45 keeps banging at the legal door, but there's no way in. There's no path he can create.
He wants to create confusion and run out the clock until January 20, when under intense pressure, the Supreme Court grants him another term because it can't tell who won the election. But he's failing. He's failing because he's run into an American institution that his party helped solidify: Elections.
Let's go back to 2000. Those are bad memories, especially for Democrats: The Mystery of the Hanging Chads. Al Gore had Florida won but only for the mistakes that thousands of Democrats voting there made, voting for the very undeserving Pat Buchanan instead.
Even Buchanan knew that it was ridiculous that he would get that many votes. But Republicans rushed right in, challenging the validity of the vote, especially after Gore was declared the winner, then George W. Bush, then nobody.
And off we went. Remember the Brooks Brothers Riot? That prevented the vote from being completed in Miami-Dade County. That alone might have clinched Florida, and its electoral votes, for Gore. It worked. Might became right. That was dangerous in a way no one could have foreseen.
Cut to December and we know what happened: The Supreme Court was called in and, in a "non-precedent setting" decision, as they put it, a mostly Republican appointed group said that the vote count could be allowed to go on for three more hours until being shut down and Bush being the winner by default. It had all the veneer of a coup d'etat.
The Republicans did a masterful job of playing for time. As the clock ran, Democrats knew their case was weakening. That the brother of the winning candidate just happened to be the governor of Florida didn't hurt, either.
45 is trying the same playbook. But the circumstances aren't the same this time. There are several states with results he's trying to contest, not just one. He's tried to debunk voting by mail, tried to cause a lack of confidence in the mail system by working the pandemic to his advantage (in a strategy that history will condemn forever), neither of which worked. He's tried seven times in court already, and gotten nowhere.
That's especially true in Pennsylvania. "It's sad and pathetic," said Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman, a fierce-looking fellow if I've ever seen one. "It's like putting sour milk in the refrigerator and checking back to see if it's good."
Why? Because of 2000. Florida was embarrassed by what happened. States saw that and adjusted. What state wants to look that goofed up? What Secretary of State of any state wants to be, or look, that incompetent? After all, that position is elected, too.
So, as what happens in crisis, they woke up. They tightened restrictions and modernized their processes. They saw gaps in proceedings and closed them.
Twenty years later, the states run a much tighter ship. You got a problem with the vote count? Bring it on. Tell us how corrupt we are. Go ahead. We have lawyers, too. And we have a process that we've worked five times since 2000.
45 got people to gather outside of vote counts to try the same thing as the Brooks Brothers Riot. But having been through that once was enough for any state so challenged. They were ready this time.
And I've heard two election directors, from Wisconsin and Georgia, say clearly and definitively: Our system is public. If you want to come in a watch us, no problem. We have nothing to hide.
(Oh, and--where are the Russians this time? Where are the Chinese and Iranians? Did they have any effects, enough effects? Why aren't we talking about that? Hmmmm???)
Nothing can restore public trust better than that. And we need some public trust nowadays because our president is so bent on destroying it for his purposes. I alone can fix, he said, which he wants you to apply to everything so you are dependent upon his every, lying word.
What's been happening is that, from a practice that has been circumvented and cheated upon many times in the past--we still don't know how many votes Kennedy got in Illinois in 1960, but probably not nearly as many as posted, but enough to win--the state-by-state voting system has been improved in the last twenty years, if only to cover the asses of those officials in charge of them.
That is a laudable goal of any government, to avoid screaming and being remembered negatively when it comes their turn to stand in front of the voters once again. That's how it's supposed to work.
So when a rogue like 45 figures that there must be some way through to create a path to get the consideration of the Supreme Court, one-third of which he has appointed (and which he expects payback now, though he'll never say it), he's finding path after path legally blocked. There aren't enough weaknesses anymore. He could manipulate the reaction to the pandemic because the states weren't prepared for it, but this is another item altogether.
Besides, he also must find a way for a court to rule that he's won enough votes. He can't do it in Pennsylvania. He can't do it in Arizona. He can't do it in Nevada. It's because he hasn't, and it's all out there for the world to see.
He's going to try a recount in Wisconsin, he says, but he has to overcome a 20,000 vote deficit. Even Mr. F. Gow (most recent former governor of Wisconsin), no stranger to recounts, knows that it's extremely unlikely that he'll prevail there. Only a relatively few votes get moved around: 131 in 2016, as Jill Stein found out there. And, if things continue as they are, it will be futile even if he succeeds: ten electoral votes, whoopy ding! The Electoral College won't open up a back door for him this time.
He's tried to stop voting in one place and keep it going in another. There's no consistency. There's no overriding legal principle involved. There's just winning. That won't wash in voting practice, anywhere.
The states have been there, seen that. They went into this game several innings ahead of him. They had him scouted. He didn't think it was possible.
Willy-nilly, the states have established, through course correction, an institution that is increasingly impregnable. It's like rebuilding a fortress after it's been attacked; nobody's going to do it the same way. It's going to be better, stronger, tougher. It's going to withstand other attacks to the degree to which they can be anticipated. Argue though we might--Lord, yes, we do--about policy, the integrity of our elections is a great thing, still.
With it is finally a place we all can stand. The one thing that makes us secure as the members of a free society is the freedom to choose our leaders. When that freedom is diminished, so are we all (and it is diminished when people don't vote, so dearly I wish they would realize that).
That was the legacy of 2000, which came back to bite the Republicans. It has clearly been corrected--not perfectly, not all at once, but much better than twenty years ago. It feels solid.
It feels like something we deserve--all of us: those who think carefully before we vote, and those who don't. But at least they voted, in larger numbers than ever this time. And though the president, grifting as usual, tried to get us to lose confidence in the very thing that expresses our citizenship the best, we now know that he couldn't and can't. The mails worked, mostly (another institution that needs shoring up; you can bet Joe Biden will do so). The voting worked. We are damaged, but at least a little restored.
Democracy is messy and in a nation like this, painstakingly and so frustratingly slow partly because of our size, partly because of the decentralization upon which we insist. And of course, they're still counting the votes, partly because of the disastrously handled pandemic that finally sank the pirate ship of this awful president. I'm not feeling proud as much as relieved, but that's a place to start. A corrected process may have saved the republic--from ourselves.
Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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