Former President Donald Trump’s lawyers are back this week presenting the same case they argued last year in courtrooms in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and Texas. This time they’ll be mounting their legal case not in a court of law but on the floor of Congress — new circumstances, new lawyers but the same big lie.
It's a brazen falsehood they put forth with no attempt to produce evidence, instead insisting that votes were miscounted or hidden by election workers, or disappeared by Dominion Voting Systems, the voting machine manufacturer. The former president’s most loyal sycophants didn’t go so far as to suggest that he’d won by a landslide, but they didn’t have to — he said so himself, repeatedly. And most infuriating to me — the man who fueled an extremist-led scam movement called Stop the Steal concocted his desperate plan to stay in the White House based on stealing votes from Black citizens.
The impeachment charge is based on the violent insurrection at the Capitol and the former president’s role in inciting it. But I don’t want anybody to forget that the underpinning of it all was a campaign of premeditated racism. Whether Georgia or Pennsylvania, the Rudy Giuliani cohort of attorney conspiracists zeroed in on counties where the majority of voters were African American. To be clear, Giuliani’s gang trudged from courtroom to courtroom filing baseless lawsuits that only claimed voter fraud in communities of color, but not for votes cast in majority-white areas where Trump lost.
The NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund responded to the racist targeting with its own lawsuit charging Trump and his campaign with violating the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the law that removed barriers to voting for Black voters. In announcing the lawsuit, Sherrilyn Ifill, executive cirector, referred to “an appeal to a dangerous and corrosive racialized narrative of voter fraud.” And Kristin Clarke, then oresident and executive director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, underscored the danger, saying, “We’ve seen a voter suppression effort orchestrated by a sitting president that aimed to cancel out the votes of black voters on a massive and unprecedented scale.”
Judges across the country dismissed the Trump lawsuits with no proof of fraud, even as the former president and his prevaricating surrogates fomented anger among supporters who believed The Big Lie. When the Capitol seditionists have been rounded up and arrested for acting on the lie, and Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick, a victim of the lie, is laid to rest, how is there any dispute about accountability? Especially as former top Republican operative Steve Schmidt noted for people who swore to uphold democracy. The Lincoln Project co-founder told MSNBC, “There must be justice and accountability not just for the incited, but for the inciters.”
By now I shouldn’t be shocked that the major inciter will likely face no consequences — legal or political. It’s a sobering reminder that some of us still only possess a tenuous hold on all the rights of citizenship.
