Beware The GOP

 As Frank Rich reminds us in the New York Magazine, the GOP will likely learn nothing from the Trump defeat:

Joe Biden’s victory cannot mask the fact that this country is divided, regardless of the Democratic margin in the presidential popular vote. The fundamental schisms pitting American tribes against each other would remain intact even in the fantastical event that the Electoral College were by some political miracle abolished in the interest of democratizing what we are overly fond of calling the world’s greatest democracy.

So as we cheer a Biden win, please let us not tell each other now that we are on our way to “healing.” Or that what Biden framed as a battle for the soul of America has been won, or even placed on hold. Yes, there was record voter turnout. But even as we congratulate ourselves on our enduring faith in the franchise, we must recognize that one of the two political parties is routinely engaged in sabotaging free elections with voter-suppression efforts aimed at the minority voters it cannot win over at the ballot box. These anti-democratic power grabs became a GOP staple decades before Donald Trump, culminating in the actions of a George W. Bush–anointed chief justice, John Roberts, whose Supreme Court shredded the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As Roberts famously wrote in 2007, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Since then, discrimination on the basis of race has only expanded in states like Georgia and Florida, where Black voting rights have been cavalierly undermined and trashed.

Once Biden survives the GOP’s legal and extra-legal efforts to rob him of his electoral success and is sworn in as president, let’s skip the sanctimony about how “the system worked.” The system is teetering. Trump — in what may be his signal accomplishment — has exposed every weakness in its structure. It turns out that a president can even monkey around with the Postal Service to manipulate election results. He can lie, steal, self-deal, corrupt the legal system, coddle dictators, alienate allies, violate all the internal safeguards intended to prevent executive malfeasance, mismanage a public-health catastrophe that kills his own voters, and get away with it for four long years.

The GOP won’t be chastened by a Trump defeat. The Republicans are more unified than ever and certainly more unified than the Democrats. The Supreme Court has their back. There is no reason to think that a setback in a single election will cause America’s conservative movement to either dwindle in size or compromise its views no matter what transpires in a Biden presidency. We harbor any illusions to the contrary at our peril.