Today’s January 6 committee hearing is under way. The topic this afternoon is former president Trump’s pressure campaign against elections officials and legislatures in a handful of states — states with legislatures controlled by Republicans and where Joe Biden had won the popular vote — to invalidate Biden’s victory.
The opening statements by Bennie Thompson (D., Miss.) and Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.) endeavored to tie this scheme into what the committee has portrayed as an overarching scheme to overturn the election. I have a column on the homepage explaining why I think the committee should not be emphasizing a purported conspiracy, since it is unnecessary to demonstrate either that Trump is unfit for the presidency or that he may be guilty of a crime.
It is already clear that the committee is again steering into what I’ve called the “plausibility gap” — i.e., the difference between (a) the extent of Trump’s machinations and (b) the possibility that he could actually have succeeded in getting the election overturned.
Relying on no shortage of bombastic rhetoric in an opinion by federal judge David O. Carter, a Clinton appointee who once sought elective office as a Democrat, the committee is taking the happenstance of Trump’s having had gambits that “targeted every tier” of government and inferring from it the extravagant conclusion that this made the reversal of the election result more likely to succeed.
I believe instead that the committee is already demonstrating that the opposite is the case. California Democrat Adam Schiff, the committee member taking the lead in today’s hearing, gave an opening statement in which he previewed that Trump targeted the Congress, the vice president, the state courts, the state legislators, and the state election officials, yet at every turn, he failed.
So yes, the committee is showing that Trump is unfit for office. It may even be showing that he obstructed Congress or (as Schiff said, relying on Judge Carter) conspired to defraud the United States. But the committee is not showing that this scheme was plausible. To the contrary, Schiff is showing, however inadvertently, that the genius of our Constitution is that authority over our presidential elections is so diffuse, so extensively divided between federal and state officials who do not answer to the president, that Trump’s scheme had no chance of success. Our democracy was never on the brink.
This goes to a point we made in our editorial earlier this week:
Notwithstanding committee hyperbole about our democracy on the brink of destruction, the main hero of this dark episode is the Constitution. Ingeniously, the Framers divided power horizontally among the branches, and vertically among the federal government and the sovereign states. No one actor could have stolen this presidential election, and even a well-conceived conspiracy (which this wasn’t) would have been foiled at several turns. In this case, dozens of state and federal courts (including Trump-appointed judges and justices) rejected Trump’s frivolous lawsuits. The Justice Department’s top officials discredited his fraud claims and refused to thrust the baseless suggestion of voting fraud onto state election officials. Thanks to separation of powers, those officials did not answer to Trump and would have defied him — as, in fact, Georgia officials did. And Trump never even tried to seek armed-forces support for his scheme to remain in power because he understood he’d never get it: The military was loyal to the Constitution. So was Pence.
One last point. Representative Schiff — as we’ve seen in the impeachment proceedings — is a very able lawyer, and particularly good at marshaling the most emotionally gripping evidence. Not surprisingly, he has done a compelling job of showing the tremendous pressure state officials were under from Trump supporters. He has done this by weaving into his presentation video clips of these officials being harassed by pro-Trump protesters at their homes.
It was hard to take this too seriously, though, when at this very moment, committee Democrats well know that Supreme Court justices are facing exactly the same kind of pressure from pro-abortion advocates who hope the harassment will corruptly influence the justices, in the Dobbs case, to shrink from overruling Roe v. Wade.
Notwithstanding his indignation today, I’m pretty confident that if we could question Representative Schiff, he’d somehow manage to tell us that the threat to our democracy is conservative Supreme Court justices, not the left-wing protesters harassing them in violation of federal law.