Trump's Attempted Coup Just a Repeat of Bush's Stolen Election Playbook
from 2000
Democrats and others are swallowing their tongues,
expressing outrage and demanding that legislators who voted to challenge the results
of the presidential election should resign or be removed from office. Why?
Trump was just reprising,
unsuccessfully, what Bush did in 2000 when neither the Republicans nor the
Democrats accepted the results of the election.
Bush got the Supreme Court to intervene to change
Florida's rules for resolving disputed elections. In 2020, Justices Clarence
Thomas and Samuel Alito again wanted to get involved, but Chief Justice John
Roberts is not the late Justice William Rehnquist. The court refused to involve
itself in the disputed presidential election like it should have done two
decades ago.
In 2000, Republican
congressional staff members converged in a mob on county Boards of Elections to
thwart the counting and recounting of votes. In 2020, Trump mobilized his
supporters to come to the Capitol to protest the counting of the electoral
votes.
Trump, who lost the election,
was modeling the behavior Al Gore should have followed to secure the victory
that the American people gave him. Gore did not have to accept the illegitimate
intervention of the Supreme Court. He could have forced people to pay attention
to the actual results, the butterfly ballot in Palm Beach County with the
thousands of Gore votes that were tallied for Buchanan, the old broken voting
machines deliberately concentrated in the black districts of Duval County that
disenfranchised 16,000 voters, the failure of Governor Jeb Bush to order a
re-examination of all the ballots, including the 120,000 overvotes, that would
have conclusively proved that Gore carried Florida. Then Gore could have
lobbied, if necessary, for four electors to switch their votes.
Thirteen
members of the House of Representatives challenged the Florida electoral vote,
mostly members of the Congressional Black Caucus: Rep. Alcee Hastings, Rep.
Carrie Meek, Rep. Corrine Brown, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, Rep. Elijah
Cummings, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, Rep. Maxine Waters, Rep. Barbara Lee, Rep.
Cynthia McKinney, Rep. Patsy Mink, Rep. Eva Clayton, Rep. Bob Filner, and Rep.
Jesse Jackson, Jr. Of the thirteen, eleven were black, one was Asian, one was
white and nine were women. But not a single senator would support the
challenge. There wasn't a single black senator after Carol Moseley Braun was
defeated for re-election in 1998. No one
in the Senate, not even newly-elected Senator Hillary Clinton, nor old-timers
like Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, John McCain, Joe Biden, Patrick Leahy, the Democratic
Vice-Presidential nominee Joe Lieberman or Republicans Susan Collins, Mitch McConnell,
Chuck Grassley and John McCain would support the House challenge. In 2000, the
Democrats and Al Gore caved-in like a house of cards.
The Democratic outrage at
Trump's behavior reminds me of other clearly hypocritical conduct. The
Democrats launched the war in Vietnam, yet, once Nixon came to power, they
acted like Nixon had started the war and that they hadn't voted for the Gulf of
Tonkin Resolution and passed war budget after war budget.
In 2016, when F.B.I. Director James Comey resurfaced Hillary
Clinton's email server issue ten days before the election, violating the
informal understanding that the security services should not take actions that
might influence elections; democrats were justifiably outraged. Yet, four
months later, when President Trump fired Comey, the Democrats acted like Trump
had committed a crime against humanity. Comey was a bum in October, and he was
still a bum in March.
The truth is that Donald Trump in 2020 showed how Al Gore
should have behaved in 2000. The fact that there wasn't a single Senator to
challenge the 2000 electoral vote is an enduring stain on the Democratic party
and another reason that Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and John McCain lost.
Even though Trump, like Bush, lost the election, the former
can't be faulted for trying to get the Supreme Court to intervene and hand him
the White House. The difference is that in 2020 Biden decided to wait a few
days while the votes were being tabulated instead of imitating Gore by rushing
to concede the election while millions of votes had yet to be counted.
President Carter conceded before all the polls had even closed.
Another difference is that Trump
didn't have a father who was a former president and former head of the Central
Intelligence Agency, an organization with a long history of overthrowing
democratically elected governments.