I have pretty rigorously avoided writing about the “legal” challenges to Joe Biden’s election victory, since we all know that none of them are meant as serious legal arguments. They are merely tokens from the Republican Party leadership to its base that, by God, they are going to fight to the end.
But with the Electoral College now voting, I’ll break my routine and comment on this:
I don’t get the “But Democrats questioned the legitimacy of the election in 2016!” stuff. If you condemned that at the time, doing the same thing — but much worse — is not exactly an ethically or logically serious response.
— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahDispatch) December 14, 2020
Goldberg is right, of course, but in the least of the ways that this is ridiculous. The primary way this is ridiculous is that there’s a huge difference between:
- Publicly conceding an election, congratulating the winner, beginning the transition process, and occasionally griping that Russia helped Trump win.
and
- Refusing to concede, filing dozens of lawsuits, tweeting endlessly about Democrats stealing votes, stalling the transition process, and insisting that Biden isn’t truly the winner.
To pretend that these two things are even comparable, let alone the same, is nuts. If Fox News wants to blather on about it, that’s fine. There’s nothing we can do about that. But surely no one else should join in on this nonsense.
