Fighting Republican authoritarianism means sometimes delaying political gratification.
The Utah Democratic Party did something extraordinary last week: They threw their support behind a Republican. Well, a former Republican, anyway. Evan McMullin, who ran for president as an independent in 2016, is now seeking to unseat Senator Mike Lee.
Now, cards on the table, it isn’t as if any Democratic nominee would stand a ghost of a chance. Utah hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate in more than fifty years, and Republicans outnumber Democrats in the state five-to-one. But McMullin is a political unicorn—a former Republican, CIA veteran, and conservative who garnered 21 percent of the vote in Utah when he made his quixotic presidential bid in 2016.
Over the following years, like every other leading Republican except those you can list on two hands, Lee immolated his constitutional principles on a pyre. As Amanda Carpenter itemized, the recently revealed text messages to Donald Trump’s White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows reveal a senator not only willing to overlook a little authoritarianism now and again, but an active participant in a behind-the-scenes effort to overturn a free and fair election.
It didn’t occur to Mr. Constitutional Conservative that phone calls from a United States senator to state legislators asking questions might be interpreted as signals or even possibly as threats? He certainly knew that Trump was engaging in every possible ploy to overturn the election. What business did this senator from Utah have even calling legislators from Pennsylvania or Michigan? And he wasn’t troubled by the utter fallaciousness of the election fraud claims, rejected by courts something like 63 times, that would be the foundation of any effort to submit alternative slates? That’s the nub of it. It was a lie—a blatant, stinking lie.
In October 2020, Lee famously tweeted “We are not a democracy.” It’s a familiar conservative talking point. We are a republic. True. A democratic republic. Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution that Lee claims to revere guarantees to each state a “republican form of government.” A republican form of government depends utterly on votes being counted legally and properly. Otherwise, the Constitution’s guarantee becomes a dead letter, rather like the sham elections in Russia or Cuba. It seems that Lee wanted to use the Constitution as a fig leaf for a naked power grab. Yes, he ultimately voted to certify Biden’s victory, but only after granting the coup plot legitimacy with his backroom maneuvering.