Cynical opportunism is the currency of democratic politics. Since man first learned that the route to power required the massaging of others’ egos, history has been replete with sycophants and yes-men with an unerring drive to jettison any principle in the service of self-advancement.
There’s a story of an ambitious and especially oleaginous member of the British Parliament who, when some young colleague — a potentially useful voter in a future leadership election — asked what time it was, put his arm around the questioner’s shoulder and, smiling, said: “What time would you like it to be?”
Soul-corrupting acts
But even those long familiar with spectacles of careerist expediency dressed up in faux-altruistic casuistry can only step back in awe when evidence of a new standard of cynical self-aggrandizement comes along. So it is this week with the spectacle of around 150 Republican members of Congress who will on Wednesday (Thursday in Australia) refuse to approve the presidential election results returned last month by the Electoral College.
The action, by more than half the Republican members of the House and almost a quarter of GOP senators, may rank among the most cynically contrived, morally contemptible, soul-corrupting acts of political degeneracy ever attempted.
Cynical stunt, not a coup
Let’s be clear at the outset what it isn’t. It isn’t a coup. It isn’t even a serious attempt to overturn the election result.
The letter signed by 11 senators who plan to object this week is up front about this. They acknowledge with disarming honesty that their effort to reject the result pending a congressionally-mandated inquiry into voter fraud will fail.
“We are not naïve. We fully expect most if not all Democrats, and perhaps more than a few Republicans, to vote otherwise.”
It’s the brazen acknowledgment of this reality that makes the whole enterprise so unprincipled. We can reasonably surmise that if the senators really thought their stunt had the slightest chance of success they wouldn’t be doing it. If they thought that their votes would throw the election to the House of Representatives, deny Joe Biden’s victory and gloriously reinstall Donald Trump as president on Jan. 20, they wouldn’t touch it.
There would be a kind of kamikaze courage about their action if this was indeed its objective. But these are no kamikaze politicians, willing to make the ultimate political sacrifice for a cause. These guys are more like the ground crew at a Japanese fighter base, happy to supply the fuel to propel others to their fate. They only mount this performance because they are secure in the knowledge that enough of their Republican colleagues will eschew their opportunism and affirm the election result.
The senators’ cynicism is further underlined by their claims of precedent. It’s true that something similar happened in 1876. And they rightly note more recent examples, including the last time a senator objected to Electoral College results in 2005. To grasp fully the measure of these senators’ gall, however, it’s worth noting exactly who that challenger was.
Two words: Barbara Boxer.
I’m old enough to remember when that name was for most conservatives a byword for unprincipled chicanery, political extremism and rank dishonesty. Now, apparently, Ms. Boxer’s ridiculous challenge to the 2004 election result makes her the model they wish to emulate.
Let’s state it again for disgruntled conservative voters: Of course there are legitimate concerns about the outcome of the 2020 election, especially the ubiquity of mail-in voting susceptible to manipulation.
But beyond that general objection — and a justified conviction that future elections must not be conducted in this way — the case that the election was fraudulent and must be undone hasn’t been made to anything near a legal standard.
The senators’ letter fails to advance the ball on this issue. Tellingly, the only documentation in their bill of complaint is a reference to a Reuters-Ipsos poll citing widespread distrust of the election outcome. It isn’t clear if any of them spotted the irony — the only thing less trusted these days than mail-in voting is opinion polling.
There are, it seems, enough principled conservatives to expose and oppose this cant. As Rep. Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.) put it this weekend, the proposed vote would set “an exceptionally dangerous precedent, threatening to steal states’ explicit constitutional responsibility for choosing the president and bestowing it instead on Congress.”
Doubtless, the members of Congress signing up for this week’s odious little exercise assume they will be rewarded by the ranks of angry Republican voters. Perhaps so. Let’s hope for their sakes that the gain thus achieved is large enough to fill the hole where their principles might once have been.
The Wall Street Journal
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