The Republican Party Is Now a Seditious Organization

Late Wednesday afternoon, in as clear a demonstration as there ever has been of the authoritarian rot at the heart of the Republican Party, 17 other states, all governed primarily by Republicans, filed an amicus brief in support of the ludicrous lawsuit being brought by Ken Paxton, the indicted Republican attorney general of Texas, that seeks to overturn the results of the presidential election by disenfranchising millions of voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.

The 17 accomplices to this braindead seditious conspiracy are Missouri, Arkansas, South Dakota, Florida (Shocker!), Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina (now two-for-two in attempts to subvert the republic over a presidential election), Utah, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Alabama. None of these benighted places has any more standing to subvert the elections in, say, Michigan, than Texas or the Elks Club of Bugtussle have. But they're willing to sign onto the closest thing we've had to secession in 150 years because the Republican Party has created a couple of generations of leaders who simply can't think of any other way to do politics than to scorch the earth, win or lose. Zero-sum democracy is untenable. Listen to this unreconstructed—in every sense of the word—swill out of Tennessee's Secretary of State via The Tennessean:

"The Tennessee Attorney General's Office has consistently taken the position that only a State's legislature has the authority to make and change election laws," Slatery said in a statement. "This Office pressed that argument in cases defending Tennessee’s election laws against pandemic-related challenges and in amicus briefs in cases involving similar challenges in other courts. This is not something new. Texas’s action in the Supreme Court seeks to vindicate the same important separation-of-powers principles, and that is why we joined Missouri’s amicus brief in support of that action."

There's mischief going on elsewhere, too. In Michigan's House of Representatives, the Speaker, White House invitee Lee Chatfield, is going to give its Oversight Committee subpoena power to continue "investigating" fairy tales well into 2021. (Will there be a return engagement for Michelle Carone? You'll have to stay tuned, America.) At the same time, Chatfield and the Michigan House stripped Rep. Cynthia Johnson of her committee assignments, which includes her membership on said Oversight committee. Johnson apparently violated House rules by being a Black person who questioned Rudy Giuliani without the proper deference in that now-legendary clown show that was the last televised meeting of the Oversight committee, which soon will be able to subpoena crazy people to testify instead of having Giuliani deliver them in his special padded minivan. This got Johnson voicemails in which Michiganders exercised their First Amendment rights by saying she should be lynched.

The ostensible reason for cracking down on Rep. Johnson is that she posted a video on Facebook in which she said the following:

"So, this is just a warning to you Trumpers. Be careful. Walk lightly. We ain’t playing with you. Enough of the shenanigans. Enough is enough...And for those of you who are soldiers, you know how to do it. Do it right. Be in order. Make them pay. I love y’all."

Of course, in the video, Johnson also tells people not to yell at folks, or to cuss, but, rather, to "hit them in the pocketbook." Nevertheless, Chatfield claims he felt threatened by this video, so he moved against Johnson.

In Wisconsin, the chairman of the state assembly's election committee is refusing to surrender to mathematics and is still flashing the Inquiry light. From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

The chairman of the Assembly’s elections committee says he’s unsure who won Wisconsin’s presidential election and might support having the GOP-controlled Legislature try to flip Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes from Joe Biden to Donald Trump. Republican Rep. Ron Tusler of Harrison, the chairman of the Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections, also said he would not vote early in person in the spring election, as he did in November, because he no longer believes the procedure is being conducted legally by officials around the state. Tusler's committee plans to host a wide-ranging hearing Friday alongside a Senate committee to look into the Nov. 3 election, which Biden won by about 21,000 votes, a margin of 0.6 percentage points.

That should be an entertaining carny act. Looking forward to it.

But the Texas case is Big Casino for these folks. They all believe that the Supreme Court will ride to their rescue and disenfranchise millions of people whom they don't believe should be allowed to vote anyway. The Republican Party is now a seditious, subversive organization, a Fifth Column of organized authoritarian yahoos. Where's Joe McCarthy when you need him?

They all believe that the Supreme Court will ride to their rescue and disenfranchise millions of people whom they don't believe should be allowed to vote anyway. ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS Getty Images

Also on Wednesday, the president* filed a brief "intervening" in the Texas case. This is part of it.

The fact that nearly half of the country believes the election was stolen should come as no surprise. President Trump prevailed on nearly every historical indicia of success in presidential elections. For example, he won both Florida and Ohio; no candidate in his- tory—Republican or Democrat—has ever lost the election after winning both States. And he won these traditional swing states by large margins—Ohio by 8 percentage points and 475,660 votes; Florida by 3.4 percentage points and 371,686 votes. He won 18 of the country’s 19 so-called “bellwether” counties—counties whose vote, historically, almost always goes for the candidate who wins the election.2 Initial analysis indicates that he won 26 percent of non-white voters, the highest percentage for any Republican candidate since 1960,3 a fairly uniform national trend that was inexplicably not followed in key cities and counties in the Defendant States. And he had coattails but, as some commentators have cleverly noted, apparently no coat. That is, Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate and U.S. House, down to Republican candidates and the state and local level, all out-performed expectations and won in much larger numbers than predicted, yet the candidate for President at the top of the ticket who provided those coattails did not himself get over his finish line in first place. This, despite the fact that the nearly 75 million votes he received—a record for any incumbent President—was nearly 12 million more than he received in the 2016 election, also a record (in contrast to the 2012 election, in which the incumbent received 3 million fewer votes than he had four years earlier but nevertheless prevailed). These things just don’t normally happen, and a large percentage of the American people know that something is deeply amiss.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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