‘They Might as Well Have Torn Up the Constitution’

For years, a central goal of the conservative movement was to install right-wing judges. A Republican president delivered, big time. And these Trumpists are still pissed. 

Which tells you one thing. For the authoritarian wing of the Republican party, this was never about interpreting the American legal code. It was always about raw political power. 

“It's not about the rule of law. It's not about getting good qualified judges. It's about results- oriented litigation,” former U.S. Attorney for Alabama Joyce Vance tells Molly Jong-Fast on the latest edition of The New Abnormal. “They want judges who will vote to save the election for a president who has clearly lost it. And that's just out of bounds. It doesn't matter if you're a Democrat or a Republican. The notion that the courts could be used to steal an election is really the epitome of being anti-democratic. It's ludicrous. It's ridiculous. It just shows you that these folks are off the rails. They might as well have stood on a stage at CPAC and torn up the Constitution.” 

Vance adds, “We should immediately begin to identify what's being done here as anti-democratic. I don't believe that that's where my Republican friends in Alabama are. Many of them are good people who have different principled views than I have on policy issues. They believe in the Constitution and the rule of law. And they're horrified by what they're seeing.” 

Because the Trumpists aren’t just looking for judges that overturn elections they don’t like. They don’t want anyone outside of their crowd to be able to vote, period. “These efforts to suppress the vote previously have been relegated to dark corners of political operatives. It's now actually the platform of the Republican party to make it hard for people to vote, because they're afraid that they might not vote Republican. They should be expending half the energy they're expending on voter suppression on trying to win voters over, on creating policies that are appealing to the population,” Vance says. “This is a sickness in the American political dialogue.” 

Vance also looks at the mushrooming scandals around Andrew Cuomo, and the mounting legal cases for Trump. Then, Olivia Troye, who worked for Trump and Mike Pence during the early days of the pandemic, talks about their botched response to COVID. “It turns out nobody in the White House cared about spreading the virus,” she says. And the Washington Post’s Dave Weigel, fresh from CPAC, talks about how even straight-laced Republicans are now espousing the Big Lie.

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