The GOP is pre-litigating 2022. And 2024.

The big idea

The GOP is pre-litigating 2022. And 2024.

(Washington Post illustration, iStock)

The best way to understand the aggressive Republican push to cast doubt on the 2020 election results and rewrite voting procedures in states the GOP controls is not as re-litigating President Biden’s victory, though that is a tool for trying to undermine him.

Instead, it’s better understood as pre-litigating 2022 and 2024: Laying the foundation for challenging or even overturning Democratic victories of the lowercase “d” democratic variety in the future. 

Yes, I know that this has been blindingly obvious for some time. (Also, I offer my apologies to all of my English teachers for “pre-litigating.” I blame years of covering State of the Union “preactions.”)

CONSIDER WHAT WE'VE LEARNED

But consider what we’ve learned — though “confirmed” might be a better word — over the past week about former president Donald Trump’s avalanche of false claims he was cheated out of a second term. And consider he’s flirting with running again and has been repeating this nonsense at campaign-style rallies.

First, Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and — hardly “Never Trump” politicians — personally investigated the Trump camp’s claims of widespread irregularities and found nothing to deter them from voting to certify Biden’s victory.

 

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As my colleague Isaac Stanley-Becker wrote last week:

“The episode illustrates how strenuously the president’s legal team sought to nullify the results of the election; how flimsy even their more serious claims were; and what little stock the president’s own allies placed in his objections, even as they stood steadfastly with their standard-bearer.”

Second, it wasn’t just his “allies” who found the accusations illegitimate. Trump’s campaign had determined shortly after the election that many of the loudest false claims of fraud were, well, false.

At the New York Times, Alan Feuer reported:

“Even at the time, many political observers and voters, Democratic and Republican alike, dismissed the efforts by Ms. [Sydney] Powell and other pro-Trump lawyers like Rudolph W. Giuliani as a wild, last-ditch attempt to appease a defeated president in denial of his loss. But the false theories they spread quickly gained currency in the conservative media and endure nearly a year later.”

“It is unclear if Mr. Trump knew about or saw the memo; still, the documents suggest that his campaign’s communications staff remained silent about what it knew of the claims against Dominion at a moment when the allegations were circulating freely.”

Third, the ultra-partisan reexamination of voting results in Maricopa County, Ariz., failed to generate credible claims of irregularities, much less fraud. If you’re dying for a point-by-point rebuttal of the “anomalies” that the authors of that effort claimed to have turned up, my colleague Philip Bump played tour guide here. Maricopa County itself has been addressing various claims on Twitter here, and on JustTheFacts.vote.

My colleague Rosalind S. Helderman reported:

“In a letter describing the findings, Senate President Karen Fann (R) — who commissioned the process — stressed the importance of the ballot count showing Biden’s winning margin and noted that it ‘matches Maricopa County’s official machine count.’

‘This is the most important and encouraging finding of the audit,” she wrote, adding: ‘This finding therefore addresses the sharpest concerns about the integrity of the certified results in the 2020 general election.’”

 

Fourth, well, let’s let CNN’s Jamie Gangel and Jeremy Herb tell the story. They reported last week how, shortly before the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, a conservative lawyer working with “Trump's legal team tried to convince then-Vice President Mike Pence that he could overturn the election results on January 6 when Congress counted the Electoral College votes by throwing out electors from seven states, according to the new book "Peril" from Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.”

“The scheme put forward by controversial lawyer John Eastman was outlined in a two-page memo obtained by the authors for ‘Peril’" and which was subsequently obtained by CNN. The memo, which has not previously been made public, provides new detail showing how Trump and his team tried to persuade Pence to subvert the Constitution and throw out the election results on January 6.”

Fifth, as my colleague Amy Gardner reported, the GOP response to the Arizona experiment has not been second thoughts about similar efforts in Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin. Quite the opposite.

“While no evidence of widespread fraud has emerged, they have pushed forward at a potential cost of millions in taxpayer dollars — and the risk of further eroding public confidence in U.S. elections, particularly among their own voters.”

(Amy reported in March how Republicans are trying to take more control over the process of certifying election results, “efforts that voting advocates decried as a blatant attempt to circumvent the popular vote, as President Donald Trump tried to do after his defeat in November.”)

But the point of what Trump supporters called an “audit” was to feed doubts about the election, doubts that have firmly taken root among Republicans, 59 percent of whom say believing Trump won in 2020 is very, or somewhat, important to what it means to be a Republican, according to a CNN poll.

Or, as Trump put it at a July rally in Arizona: “There is no way they win elections without cheating. There’s no way.”

He wasn’t talking about 2020.