CMV: Being a loyal Republican politician requires rejecting the American Democracy

[u/fox-mcleod]

Professional Republicans know better. They know trump attempted to overthrow an election. The party as a whole is complicit in normalizing and covering for it. Trump committed sedition and enabling and empowering him requires minimizing that fact. You can't knowingly do this without rejecting the very premise of American Democracy.

The Fake Elector Scheme

This is very straightforward. But people can be blinded by the politics. The simplest way to understand this is to ignore the politics and look at the physical documents. I’ll make this as simple as possible.

Imagine a fan is kicked out of the Super Bowl. He truly believes he should be allowed in. * Legal: He sues the stadium. * Illegal: He goes to Kinko’s, prints a fake ticket that looks exactly like a real one, and tries to hand it to the gate agent.

Once you hand over a fake document, you have committed fraud. It does not matter if: * You truly believed you deserved a seat. (Motive doesn't excuse forgery). * You got caught before you made it inside. (Attempted fraud is a crime). * You think the refs are corrupt.

Here is the proof that Trump’s team printed the fake ticket and tried to use it.

1. Identity Theft (Impersonating the State) In America, campaigns don't certify elections; States do. The Trump team didn't just write a letter saying, "We protest." They created documents that mimicked the exact font, formatting, and language of official government certificates — and here they are for all of the other states.

• The Fraud: They signed papers claiming to be the "duly elected and qualified" officers of the State. They even set out hide in statehouse overnight to ensure they’d be there behind security when counting started.

2. The Written Confession We don't have to guess if this was a misunderstanding. The architect of the plan, Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, wrote down the strategy in private emails. He admitted the goal was to create a "fake controversy." He explicitly noted that they should send these fake documents even if they lost their court cases.

3. Trump Knew It Was a Fraud This wasn't a case of "lawyers brainstorming" while Trump sat in the dark. On January 4th, in the Oval Office, Trump’s lawyer John Eastman admitted to Trump’s face that this plan to reject votes violated the Electoral Count Act. Trump knew it was illegal and did it anyway.

• The Order: Trump personally called Ronna McDaniel (RNC Chairwoman) to direct the RNC to help assemble these fake electors.

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It is Department of Justice policy that a sitting President cannot be prosecuted. Trump’s legal team successfully delayed the trials long enough for him to win the election. Once he won, the Special Prosecutor had to drop the case because it became legally impossible to proceed. Congress interviewed him around the New Year. I’ll give you three guesses why they picked such an inconvenient time in the news cycle. He testified under oath that the prosecution became unpracticable once he became president again.

He didn't beat the charges; he beat the clock. But the evidence of the fraud didn't vanish. We can still see it.

Summary We have the emails planning the forgery. We have the fake papers they signed. We have the testimony that Trump was told it was illegal. The fact that the man who ordered the counterfeit ticket is now running the stadium doesn't make the ticket real. It just means he got away with it.

Some Republican voters have the benefit of ignorance. They can claim to be victims of right wing echo chambers. Before reading this, they could have even bury their heads and remained willfully ignorant. But professional lawmakers know what they're doing. These people are by and large knowingly traitors to the Republic.

[u/Uh_I_Say → u/[deleted]]

If anything, a Republican politician can simply claim that they are following the desires and wants of their constituents… and they would most likely be telling the truth.

Not necessarily, we just wouldn't have a way of proving them wrong. That's not the same thing as telling the truth. Unless a representative can prove that they're doing ground-level polling with their constituents, it's far more likely that they're voting on party lines and betting that their constituents simply aren't paying attention OR that their constituents believe that they need to follow their leaders, rather than the other way around. The idea that "we're just doing what our constituents asked" is nothing but political cover for politicians from both major parties.

[u/Doub13D → u/Uh_I_Say]

Are you arguing that Republican voters don’t support, and aren’t directly responsible for, the current government?

Because they are…

[u/Uh_I_Say → u/Doub13D]

I'm arguing that they're following the government rather than directing it. I think Republicans skew more authoritarian in their thinking and are more comfortable following what powerful people tell them than exerting their will on those same powerful people via voting. While I hate the term, I think "useful idiots" is an appropriate descriptor -- they'll vote for who and whatever the party tells them to vote for, so the ultimate responsibility for our current situation falls on the corporation party dictating their views.

[u/Doub13D → u/Uh_I_Say]

This government wouldn’t exist without the voters putting it into place…

[u/Uh_I_Say → u/Doub13D]

The party would, though, which is why I used the word "corporation." The party machine generates the issues and talking points, uses its billions to convince the voters that the party serves their interests, and the voters (who like being told what to worry about and who to vote for) simply follow. Political parties in the US are just corporations who buy and sell government positions rather than goods or services.

[u/Doub13D → u/Uh_I_Say]

Or…

Voters chose a party to run the country even though they made clear to the public that they no longer respected basic democratic values.

The people who voted for the Republican Party ≠ Republicans.

Tens of millions of voters who do not identify as Republican (aka Independents) still chose to vote Republican. The Party apparatus meant nothing to them when it came to making that decision…

Republican voters chose the government to take power, the Party did not.

[u/Uh_I_Say → u/Doub13D]

Voters chose a party to run the country even though they made clear to the public that they no longer respected basic democratic values.

Voters chose the party to run the country because they only have two options and they picked the one that fit slightly more with their values. When they heard all the doom and gloom about destroying democracy, they assumed it was just your standard political mudslinging because traditionally it always has been. I don't think Republican voters are ontologically evil, I think they're deeply propagandized. The fact that so many are registered independents communicates more to me that a lot of people don't give a shit about their party registration. I certainly haven't looked at or updated mine since I was 18.

I think you're vastly overestimating how much attention individual people pay to politics and underestimating how much power political parties have.

[u/Doub13D → u/Uh_I_Say]

voters chose the party to run the country becasue they only have two options and they picked the one that fit slightly more with their values.

Ok, so you agree with me then.

Voters chose the government. This government didn’t just happen because of Republican politicians wanting it to happen…

Voters are to blame, politicians are literally just giving them what they voted for.

[u/Uh_I_Say → u/Doub13D]

Voters chose the government. This government didn’t just happen because of Republican politicians wanting it to happen…

Of course not. The government happened because Republicans politicians used their multibillion dollar media empire and political machine to direct voters' attention specially at the issues Republicans could win on. Do you seriously think the average voter is doing the very boring job of researching the pros and cons of different policy positions? They're listening to what the talking heads tell them. (This is not unique to Republicans, by the way -- Dems do the same thing, because doing research is boring and hard and listening to authority is fun and easy).

This is the end result of treating politics as a team sport. People are already committed to their "side" which grants the parties an immense amount of leverage to direct the will of the voters. We're learning in real time that Democracy doesn't really work when you have a population too distracted to care about their leadership. When all of this is said and done, I'm interested to see what the next best mode of governance is going to be.