It's Not a Good Sign That the Electoral College Has a Vote Tracker This Year
"I think we're all getting an education about the presidency," Dave Chappelle told Stephen Colbert in 2017. "I don't know that I've ever heard in popular discourse people discussing 'ethics' this much, and I didn't even realize how ethics were necessarily supposed to work at that level of government." It was an early sign of one of the fruits of the Trump era: the broad re-engagement of Americans with the process of self-government. Everyday citizens began to scrutinize conflicts-of-interest in the Executive Branch, or to learn about the asylum process that refugees were fighting their way through at the southern border. When minor features of government suddenly became hot talking points in the national discourse, it was sometimes mocked. But this was usually a win for civic life in America, and long may it continue into the less grotesque—and for some, undoubtedly, less interesting—days of President Joe Biden. The Big Tech types are starting to find their way into his transition team, for instance.
Speaking of which, a milestone on Biden's path from president-elect to president will take place this very Monday, and serves as another example of how basic processes of our constitutional system have been elevated to flashpoints in our national political affairs. And there are some things we'd maybe rather not have to pay such granular attention to. Normally, the Electoral College vote is a formality: the various states' elections were long ago conducted and more recently—and repeatedly—certified. The Electors vote for the candidate that citizens instructed them to vote for. But this year, when the incumbent president has waged a relentless month-long campaign to overturn the results of a contest that was not close by any metric, including his margin of victory in the same key states four years ago, this boneheaded feature of the constitutional design has become yet another opportunity to further the decay of the American republic. Suddenly, the Washington Post has an Electoral College Vote Tracker. It should be said also that some liberal commentators went a haywire four years ago with talk of Faithless Electors who would save us all from Donald Trump, who'd actually won the election.
The main issue this time is not necessarily the slapdash efforts from Trump and his allies to directly tamper with the Electors' votes or the process, which are, like his half-century of lawsuits across various state and federal courts, always likely—though not destined—to fail. Stephen Miller's "alternative Electors" scheme, which he laid out on the president's favorite teevee program this morning, is a real shot in the dark, which means it doubles as a signal this may be one of the very last times we have to see the face of the Santa Monica Gargamel on-screen. (The Alternate formulation pairs well with the growing universe of Alternative Facts from which this assault on democracy is sprouting.) However, like any aspiring strongman, the president has set a number of fuses, hoping one will burn in a way that throws things into enough chaos that he can seize on it in some way.
Based on the various displays out of the nation's capital and elsewhere this past weekend, the chaos is certainly brewing. The entire country has been sitting atop a powder keg for months, teetering on the edge of a kind of social collapse, and the president has spent week after week yelling that the election was stolen from him—and thus, from the millions of people who support him and take his word as gospel. Thankfully, things have just about held together thus far, though four people getting stabbed in spasms of political violence in the streets of the capital is not a harbinger of much good to come.
Out in the states, some Georgia Republicans are engaging in Miller's Alternative Electors gambit, even if the real electors have already voted to give the state's Electoral Votes to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Michigan has been a hotspot at least since the state's governor, Gretchen Whitmer, was subject to a kidnapping—and apparent execution—plot from a local paramilitary group. Then the state's attorney general had a group of armed individuals station themselves outside her house in the dead of night. The state legislature building will be closed while Electors do their duty Monday amid safety concerns, and it seems wise under the circumstances. Those circumstances have now been laid bare: basic functions of our democratic system are now under threat of violent disruption from people inspired by lies about the election from the President of the United States.
Seems bad, especially when you hear that, despite all their tough talk of Continuing the Fight, the president's legal eagles have departed his actual campaign headquarters—which has begun selling off office equipment in a sure sign things are Not Over—and moved to a hotel. Like when Fox News was pumping people full of COVID trutherism while its actual offices were abiding by strict pandemic protocols, this is a bit of a tell that the public rhetoric from these authoritarian types may not be entirely genuine. The president is yelling that we just had THE MOST CORRUPT ELECTION IN HISTORY, a seismic world-historical sabotage he's responded to by playing a lot of golf. The cynicism is absolutely towering at this point, but that's a secondary concern when you really take stock of how much the ideological end product of these machinations is beginning to take hold.
People believe this stuff, even after Trump's lawyers are laughed out of court by Trump judges—or, in Monday's case, by the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The president's chances of overturning the will of the people using existing mechanisms of the republic are fading fast, but there remain still other means available to him, methods we cannot rule out in the case of someone so desperate and so incapable of empathy or remorse. His laziness does not preclude him from telling his minions to keep causing trouble. And besides, the basic institutions have only held up through constant vigilance. A democracy that survives because its Supreme Court chose to prevent the sitting president from seizing continued power is not in fine health. It all gets at what Stephen Colbert said by way of a reply to Dave Chappelle a lifetime ago: "Well, nobody really talks about oxygen until somebody's got their hands around your neck."
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