FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
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Trump's election goal posts keep shifting

Trump's election goal posts keep shifting

Until early Friday evening, a lawsuit brought by Texas against four swing states was the last, best hope of President Donald Trump and his supporters. "This is the big one," the president tweeted Wednesday. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who had previously promised to argue another suit if it got to the Supreme Court, promised to argue his home state's. One hundred and twenty-six House Republicans, few of whom had backed other lawsuits, signed an amicus brief asking the court to "restore the confidence of all Americans" and toss out enough state election results to defeat President-elect Joe Biden.

The Supreme Court dismissed that case, and Trump barely changed his tune. The president flew Marine One over Saturday's "MAGA March," hours before some demonstrations turned violent. He told Fox News that there were "numerous local cases" that could still overturn the election, arguing that he "won big" in states that he actually lost. And he suggested that his defeats were not about merit, but about legal standing, a talking point adopted by House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., in a separate Fox News interview Sunday.

"The Supreme Court said they weren't going to take the case," Scalise told "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace. "They said Texas didn't have standing. They didn't say they were going to address the merits. Look, the Supreme Court, I think a lot of people know, didn't want to be anywhere near this."

With the president's permission, the goal posts had shifted again. As Biden prepares to take office, he has already rejected some demands from the left, approaching the presidency as a consensus-building job rather than a windfall for his base. The outgoing president has raced in the other direction, continuing to indulge his most devoted supporters, even though he cannot deliver what they are demanding - four more years in power.

Politically, there's not much evidence that this approach is hurting Trump. Polling has found that about 80% of the president's voters are willing to believe that the election was rigged against him. Donations to the president's campaign and political action committee, as well as the GOP's recount efforts and the Senate runoffs in Georgia, have been pouring in amid the effort to overturn the election, even though the race is functionally over. (The Trump campaign is waiting for Wisconsin's Supreme Court to rule on an appeal that would retroactively disqualify most absentee ballots cast in the state's two biggest Democratic counties.)

Twin defeats at the Supreme Court - the Texas case and a case brought by a Pennsylvania congressman who argued that the GOP legislature violated the state's constitution by allowing more absentee voting - have moved a few Republican officials off the bench. Of the 18 Republican state attorneys general who supported the Texas case, three had said by Sunday afternoon that Biden won the election. Republicans still facing voters have not dared.

"The Supreme Court won't hear it, so that's terrible," said Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., at a rally after the court's decision. "All I know is, the evidence they demonstrated in that case was that in Fulton County, not one absentee ballot was turned down because of an invalid signature. Not one. Now, y'all, that's physically impossible."

That was not true, either, but there has been no penalty for denying the election results, apart from condemnation by news outlets that Republicans do not take seriously anymore. At a Saturday hearing in the outstanding Wisconsin case, Trump campaign attorney Jim Troupis argued that even his ballot, cast using the looser pandemic rules approved by election officials, should be tossed as part of a mass disqualification of votes. At the same time, at Saturday's overlapping marches in downtown Washington, Trump supporters repeatedly said a second term had been ordained by God. MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, who is expected to run for Minnesota governor in 2022, told his audience that they were living in the biblical "end times."

The response of Biden and most Democrats has been to shrug and wait, in Barack Obama's old phrase, for "the fever to break." On CBS News's "Face the Nation," incoming Biden adviser Cedric Richmond handled a question about a majority of House Republicans rejecting Biden's win by suggesting that they did not believe it.

"They recognize Joe Biden's victory. All of America recognizes Joe Biden's victory," said Richmond, who is leaving a House seat in Louisiana to join the administration. "This is just a small portion of the Republican conference that are appeasing and patronizing the president on his way out because they are scared of his Twitter power and other things."

Richmond's dismissal underscored how little Biden and Democrats are doing to goad or punish Republicans who will not go along with the results. The biggest threat levied against the GOP came this week from Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., a 12-year incumbent with some gadfly tendencies, who urged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., not to seat any Republican who signed the amicus brief. Pelosi ignored him, as did the Biden campaign.

The rest of the party has generally adopted Biden's tone, which has not changed since his campaign began, and presumes that fighting for everything his base demands is a rotten way to run the country. That came into sharper view this week when The Intercept obtained a recording of Biden talking to Black civil rights leaders, defending his decision to return Tom Vilsack to the Agriculture Department and laying out why he would not jump when his party's left demanded him to use executive power.

"Where I have executive authority, I will use it to undo every single damn thing this guy has done by executive authority, but I'm not going to exercise executive authority where it's a question," Biden said. As an example, he floated the idea of an executive order to ban assault weapons. "There's no executive authority to do away with that. And no one has fought harder to get rid of assault weapons than me, but you can't do it by executive order. We do that, next guy comes along and says, 'Well, guess what? By executive order, I guess everybody can have machine guns again.' "

Throughout his career, Biden has bristled at his party's left-wing activists, bucking them in ways that he would sometimes come to regret. On the Intercept tape, Biden emphasized a trait that flashed frequently in the election: When challenged on his fealty to civil rights, or his political instincts, he pushes back hard, sometimes leaving bruised egos on the other side of the table.

That's not how Trump has operated, and the results have been both disastrous - he is the first incumbent president to lose reelection this century - and effective at enforcing party loyalty. In an open letter this week, conservative Trump allies ranging from the former president of the Heritage Foundation to the president of the Council for National Policy signed a letter declaring Trump the "lawful winner of the presidential election" and urging six state legislatures to void Biden's wins. The idea that the election was so fatally flawed that rules in each state must be rewritten, with new restrictions, is already catching on in those states. The Democrats' hope is that this becomes either too embarrassing to continue or that it fades - just as soon as the goal posts stop moving.

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