"You traitor! You traitor!

      "I’m not afraid Donald Trump is going to run again. I’m afraid he’s going to run again and lose. Because he’s going to do this again.”

U.S. Rep Ted Lieu

The 2020 election was nearly overthrown. A few Republican election officials in key places said their duty was to the law, not the GOP. They stopped the overthrow.

They are being censured, attacked, and removed. 

In the aftermath of the 2020 election the GOP did not learn the lesson that Trump-style governance is an electoral problem. He lost by over seven million votes, nationwide. The GOP learned the lesson that they almost won in states with the right electoral votes, and they don't need to win a majority of votes if they can get Republican election officials to put their thumb on the scales on behalf of the GOP presidential candidate in those key states.  

GOP voters are OK with it. In fact, they demand it. 

We got a head's up of the political consequence of playing it straight when the video went viral of Lindsay Graham being harassed in the airport as he returned home to South Carolina from D.C.  He had just voted in the Senate to certify the election. In the aftermath of the Capitol insurrection riots, only five U.S. senators voted to disallow electoral votes from states that voted for Biden. Graham voted to certify.

"You traitor! You traitor! You traitor! You're a traitor! . . . You garbage human being! It will be like this forever, wherever you go! . . . You fucking asshole. You piece of shit! You don't represent us anymore!"

Those are the kinds of words that go viral. The harassment worked.  Graham had briefly expressed shock that Trump had stirred up a crowd to go to the Capitol to stop the Congress. "I'm done," he said. He did not stay done. He got the message where the energy was. Graham got back onto the Trump train. He wanted to keep representing those people.

In hindsight the 2020 election hanged on the thinnest of threads. In Michigan, a four-person body, with two Democrats and two Republicans do a ministerial act of receiving the vote counts. Both Republican members were lobbied hard by Trump and other Republicans to refuse to accept the count. That would have thrown the election to the Republican-majority Michigan legislature to resolve the failed election. One of the two Republicans on that board refused to bow to that pressure. Michigan cast its votes for Biden. That election official, Aaron Van Langevelde, did his duty. He explained that the courts had determined there was no basis for failing to observe the vote count. His reward was to be replaced.

A process is underway in state after state where the election was close and there is a Republican legislature. It is not to congratulate the officeholders for representing democracy and the will of a free people. It is to condemn them for it.

Nevada's Republican Party voted to censure the Republican Secretary of State, Barbara Cegavske. She said she ran a free and fair election. She told the Las Vegas Sun newspaper, 

"While I have been loyal to the Nevada Republican Party during my over two decades as an elected official, I have been unwavering in my commitment to oversee elections and administer Nevada’s election laws in a neutral, nonpartisan manner. My job is to carry out the duties of my office as enacted by the Nevada Legislature, not carry water for the state GOP or put my thumb on the scale of democracy. Unfortunately, members of my own party continue to believe the 2020 general election was wrought with fraud — and that somehow I had a part in it — despite a complete lack of evidence to support that belief.” 

Republicans in Arizona voted to censure their Republican Governor Doug Ducey, who had signed the election certification in Arizona while ignoring yet another phone call from the White House lobbying him to claim the election was flawed, so he could turn the decision over to a Republican legislature to reverse the election.  The party also voted to re-elect Kelli Ward as GOP Chair. She calls herself a "Trump Republican."

A member of the Arizona House of Representatives wished to clarify in the law that the legislature maintains plenary right to cast the electoral votes regardless of the decision by voters, vote counters, the secretary of state, or governor. He introduced HB 2720 which includes the sentence:

   "Notwithstanding Subsection A of this section, the legislature retains its legislative authority regarding the office of presidential elector and by majority vote at any time before the presidential inauguration may revoke the Secretary of State's issuance or certification of a presidential elector's certificate of election."

The Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger stood by his election results in the face of lobbying by Georgia voters, fellow officeholders, and by then-President Trump. He already has a formidable primary election opponent. 

The January 6 insurrection may have shocked Americans, but it did not change the majority vote of Republicans in the U.S. House. That evening over half the Republicans in the Congress voted to disallow votes cast in Pennsylvania. There was a chance that this vote would age badly, but in fact the opposite seems to be the case within the GOP media environment. Senator Ron Johnson dismissed the Capitol insurrection as not being worrisome; the people were patriots; he would have been worried had they been Black Lives Matter protesters, but not Whites carrying Trump banners, he said. Half of GOP voters insist the people there were liberals in disguise. Fox News' Tucker Carlson says the only real death that happened at the event was the police shooting of the protester. 

Most important, a great many vocal Republicans think overthrowing the election was justified because somehow Democrats had already cheated and stole the election and they were simply stealing it back. The lack of evidence for it is proof of Democratic perfidy and cleverness in successfully hiding the evidence, tricking the judicial system, having co-conspirators among Republican election officials, and in intimidating the Vice President into failing to do his plain duty to refuse to count Democratic electoral votes.  

Therefore, Republican officeholders who confounded the overthrow were, as the woman at the airport shouted, traitors and human garbage. The new people won't make that mistake.