing to accept it. It’s evidence that you can’t rely on elections to punish attempts to subvert elections. Only the law can do that, even if it’s inconvenient.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More