Texas Republicans abandon democracy

by Jim Powers
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The Texas Republican Party during their annual convention, passed a resolution.

"We reject the certified results of the 2020 presidential election, and we hold that acting President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was not legitimately elected by the people of the United States,"

Words matter, and the specific wording here is significant.

It is the “certified results” of the election they reject. Which would indicate a belief that the entire democratic process of voting was fraudulent in the 2020 election. And that, of course, has been the contention of the Republican Party since before the election, that huge numbers of people voted illegally, that the voting machines were rigged, that the people counting the votes were corrupt, and that the national process of certification of the results was illegitimate. If you are unwilling to accept the certified results of an election because your guy lost, then you have given up on democracy. You think this resolution would have been presented had Trump won?

But the resolution attempts to narrow the scope of their rejection by including the words “presidential election.” If there was fraud in the presidential election, there was fraud up and down the ballot, in all states, because it was the same ballot, entered into the same machines and counted by the same people. If there was fraud, then nobody on the ballot was “legitimately elected by the people of the United States.” They should all pack up their offices and go home.

I’m left wandering what form of government Texas Republicans would prefer? Theocracy, autocracy, plutocracy? Perhaps an autocratic head of the country appointed by corporations and billionaires.

How is it that a democratic election process that has worked for us throughout most of our history suddenly failed when Donald Trump lost an election? And that would have been deemed the most successful in history had he won?

We critically need to answer those questions of we are to avoid the collapse of our republic.