Which Side Are You On? By Josh Marshall

Which Side Are You On? By Josh Marshall

January 5, 2021 2:59 p.m.

We know from past experience that Republicans will try to repurpose their election fraud charade as the rationale for new voting restrictions. Many non-Republicans are looking at this ghastly carnival and simply being thankful that it will almost certainly fail in its goal of giving President Trump a second term in office. But this is a dangerous and misguided complacency. It’s one that will further endanger the country down the road, not only in additional voter suppression laws but in the danger of repeats and possibly successful repeats of what is happening now.

To put it simply, this will create a new reality in which this episode lives on not as a shameful, discrediting episode but as a grievance and rallying cry on the right with no counterforce opposing it. We absolutely have to avoid this.

How do you do that?

No one should see this as done because it doesn’t work now. And simply being mad about it doesn’t count. It will take funding and disciplined action over months and years, labeling everyone who has participated in this outrage as supporting a coup, attacking the constitution and the republic itself. There should be no context in which political leaders speak the name of a Ted Cruz or a Josh Hawley and not repeat that they were men who supported President Trump’s failed coup. They attacked the American republic and for self-serving reasons.

Some rich person or well-funded group should step forward to fund bar disciplinary actions against all the lawyers who have participated in this. In a democracy the highest law is that the people shall rule. These men and women have misled the public with what they know are lies. Again and again. In many cases they’ve brought knowingly fraudulent claims into courts or tried to stymie or overturn an election with frivolous claims. All of these actions merit disbarment.

Will people be disbarred? I have no idea and that doesn’t really matter. Spending years defending your right to practice law has a deterrent effect in itself. And if they should be disbarred it is wrong not to try to disbar them because not doing so undermines the premise that it should happen in the first place.

This is incredibly important.

Next, at the federal and state level Democrats and anyone who defends democracy should be working to pass laws that prevent something like this from ever happening again. It is admittedly challenging to devise new laws when the problem to be addressed is people ignoring the law in the first place. But again, this misses the point. Laws are norm-setting. They put the public on the record about what is right and wrong. Roll calls also make clear which side people are on.

This is incredibly important.

We are witnessing one of the greatest challenges and attacks on the American republic in the country’s history. Like antibodies swarming an invading pathogen we should all be acting on multiple fronts to beat back this threat. And that effort does not remotely end when Donald Trump leaves office in two weeks.

Everyone who has participated in this attempted coup should be written out of public life forever. Doing so will be difficult and not even possible as long as a big minority of the country supports these actions. But by not trying, by not doing the work on every front, you undermine the very premise that they did anything wrong. You become complicit in the offense.