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But since prediction is often just an expression of desire, Ill tell you what I want to happen. Even though the party richly deserved some sort of punishment, I didnt want the G.O.P. to be destroyed by its affiliation with Trump, because Im one of those Americans who dont want to be ruled by liberalism in its current incarnation, let alone whatever form is slowly being born. But now that the party has survived four years of Trumpism without handing the Democrats a congressional supermajority, and now that Amy Coney Barrett is on the Supreme Court and Joe Manchin, Susan Collins and Mitt Romney will hold real power in the Senate, whatever happens in Georgia well, now I do want Perdue and Kelly Loeffler to lose these races, mostly because I dont want the Republican Party to be permanently ruled by Donald J. Trump.

Obviously, a runoff-day defeat wont by itself prevent Trump from winning the partys nomination four years hence or bestriding its internal culture in the meantime. (Indeed, for some of his supporters it would probably confirm their belief that the presidential election was stolen because look, the Democrats did it twice!) But the sense that there is a real political cost to slavishly endorsing not just Trump but also his fantasy politics, his narrative of stolen victory, seems a necessary precondition for the separation that elected Republicans need to seek working carefully, like a bomb-dismantling team between their position and the soon-to-be-former presidents, if they dont want him to just claim the leadership of their party by default.

That kind of Trump-forever future is what Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz and others are making possible, with their ambitious pandering. Hawley and Cruz both want to be Trumps heir apparent (as though he doesnt already have several in his family), but the deeper they go into the Trumpian dreampolitik, the more they build up the voter-fraud mythos, the more likely it becomes that theyll just be stuck serving him for four more years or longer.

So there needs to be some counterpressure, some sense that dreampolitik has costs. And defeat for two Republicans who have cynically gone along with the presidents stolen-election narrative, to the point of attacking their own states Republican-run electoral system, feels like a plausible place for the diminishment of Trump to start.

I dont think that diminishment is necessary to save the American republic from dictatorship, as many of Trumps critics have long imagined, and with increasing intensity the longer his election challenge has gone on. Whatever potentially crisis-inducing precedents Republican senators are establishing this month, the forces and institutions technological, judicial, military that could actually make America into some kind of autocracy are not aligned with right-wing populism, and less so with every passing day.

But Trumps diminishment is definitely necessary if the American right is ever going to be a force for something other than deeper decadence, deeper gridlock, fantasy politics and partisan battles that have nothing to do with the challenges the country really faces.

Or to distill the point: You dont have to see Trump as a Caesar to recognize his behavior this month as Nero-esque, playing a QAnon-grade fiddle while the pandemic burns. We imported at least one of the new variants of the coronavirus from overseas in the past few weeks like the pandemic itself, the kind of thing a populist-nationalist president is supposed to try to slam the door against but instead of shutting down flights from Britain or South Africa, hes been too busy pushing the stupidest election challenge in recorded history, while slipping ever-closer to blaming the lizard people for his defeat.

See the article here:
Opinion | Why I Hope the Republicans Lose in Georgia - The New York Times

On Wednesday, the Republicans transition to the party of the Confederacy will be complete. A day after Georgias runoff elections, at least a dozen lawmakers in the Senate and more than half of the partys House membership will seek to overturn the results of the 2020 election and disenfranchise the majority of US voters. A coup attempt in all but name, this is how democracy dies.

Sadly, a statement issued on Saturday by seven sitting senators and four senators-elect dispelled any doubts about the nexus between the end of the US civil war, more than 150 years ago, and Donald Trumps desperate attempt to cling to power. Predictably, Americas racial divide again stands front and center.

After regurgitating for the umpteenth time unproven and unsubstantiated charges of electoral fraud, the senators invoked the election of 1876. Back then, the Democrats contested the outcome, conceding after the Republicans agreed to halt Reconstruction.

As framed by Ted Cruz and his posse, the most direct precedent for their actions arose in 1877, following serious allegations of fraud and illegal conduct in the Hayes-Tilden presidential race. In their telling, elections in three states were alleged to have been conducted illegally. Left unsaid is that after the end of Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the toxic legacy of separate but equal followed.

To quote Mississippis William Faulkner, The past is never dead. Its not even past. Senators from states that were part of the Confederacy, or territory where slaveholding was legal, provide the ballast for Cruzs demands. At least one senator each from Alabama, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas is on board.

Apparently, Trumps defeat at the hands of Joe Biden, formerly vice-president to the first black man in the White House, and Kamala Harris, a black woman, is too much for too many to bear. Said differently, to these Republicans the right to vote is only for some of the people, some of the time those people being this presidents supporters.

Trumps equivocation over Charlottesville, his debate shoutout to the Proud Boys and his worship of dead Confederate generals are of the same piece. The vestiges of an older and crueler social order are to be maintained, at all costs.

Likewise, the reluctance of Trump appointees to the federal judiciary to affirm the validity of Brown v Board of Education, the supreme court ruling that said school segregation was unconstitutional, is a feature not a bug.

As for the Declaration of Independences pronouncement that All men are created equal, and the constitutions guaranty of equal protection under law, they are inconveniences to be discarded when confronted by dislocating demographics.

Stand back and stand by, indeed.

Since the civil war, there has always been a southern party, frequently echoing strains of the old, slave-owning south. Practically, that has meant hostility towards civil rights coupled with wariness towards modernity.

To be sure, southern did not automatically equal neo-Confederate, but the distinction could easily get lost. And to be sure, the Democrats were initially the party of the south. During debate over the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Republicans gave Lyndon Johnson the votes he needed. Not anymore.

Cruz and Josh Hawley, the Missouri senator who kicked off the attempt to deny the electoral college result, are the products of places like Harvard, Stanford and Yale. John C Calhoun, the seventh vice-president, argued in favor of slavery and the right of states to secede. He went to Yale too. Joseph Goebbels had a doctorate from Heidelberg. An elite degree does not confer wisdom automatically.

For the record, Cruz also clerked for a supreme court chief justice, William Rehnquist. Hawley did so for John Roberts.

On Sunday, as the new Congress was being sworn in, a recording emerged of Trump unsuccessfully browbeating Georgias secretary of state into finding 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. From the sound of things, Trumps fear of prosecutors and creditors, waiting for him to leave the White House, takes precedence over electoral integrity.

Back in May, after Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, predicted 240,000 deaths from Covid, and as armed protests to public health measures grew, an administration insider conveyed that Trumps America was becoming a bit like the late Weimar Republic. Eight months later, the death toll is past 350,000 and climbing unabated.

Come nightfall on 6 January, the party of Abraham Lincoln will be no more. Instead, the specters of Jim Crow and autocracy will flicker. Messrs Trump, Cruz and Hawley can take a collective bow.

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Trump's Republicans have dumped Lincoln they're the Confederacy now - The Guardian

But others have grown frustrated that Mr. Hawley thrust the party into a lose-lose choice, and that he has done little to explain his actions. When Republican senators convened a call on New Years Eve to discuss the looming certification process, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, twice called on Mr. Hawley to explain his views. The requests were met with silence; Mr. Hawley was not on the line, aides said, because of a scheduling conflict.

He still has not said which states he plans to object to. House Republicans are eyeing six Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. But Mr. Hawley has so far singled out only Pennsylvania, where he argues that a law loosening restrictions on mail-in voting violated the states Constitution.

Mr. McConnell had strenuously discouraged senators from joining the Houses objections, warning it could put Republicans in a tight spot, particularly difficult those up for re-election in 2022. Senator Roy Blunt, the senior senator from Mr. Hawleys state, is among them.

I think that if you have a plan, it should be a plan that has some chance of working, Mr. Blunt told reporters on Sunday, though an aide declined a request for an interview about Mr. Hawley.

In the face of Republican criticism, Mr. Hawley wrote to colleagues saying he would prefer to have a debate on the Senate floor for all of the American people to judge rather than by press release, conference call or email.

It is a position other senators might hesitate to put their colleagues in, but like Mr. Trump, Mr. Hawley prides himself on not playing by Washington conventions.

He often promotes his small-town upbringing in western Missouri, inveighing against coastal elites who he says used big business, technology and media to slowly marginalize working people. Though he holds deeply conservative views on abortion rights and other cultural issues, he speaks comfortably about the dignity of work and labor unions in language often used by the left. When the coronavirus pandemic began ravaging the economy last year, he pushed first for government-sponsored wage replacement, and later $2,000 direct payments to Americans, teaming up with Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont.

The rest is here:
Josh Hawley Puts Republican Party in a Bind With Objection to Biden's Win - The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re Will Trump Force Principled Conservatives to Start Their Own Party? I Hope So, by Thomas L. Friedman (column, Dec. 23):

Your column said it perfectly, Mr. Friedman. I left the Republican Party because of Donald Trump. I wouldnt vote for any of the Republicans who backed him to the end. But I cheered those who finally stood up to him and the awful things he keeps trying to do to our country for his own ego. It gave me faith in our countrys future.

Republicans need a new party sans anything Mr. Trump or his heirs (oh, please) and sans any cowardly Republican followers. Give me faith in my country again, please.

Barb HeinleinMalta, Mont.

To the Editor:

Mr. Friedman is living in that alternate universe where principled conservatives still reside. In this world, they have long gone the way of the dodo bird.

Donald Trump was the result, not the cause, of the disintegration of the Republican moral code. From the Southern strategy during the fight for passage of the Civil Rights Act to Barry Goldwaters overt racism, from Richard Nixons dirty tricks to Ronald Reagans welfare queens, from Newt Gingrichs mandate to treat Democrats as the enemy to Mitch McConnells pretzel-twisting logic to steal a seat on the Supreme Court, the six-decade trajectory of this party has been in only one direction.

Donald Trump was merely an accumulation of all the ills the Republican Party has long demonstrated. It is past time we waited for a different kind of Republican. Santa Claus and the Easter bunny are not real, Mr. Friedman. Neither is the kind of Republican you imagine.

Robert S. NussbaumGreat Barrington, Mass.

To the Editor:

Thomas L. Friedmans call for principled Republicans to break away and start their own conservative party in opposition to President Trump calls to mind what the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Richard Hofstadter once said: Third parties are like bees: Once they have stung, they die.

Thomas VinciguerraGarden City, N.Y.

To the Editor:

I concur with Thomas L. Friedmans assessment of the current state of the Republican Party. Post-Trump, it could split in two factions: principled Republicans versus unprincipled, i.e., Trumpist Republicans.

But I wish Mr. Friedman had gone one step further in his analysis to include the Democratic Party. Our democracy is certain to fail in this era of extreme polarization, doomed to produce only gridlocked dysfunction. The leaders of both parties are firmly ensconced in the establishment, comfortable with the status quo, their donor classes and Citizens United.

The progressive wing of the Democratic Party must also come to grips with this reality and push for a new principled progressive party. A democracy that must accommodate negotiations between multiple parties has a better chance at governance than our bipartisan dysfunctional one.

Manuel de LizarriturriPueblo, Colo.

To the Editor:

Im an independent conservative who is both as anti-Trump and anti-progressive Democrat as one can be. Therefore, Mr. Friedmans column about starting a new political party was music to my ears. Mr. Friedman, please send me an application.

Sander BelkinBellmore, N.Y.

To the Editor:

I wonder why we are still locked into two tribal parties when there are now more voters who are independents than in either of the parties. Isnt it again time to consider a new political party that isnt either conservative Republican or liberal Democrat? Why cant I be both a fiscal conservative and socially progressive? Why isnt there a political party committed to debating and voting on specific policies and issues, independent of political allegiance, and not stuck in the idolatry of ideologies?

Hugh M. McElyeaHowey-in-the-Hills, Fla.

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Opinion | A New Party for Principled Republicans? - The New York Times

Today, the sedition caucus includes at least 140 members of the Housethat is, some two-thirds of the House GOP membershipand at least 10 members of the Senate. Their challenge comes after weeks of insistence that the 2020 election was rigged, plagued by fraud, and even subverted by foreign powers. The president and his minions have filed, and lost, scores of lawsuits that ranged from minor disputes over process to childlike, error-filled briefs full of bizarre assertions.

Instead of threatening to gavel these objections into irrelevance, as Biden did four years ago, Vice President Mike Pence welcomes these challenges. Pences career is finished, but he could have stood for the Constitution he claims to love and which he swore to defend. However, cowardice is contagious, and no mask was thick enough to protect Pence from the pathogen of fear.

Perhaps the sedition caucus didnt mean to go this far. Its members began by arguing that we all just needed to humor President Trump, to give him time to process the loss, and to treat the president of the United States as a toddler who was going home empty-handed. He wouldnt be a dead-ender, they assured us, because that would be too humiliating. The Republican Party would never immolate itself for a proven loser.

But for Trump, there is no such thing as too much humiliation. The only shame in Trump world lies in admitting defeat. And so Trump doubled down, as anyone who had watched him for more than 10 minutes knew he would. And then he tripled, quadrupled, quintupled down. And just as they have done for the past four years, elected Republicans tried to convince themselves that if they supported this outrage, it would be the last time they would be required to surrender their dignity; that this betrayal of the Constitution would be the last treachery demanded of them. That if they complied one more time, they would be allowed to go back to their privileged lives far from the districts they claim to representplaces few of them really want to live after tasting life in the Emerald City.

It is possible that the sedition caucus knew that all these challenges would fail. It is possible that they know their last insult to American democracy, on Wednesday, will go nowhere, as well. This is irrelevant: Engaging in sedition for insincere reasons does not make it less hideous. Arguing that you betrayed the Constitution only as theater is no defense.

Indeed, shredding the Constitution purely for personal gain is perhaps the worst of the sins of the sedition caucus. It would almost be a relief to know that these Republicans really believe what theyre trying to sell, that they are genuine fanatics and ideologues who have at least paid us the respect of pitting their sincere beliefs against our own.

But we are, in the main, dealing with people who are far worse than true believers. The Republican Party is infested with craven opportunists, the kind of people who will try to tell us later that they were just asking questions, that they were defending the process, and of course, that they were merely representing the will of the people. Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz are not idiots. These are men who understand perfectly well what they are doing. Senator Mitt Romney sees it clearly, noting that his GOP colleagues are engaged in an egregious ploy to enhance political ambition.

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Worse Than Treason - The Atlantic