The crisis will get worse before it gets better. Are Democrats prepared?

The crisis will get worse before it gets better. Are Democrats prepared?

Opinion by 

Paul Waldman

 and 

Greg Sargent

 

Today at 4:32 p.m. EDT

The Democratic Party has seldom been accused of being too bold and aggressive, but the party finally seems to be leaning into making a grand argument against GOP efforts to impair our national recovery from the pandemic. They won big in the California recall fight by prosecuting GOP anti-vax mania, and if this works in the Virginia gubernatorial contest, it could encourage more of the same.

Which is justified, since the pandemic is the defining event of our time. But Democrats should be equally forceful in describing to voters the true perils associated with the GOP’s ongoing abandonment of democracy.

That’s because numerous new developments indicate that our democratic crisis will get worse before it gets better. Are Democrats prepared to make a big argument to the country about this?

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Consider what’s currently happening in Pennsylvania. Having watched the clown show of an “audit” of the 2020 results Republicans conducted in Arizona, the GOP-controlled Pennsylvania state legislature decided that they ought to go down the same road.

But, in this case, the legislature is issuing sweeping subpoenas for information on the state’s voters. As The Post reports:

Among other requests, Republicans are seeking the names, dates of birth, driver’s license numbers, last four digits of Social Security numbers, addresses and methods of voting for millions of people who cast ballots in the May primary and the November general election.

With that personal information in the hands of a bunch of Republican state legislators determined to promote conspiracy theories and pay tribute to their leader Donald Trump, what could go wrong?

Joking aside, this shows the mania is only deepening. And it won’t be long until the results of this “investigation” are released. That will give Trump-loyal Republicans and right-wing media a whole bevy of fake new “evidence” to wield “proving” the election was stolen from Trump.

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Meanwhile, on another front, the leaders of the select committee examining the events of Jan. 6 announced Thursday that new revelations involving Gen. Mark A. Milley will be a “crucial area of focus” in its investigation.

Those revelations concern the news — reported in the new book by Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa — that Milley, the Joint Chiefs chairman, convened top military officials after Jan. 6. He instructed them to confirm that they understood procedure for launching military action, apparently fearing Trump would go “rogue.”

According to the select committee’s announcement, its investigation will examine actions “between January 6th and January 20th, 2021.” That will likely include whether Milley and other officials breached the chain of command, as it absolutely should.

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But it also likely means the committee will try to interview Milley, and perhaps other military officials, to flesh out just how alarmed they were about Trump’s potential designs. That indicates that the investigation will likely go very big indeed in its depiction of the urgency of democratic crisis we lived through.

Now note that Trump just issued a new statement declaring that the Jan. 6 rioters are being “persecuted" for their “protest” of the “Rigged Presidential Election.”

In coming months, the committee will dig deeply into not just the mob assault, but the events leading up to it and those that came after. That includes the role of Republicans themselves in promoting the “Stop the Steal” rally and the lies about the election, the conversations Trump had with Republicans about his intentions for Jan. 6, Trump’s efforts to manipulate the Justice Department and other agencies, and the profound alarm that set in at the highest levels of the government about what was happening.

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As this happens, the attacks on the proceedings by Trump and his media lackeys will grow more frantic and crazy. That will require more Republicans to cast those proceedings as nothing more than a partisan witch hunt, making a true national reckoning even harder.

Meanwhile, efforts such as the one in Pennsylvania will continue playing out in state after state.

In Wisconsin, the GOP legislature ordered an investigation into the 2020 results, an investigation that now employs at least one conspiracy-touting former Trump official. Trump continues to press Michigan Republicans to conduct yet another examination of the state’s results.

And the farcical Arizona “audit" hasn’t released its results yet — they were delayed when people from the company overseeing it contracted covid — but they will soon. They will surely be full of all manner of lurid lunacy.

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All those sham proceedings will generate huge stockpiles of new fake evidence for Trump and his propagandists, as they are designed to do. This stuff will flood conservative media, which will further convince their voters that our elections are irredeemably fraudulent. Even relatively sane Republican lawmakers will feel the pull of this vortex.

Republicans and right-wing media will grow more shrill in their resistance to accountability for Jan. 6. More GOP candidates will run openly on a vow to refuse to accept future election losses. GOP lawmakers will kill even modest reforms, such as tweaking the Electoral Count Act governing how Congress counts the electoral college votes, reinforcing reasonable suspicions that a GOP takeover of Congress will make a stolen 2024 election more likely.

In short, all this will get worse before it will get better. Democrats should think about this now, and prepare to meet the moment with the urgency and ambition in argument it calls for.