Kim Thatcher, former candidate for Oregon Secretary of State, urged Oregon join the Texas lawsuit to void the presidential election results in four battleground states.
She is a disappointment. She had a chance to be special.
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| Thatcher |
We can learn from her decision and heed the warning. It sets a new standard for America's democracy: Better to overturn an election than let voters remove a president.
Trump supporters have been whipsawed by the intersection of Trump's tweets, his accusations of fraud and a stolen election, facts, and lawsuits. Trump has been criticizing absentee voting and voting-by-mail for over a year. He warned us in advance that unless he won, the election would be fraudulent and that he would not accept the results. He lost.
Going into the election, Republican voters accepted Trump's premise that mail-voting would be fraudulent. They still do. A Fox poll found 77% of Trump voters think Trump actually won the election. A CBS/YouGov poll released Sunday found similar results; 82% of Trump voters do not consider Biden the legitimate winner. Click: CBS/YouGov
Trump floated and sold an idea, and it stuck. As this blog noted, Trump can sell. He seems to believe what he says, he says things forcefully, and he is selling what his voters want to buy. He claims total, obvious, landslide victory. He says there was massive fraud, with stolen and forged ballots, vote-switching software, and voting by dead people and non-citizens. The fact that all this was denied by Trump's own appointed election security chief, by election officials in multiple states, by Republican partisans who supervised elections, and by multiple courts including those with judges appointed by Trump himself, does not appear to change GOP voters' minds. People believe.
Republican politicians with political ambitions need to deal with that reality. It is an opportunity to lead, or to go along. Politicians make their choices.
Kim Thatcher is an incumbent Oregon State Senator representing the Keizer area near Salem. She was the Republican candidate for Secretary of State, the position which oversees elections in Oregon. Oregon has voted by mail for decades.
Kim Thatcher lost her bid to be Oregon Secretary of State, but her campaign drew support from a broad group of Republican leaders and donors. She ran slightly ahead of President Trump in the balloting, both in my area of politically purple Southern Oregon and statewide in blue Oregon.
Before the election I requested both Thatcher and her Democratic opponent, Shemia Fagan, tell me if they supported Oregon's universal-mail-voting system and whether they agreed with Trump's pre-election condemnation of mail-in voting.
This blog wrote that Thatcher in particular could play a significant role in thought leadership nationally. As a Republican running to be the chief supervisor of elections in a state that voted by mail, she could defend her state's system in the face of Trump's blanket criticism--or not. Either way, her perspective had standing and consequence.
Her answer before the election was a muddled non-answer, neither defending Oregon and mail voting nor overtly agreeing with Trump. She gave qualified support--"pretty good"--of Oregon's system and then said that other states might have trouble carrying out proper elections. "Here in Oregon, our system has been pretty good in the past 20 years with a very low rate of fraud. Oregon has a lot of safeguards in place that other states may not necessarily have." Click: Full statement
Thatcher re-entered the news last week because she was one of twelve Oregon Republican legislators who urged Oregon to sign onto a suit to overturn elections in four states, and instead to allow the legislatures to select electors for Trump, contrary to the election results. This lawsuit was an audacious new step: Voiding millions of votes and reversing a presidential election. It is only politically plausible in the context of widespread doubt among Trump supporters that the election was, in fact, fraudulent and stolen, even if there is no apparent evidence of that. There was an excuse. Maybe Republicans aren't stealing an election. Maybe we are just stealing it back and making things right.
The Texas lawsuit asserted that election changes approved by election officials and state courts, but which had not been approved by the legislatures, made the elections invalid. The voting may have gone smoothly but that is irrelevant; voters there were voting in vain. The remedy was to void the elections and allow Republican legislators to cast the electoral votes.
It is an astonishing assertion both legally and politically. Legally it was struck down promptly. Politically, for Thatcher and the eleven other Oregon legislators who signed the letter urging Oregon join Texas, it openly acknowledged that it was better to reverse an election than accept a disappointing result. It demonstrates the state of affairs within GOP voters' thinking. Even a politician who ran to be the top election official in a state can be on the side of voiding an election.
Some pundits and commentators are writing that America's institutions were up to the task of defending our democratic system because, in fact, some Republicans in the right places did their jobs faithfully, amid political pressure to buckle. The Supreme Court, too, denied the Trump request.
It could have gone the other way.
GOP politicians feel the political wind, and Thatcher's decision shows the direction and power of that wind. Ultimately, public opinion forms the government, and governments operate by the consent of the governed. Governments will do what the people want to see done. If they don't really respect elections, neither will the politicians. But the people can be led if leaders step up.
We observe how some key politicians respond at the critical hour. Kim Thatcher, former candidate for Secretary of State, signed onto a dead-letter request that we join a suit arguing that state elections be voided, after the fact, to install a partisan choice, notwithstanding the majority vote.
Circumstances converged to allow Thatcher to make a statement of national consequence, one I said her candidacy as a Republican election official made possible; she made it.
5 comments:
Can a political system be designed that will thwart individuals with malicious intent?
This is what is meant by the American "experiment". In science, a hypothesis is tested for is accuracy and resistance to contrary results. A recent example is the Boeing 737Max. Despite state of the art engineering they couldn't fully test to simulate every real world situation. Our democracy is being tested in the same way. It's still a young and experiencing situations the founders couldn't imagine. It's a testimony to their skill that our system survived the attack from Republicans, a party that has become a cult whose only function is to extract money from its members, but it narrowly escaped a crash.
There's a great saying that goes "build the airplane while it's flying". We pulled up just in time, and the near disaster revealed dangerous flaws in the design that need to be addressed.
One thing is clear. We now know by their actions those who are cynically willing to subvert our system any way they can to hold on to power. This time it held; we may not be as fortunate next time if we allow this sabotage to continue.
Just as a technical note, the 737 Max did not crash because of a failure to foresee some situation. It failed because Boeing fucked up.
There were two airflow sensors available on the airplane which could have been used as input to the computer system that caused the crash. In some configurations of the 737 Max (the ones that crashed), Boeing chose to hook just one of them up to the system. On the planes that crashed, that one particular airflow sensor had been damaged or it malfunctioned.
They created a single point of failure, something which is to be avoided whenever possible in aircraft design.
They did this to save costs. The people who made that decision have blood on their hands.
Kim Thatcher has now proven that not only does she have the look, but also the dedication to facts, necessary to become a Fox News Commentator. Or better yet, Breitbart News or One America News Network. The world is her oyster.
Art Baden : It is so disheartening to know how right you are.
I feel like I'm reading the opinion section of the New York Times. You might consider being a CNN anchor with this level of insight.
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