‘An Indelible Stain’: How the G.O.P. Tried to Topple a Pillar of Democracy

Jim Rutenberg and Nick Corasaniti, reporting for The New York Times:

The Supreme Court repudiation of President Trump’s desperate bid for a second term not only shredded his effort to overturn the will of voters: It also was a blunt rebuke to Republican leaders in Congress and the states who were willing to damage American democracy by embracing a partisan power grab over a free and fair election.

The court’s decision on Friday night, an inflection point after weeks of legal flailing by Mr. Trump and ahead of the Electoral College vote for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Monday, leaves the president’s party in an extraordinary position. Through their explicit endorsements or complicity of silence, much of the G.O.P. leadership now shares responsibility for the quixotic attempt to ignore the nation’s founding principles and engineer a different verdict from the one voters cast in November. […]

And it meant that Republican leaders now stand for a new notion: that the final decisions of voters can be challenged without a basis in fact if the results are not to the liking of the losing side, running counter to decades of work by the United States to convince developing nations that peaceful transfers of power are key to any freely elected government’s credibility.

It takes your breath away.

Josh Marshall: “Accepting the results of free and fair elections is now prima facie evidence of not being a Republican or lacking the willingness to fight which is required of Republicans. […] This isn’t a disagreement about voter fraud. It’s a general retreat from democracy by an entire political party.”

★ Saturday, 12 December 2020