Again showing the hypocrisy of its trumped-up contempt for Donald Trump’s pre-emptive, hypothetical questioning of the election results back when it looked like Hillary Clinton would roll, The New York Times (via a Slate editor) again fostered the fight to keep Trump out of the White House and undemocratically install his Democratic opponent instead.
Dahlia Lithwick, a senior editor for Slate (who’s become nihilistically partisan in the era of Trump) and Drexel University law professor David Cohen penned a cri de coeur for Wednesday’s Times: “Buck Up, Democrats, and Fight Like Republicans.” The text box: “The party has accepted defeat too quickly.”
Yes, the Times, the same majestic body that warned of Trump’s dictatorial questioning of a hypothetical defeat, is running articles calling for overturning the results of a free and fair election, now that Trump won.
The authors blasted purported Democratic passivity in the wake of defeat:
On Monday, members of the Electoral College will vote in Donald J. Trump as president. Though he lost the election by nearly three million votes and almost daily generates headlines about new scandals, the Democratic Party is doing little to stop him. If you’ve been asking yourself “Where are the Democrats?” you’re not alone.
Lithwick and Cohen complained that while Hillary Clinton “is decompressing, the country is moving toward its biggest electoral mistake in history.” After a list of awful things Trump was doing or failing to do, such as staffing his cabinet with rich conservatives and criticizing “union workers and protesters on his Twitter feed,” they listed some hopelessly long-shot ideas from leftist hacks to overthrow the election results:
There’s no shortage of legal theories that could challenge Mr. Trump’s anointment, but they come from outsiders rather than the Democratic Party. Impassioned citizens have been pleading with electors to vote against Mr. Trump; law professors have argued that winner-take-all laws for electoral votes are unconstitutional; a small group, the Hamilton Electors, is attempting to free electors to vote their consciences; and a new theory has arisen that there is legal precedent for courts to give the election to Mrs. Clinton based on Russian interference....
Lithwick and Cohen signed on to Jill Stein’s expensive, doomed recount efforts in three critical Midwestern states, because they just know the GOP would be absolutely ruthless in filing lawsuits if the shoe was on the other foot:
How can we be so certain? This is what happened in 2000. When Florida was still undecided after election night, the Republicans didn’t leave their fate in the hands of individuals or third-party candidates. No, they recruited former Secretary of State James A. Baker III to direct efforts on behalf of George W. Bush. They framed their project as protecting Mr. Bush’s victory rather than counting votes. They were clear, consistent and forceful, with the biggest names in Republican politics working the process.
Moreover, they didn’t cop to the possibility that their theories might lose or look foolish in retrospect. Take the theory that ultimately succeeded in the Supreme Court. There was no precedent for the idea that the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause required a uniform recount within a state. However, the Republicans pressed that theory and convinced a majority, even though the justices acknowledged that the argument was both unprecedented and not to be used again. It was a win for pure audacity.
The networks on Election Night 2000 notoriously called Florida very early for Al Gore, even before the polls had closed in a large part of the state, and litigation by the Republicans was pretty much inevitable to protect Bush’s narrow lead in the state (which he ultimately won by 537 votes) and subsequent electoral victory, against Gore and the Democrats’ attempt to have the results reversed.
Such circumstances didn’t transpire in 2016, where Trump’s margins in each of the three deciding states were far, far greater that 537 votes, and where all three states would have had to have their results reversed for Clinton to claim victory:
As Monday’s Electoral College vote approaches, Democrats should be fighting tooth and nail. Instead, we are once again left with incontrovertible proof that win or lose, Republicans behave as if they won while Democrats behave as if they lost. What this portends for the next four years is truly terrifying.
