This column will not be kind. You should know that right up front — that there will be very harsh things said about a couple of U.S. representatives from Alabama. But you should also know that there’s a good reason for this because what these two men, Congressman-elect Barry Moore and U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks, are promising to do is so dangerous, reprehensible and anti-American that their actions shouldn’t be laughed off or dismissed as the latest shameless pandering of an Alabama politician.
They should be ridiculed and shamed.
Because what Moore and Brooks plan to do is to try and undermine an American election for no reason other than their feelings are hurt.
Their guy didn’t win. The other guy did win. They’re throwing a public tantrum.
Moore joined Brooks this week in pledging to challenge the electoral votes of some states when the House votes to certify the results, alleging that the votes should be discounted because of fraud that led to President-elect Joe Biden beating Donald Trump. (For this coup attempt to get even slightly off the ground, they would need a U.S. senator to also challenge the votes. Even if that were to happen, the best they could hope for is a delay of a few hours.)
There is zero evidence of either widespread or even small amounts of fraud in the 2020 election. This has been substantiated by court after court, both at the state and federal levels, and by now hundreds of investigations that were spurred by bogus and often outlandish claims of fraud from Republicans. Even the most corrupt and malleable U.S. attorney general in modern history, Bill Barr, has confirmed that there is no evidence of fraud.
Fox News, in a story about Moore’s sedition attempt, reported it like this: “… allegations of systemic voter fraud by the president and some of his allies have been largely unsubstantiated. Some lawsuits have challenged far fewer votes than the tens of thousands that Biden won by in key states. Others have included typos, factual errors or and more defects.
“Sweeping allegations of vote-switching by the voting software company Dominion, which some states used, also have not been borne out, and judges routinely have ruled against suits brought by the Trump campaign and its allies. Attorney General Bill Barr said this week that his Justice Department has not seen fraud on the kind of scale that could flip the election.”
None of that matters to Brooks, who’s driving this crazy train.
When confronted with those facts, Brooks told Fox that the only reason the courts, investigators, poll workers, secretaries of state all over the country and various law enforcement agencies couldn’t find evidence of illegal voting is because they’re not equipped to do so. But he knows it’s happening, so he’s pushing forward.
“… in my judgment, if we limited our vote count to lawful votes cast by eligible American citizens, that Donald Trump easily won a majority of the Electoral College and won reelection,” Brooks said.
That is something a crazy person says. And it is long past time that we started treating Mo Brooks — and anyone who follows him — like one.
It’s also well past time for decent, thinking Americans to put an end to this charade of a “stolen election” and start treating these people as the traitorous, anti-American, anti-democracy clowns that they are.
Spare me the “oh, we just want election integrity” BS, too. We’ve got it. Election year after election year, there are examinations and audits of various elections all over the country. Secretaries of state dig into fraud claims and take hard looks at weaknesses and possible illegal voting.
And every year, we get the same message: A few problems here or there, a handful of arrests for minor voter fraud incidents, but overall a tiny amount of fraud — usually a fraction of 1 percent — nationwide.
Mail-in voting, absentee voting, in-person voting — they’re all 99 percent safe and secure. Every single time.
A study of the 2016 election found that out of the more than 135 million ballots cast, there were just four verified cases of fraud. Four.
So, it’s not about election integrity or voter fraud or a stolen election. It’s about the childlike brains of entitled Republicans who can’t seem to grasp that a majority of Americans — seven million more and counting — have soundly rejected their platform of racism and bigotry and hatefulness and emboldened stupidity.
Men like Brooks and Moore would just as soon burn the country to the ground as accept that a majority of the country — a big majority at this point — doesn’t accept their tiny world views. They’re proudly announcing their intent to undermine a U.S. election and attempt to overturn the will of 80 million-plus Americans.
There was a time not long ago that such actions and beliefs would be widely ridiculed, even considered dangerous and fringe. People like Moore and Brooks would have been considered wackos too crazy to take seriously.
Let’s start working our way back to that time, please.
