All 50 states and the District of Columbia have certified their votes and named slates of electors. As members of the Electoral College, those electors will meet today in their respective states to formally cast their ballots for President and Vice President — the next step in the process of finalizing Biden’s victory. Each of the state’s top election official will then send those ballots to Washington, where Congress will count them on January 6. Once that happens, Biden will be inaugurated as the 46th President on January 20 at noon. Sadly, however, I believe Donald Trump will continue to cry about the 2020 presidential election being stolen from him until his dying day. Just because we elected Joe Biden as President doesn’t mean we are rid of the cancer that is Trumpism and Donald Trump.

Paul Waldman wrote an editorial recently in the Washington Post in which he asked, “If you were dropped in from another country without knowing anything about the United States and surveyed our current political moment, what would you conclude about the Republican Party and the broader conservative movement it represents? As 2020 comes to an end, what is conservatism about?” On a side note, this question reminds me of an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine titled “Little Green Men.” In the episode, a temporal anomaly sends Quark, Rom, and Nog to 1947 Earth, where they are held prisoner in Roswell, New Mexico. The episode is an interesting look at what an outsider would have seen if they found themselves on a military base in the United States at the beginning of the Cold War. If Ferengis landed in the United States today, they would probably love the idea of a Donald Trump presidency because Trump represents the worst of Ferengi society. The Ferengi civilization centered around the concept of greed and earning profit and was built on free enterprise, in which earning profit was the sole meaningful goal in life, superseding all other endeavors no matter the cost to others.

Putting my Trekkie geekiness aside, let’s get back to Waldman’s question. During the nearly four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, no misdeed has been deemed too vulgar or corrupt for conservatives to defend. Now the Trumpists are waging outright war against democracy itself. You might be tempted to answer the above question with “Nothing.” I have said this numerous times, the Republican Party barely exists today and has been replaced by the delusional ideology of Trumpism built solely upon greed and hatred. Before the rise of the Tea Party, the Freedom Caucus, and Donald Trump, a Republican running for any office from dogcatcher all the way up to President would respond when asked what it meant to be a conservative by saying some version of the same four ideas: small government, low taxes, a strong military, and traditional social values.

While conservatives still believe in those principles, no one today could seriously argue that they are any longer the primary goals of the Republican Party. Instead, the one thing that unites the right and drives the Republican Party is hatred, especially of liberals. For years now, Republicans, and some Democrats, have not run on what they believe but what they hate. Negative partisanship — being more motivated by your dislike of the other party than by affection for your own — has consumed American politics. Republican hatred has consumed every policy goal, every ideological principle, and their commitment to this country. The difference between Republican hatred and Democratic hatred is that Democrats hate inequality and discrimination. In contrast, the Republican Party hates anyone that doesn’t fit their idea of a homogenous American society (i.e., white Christian superiority). Democrats believe in fundamental fairness; Republicans do not. 

Republicans have now turned their hatred of liberals into the hatred of democracy, the Constitution, and decency. When 18 Republican state attorneys general, more than half of House Republicans, and multiple conservative organizations all demand that the results of a presidential election where no fraud was found be simply tossed aside so that Trump can be declared the winner, something more profound has been revealed. The Republican Party has proved that its hatred of liberals is so foundational that it will abandon any pretense of commitment to democracy if democracy allows for the possibility that liberals might win an election. They have come to regard Democratic voters as essentially undeserving of having their will translated into power, no matter how large their numbers. This hatred of democracy for all may not be new to the Republican Party, but now, they’re willing to proclaim it even after they lost a presidential election by 7 million votes and a 306-232 electoral college margin. Forget all that inspiring talk about the genius of the Framers and their vision for democracy; if having an election means that the people Republicans hate might win, then the election must simply be nullified.

Everyone probably knows by now that the Texas Attorney General tried to have the Supreme Court throw out the election results — which the justices rejected Friday evening. However, we can’t get complacent and believe it was the final blow to Trump’s attack against democracy. It is not a matter of all’s well that ends well. What was alarming about the Texas effort was that it gained the support of so many others. Seventeen of 26 Republican state attorneys general. Nearly two-thirds of House Republicans, including the minority leader, Kevin McCarthy (Calif.). Every one of these individuals has forfeited any claim to believe in anything but fealty to Trump and their own political self-interest. (Who were these men and women who signed legal briefs supporting treason? Click “Read More” at the end of the post to see all of the names.) Because nothing could be less conservative, less consistent with supposed Republican principles, than urging a court to overturn a democratic election. For decades, Republicans have condemned what they saw as activist judges, but now, they are begging judges across the country and even the Supreme Court to become activist judges if it gets them what they want. Nothing could be less consistent with conservative principles than contending that one state should be able to instruct another about how to conduct its elections — or that federal judges should referee such claims. 

You might think that the Republicans signing on to a profoundly anti-American crusade against democracy are doing so out of fear as much as conviction, but the two are not mutually exclusive. All elected officials worry about contradicting their base, but in today’s Republican Party, that worry is almost wholly divorced from policy. Yes, you’d get flak if you voted to raise taxes, but the greatest danger comes from failing to fight the left with sufficient vigor. Horrifyingly, that danger is not only electoral but physical. The Republican leader in the Pennsylvania state Senate said she was told that if she refused to sign a letter demanding that Congress toss out her state’s votes in the presidential race, “I’d get my house bombed tonight.” It might not actually happen, but the point is that Republican officeholders understand well what their party values above all else and what kinds of transgressions will not be tolerated.

Trump has often cited the extraordinary loyalty he has received from his party’s voters; it’s one of the few things he says that’s true. But it isn’t because of Trump’s conservative policies and actions. If you ask a typical Trump supporter what they love about him, they don’t mention some substantive policy position (though some will say he is anti-abortion, but I think that’s because they are ashamed of their homophobic and racist reasons). They will usually answer that he is a fighter. The petty squabbles, the insulting tweets, the deranged conspiracy theories — the things that the Never Trumpers and most other Americans find repulsive and offensive are exactly what endears him to the Republican base, which speaks volumes about their character and morality. Trump fights angrily, bitterly, and endlessly because he is driven forward by his hatred of the people his supporters hate and the adoration he receives from their support. That’s what the base loves, and every other Republican knows it.

The fundamental Republican rhetoric for the 2020 campaign, starting with Trump but going all the way down the ballot, was that if Democrats were elected, then it would not be bad or even terrible, but apocalyptic and the end of everything you cherish. Towns and cities would burn, religion would be outlawed, America as we know it would cease to exist. These horrors were not presented as metaphors but as the literal truth, and the voters ate it up. In the face of that potential apocalypse, who could possibly care about mundane policy goals? The importance of everything else pales next to the urgency of stopping the cataclysm that would engulf us all if Democrats were to hold power. I received a call from my mother a few months back saying almost this exact thing. The Republican Party and the conservative movement are all about hatred today, and it might take a long time for them to change. 

With all of the lawsuits and attempts to overturn the election, Republicans have gone beyond the indulge-the-toddler-while-he-cries-it-out phase of this election debacle to a dangerous new stage: Incentivize the toddler. Reward his bad behavior. Encourage his belief, as poisonous to democracy as it is delusional, that the election was stolen. Republicans are laying the groundwork for a contentious new phase in American democracy.

Even when all of their tactics fail and Joe Biden is sworn in as the 46th President, they will move on to another phase of legal and political guerrilla warfare in which no tactic, no lie, no baseless claim is off-limits. Democracy cannot function this way.

Article II, Section 1, Clause 4 of the Constitution authorizes Congress to fix the day on which the electors shall vote and states that electors must meet the same day throughout the United States. Congress designated the date of the electors meeting in the 1936 passage of United States Code: Title 3, Section 7 [3 USC 7] which states, “The Electors of President and Vice President of each State shall meet and give their votes on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December next following their appointment.” The date of the Electors’ meeting for the 2020 Presidential election is set for this Monday, January 14, 2020. On Wednesday, West Virginia became the final of the 50 states and the District of Columbia to certify their presidential results. While the results of the election should be a foregone conclusion to any sane person in the United States, the President, his followers (including the attorneys general in 18 states), and Republicans in Congress have refused to accept a legitimate and legally conducted election of Joe Biden as President of the United States. For more than four years now, the Republican Party has descended into madness. It began long before, but the deterioration of their collective mental capacity has increased since the party chose Donald Trump as the Republican nominee for President in 2016.

The states’ certifications come as Trump has baselessly claimed that the election was rigged and sowed doubt about the outcome of the presidential race. Dozens of lawsuits challenging the results have been dismissed at the state and federal levels across the country since the November election. Now, these nutjobs have turned to the Supreme Court to beg it to hear their outrageous claims. There is no precedent or legal recourse for the Texas AG to file a suit with SCOTUS against other states for how they conducted their election. In no way does how other states handled their elections cause any harm to the State of Texas or any other state. Nowhere in the Constitution says that any state has the right to determine what another state does in their elections, especially when lawfully enacted by their state legislatures. States suing one another has in the past always been about border disputes, water rights, or interstate commerce. None of these apply to an election. While I doubt SCOTUS will accept the Texas AG’s case, we still have to wait. Article III of the Constitution does grant SCOTUS original jurisdiction over a narrow range of cases, specifically “all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party.” However, SCOTUS has set precedent in the past that they do not have to accept cases where they hold original jurisdiction. Most legal scholars believe that the Texas AG’s lawsuit has no merit, and SCOTUS will refuse to consider it.

What worries me is not the casting of the electoral votes on Monday but the counting of the Electoral College votes on January 6, 2021. If a Senator and a Representative sign an objection to the votes cast by a state’s electors, then the joint session must be adjourned so the Senate can return to their chamber to debate the objection. The House will remain and hold a debate in their chamber (the counting of the electoral votes always occurs in the House chamber). The House and Senate have up to two hours to debate before they vote separately to accept or reject the objection. Once the vote has been cast, the Senators return to the House chamber, and the joint session will resume. The good thing is that BOTH the House and Senate must agree to accept the objection and throw out the election results. This is unlikely as the Democratically controlled House will not vote to throw out any election results. However, this process must be done as soon as an objection with the two required signatures is made. The counting of votes cannot continue until a debate and vote is completed and must be done each time there is an objection with the required signatures is submitted. 

What worries me is how much time this will take if the process is repeatedly done. It could delay the certification of the electoral votes by Congress for days. At the most, it could likely take 6-7 days if Republicans object only to the electoral votes by the states Biden won, and the Joint Session only meets for 8 hours a day. The length of time Congress would meet, I believe, would be controlled by Vice President Mike Pence, who is statutorily required to chair the Joint Session, unless he passes that responsibility to Pro Tempore of the Senate, Chuck Grassley (R-IA). If Republicans somehow stupidly did delay the count until after noon January 20, according to the Electoral Counting Act, the Speaker of the House would be sworn in as Interim President at noon on Inauguration Day when Trump’s term officially ends. She would serve as Interim President until the election is certified by Congress. Sadly, this would likely mean that Nancy Pelosi would have to resign to become Interim President. As far as I know, there is no option for her to refuse and pass it on to Grassley, who is next in the line of succession. If Pelosi is required to resign to become Interim President, the California Governor cannot just appoint her back to her seat. Members of the House of Representatives must be filled through an election, not appointment like Senators can be, so she would have to win a special election for her to return to her seat in the House. Whether she could return as Speaker of the House is a question of procedure for which I don’t know the answer. 

All of this sounds like mere speculation, but a delay in the Electoral College count process is a very real possibility. Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) is already trying to frighten the more than 80 million Americans who voted for President-elect Joe Biden into thinking that there is a chance he and other Republicans in Congress could overturn the 2020 election results. To this end, Brooks has stated that he’s planning to challenge the Electoral College votes when Congress reviews them on January 6. As Brooks put it (without any evidence): “This election was stolen by the socialists engaging in extraordinary voter fraud and election theft measures.” Brooks also shared he’s actively seeking to recruit additional Republican members of Congress to join his efforts to prevent Biden from becoming the 46th president because, as he sees it, “Donald Trump won the Electoral College by a significant margin.” Even if he follows through with his threat, it won’t matter. It will only delay the inevitable.

Joe Biden will receive his projected 306 electoral votes on Monday to secure his election victory when the electors meet in their respective states. He will have well over the 270 required to become the next President. Those votes will be counted in a Joint Session of Congress. While Brooks’s objection may be an interesting (and potentially frightening) constitutional thought experiment, in reality, it doesn’t matter. No Republican Senator signaled any enthusiasm for Brooks’ plan. In fact, they have been downright dismissive of it. However, if Trump starts lobbying Republican Senators, that could change. We all know there are crazy, idiotic, stupid, Trumpist Senators who could join in and sign an objection along with Brooks. The Alabama Congressman may very well be able to enlist one Republican Senator—or even more than one—to sign his objection on January 6, given that such grandstanding will ingratiate Republicans with Trump’s base. This will likely cause a delay of hours or maybe days if they continue their stupidity long enough. But that’s all it will be — one final delay. 

All of the grandstanding and claims of election fraud is dangerous to the United States’ democratic institutions. I am tired of this stupidity that has gripped the U.S. and the Republican Party. The Republican Party has only one chance to redeem itself in any way, and that chance is quickly slipping through their fingers as they continue to humor Donald Trump’s delusions. There is no doubt this election will go down in history as one of the most fucked up ever. Even the election of 1876 did not see this much stupidity from a losing side, and that election was the reason Congress passed the Electoral Counting Act in the first place. Regardless of the attempted delays the Republicans may try, come Inauguration Day, Trump will be yelling at TV screens in Mar-a-Lago, and Joe Biden will be sitting behind the Resolute Desk (after the White House is fumigated and disinfected first).