Trump lost. Fair and square or not – and, for the most part, it was fair and square – it’s over. His presidency will end on January 20, and Biden’s victory will not be overturned by Congress or the courts.
This is where politicians are not like normal people. Normal people often – usually, even – will eventually forgive and, at some point, forget. Politicians, of both the Democratic and Republican varieties, rarely, if ever, forgive or forget. Many Democratic politicians didn’t accept Trump’s victory four years ago. You may recall that nearly seventy House Democrats boycotted his inauguration. I hope the Republicans won’t be as mean-spirited and rejectionist towards Biden as the Democrats were towards Trump. Senate and House Republicans should attend Biden’s inauguration and applaud at the end of his speech, even if they don’t like it.
But, of course, the feuds within the professional political class go back long before Trump announced his candidacy for president – back to the Obama administration, to George W. Bush’s administration, to Clinton’s – basically all the way back to Lincoln, the first Republican president, and even earlier, to Jackson, the first Democratic president, and before that, to Thomas Jefferson, the first Democratic-Republican president, and to John Adams, a Federalist, and the first partisan to be elected president.
The fights between Schumer and McConnell, Pelosi and McCarthy, congressional Dems and Reps, need not become the fights between normal people, whether we are registered as Democrats, Republicans, or Independents. Some politicians’ quarrels are genuinely fought for us, but some really are for them – their power, their prestige, their personal ambition. And while it may be difficult at times to distinguish between political fights waged for the benefit of the American people and those more self-serving battles between partisan politicians, we should not uncritically accept the word of senators, congressmen, and governors when they make supposedly principled arguments that invariably favor their party and themselves.
Our system of government allows for the challenging of presidential election results both in the courts and in Congress. Trump's campaign has been challenging the results in the courts and consistently losing. A number of GOP senators plan to challenge the electoral vote in Congress, where they too will lose. Both these kinds of challenges have been utilized following earlier U.S. elections. I don't see how either of these constitutionally acceptable methods of challenging the election results, even if they are ill-advised longshots, should be considered as attempts "to tear down the system."
