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From TPM Reader JS …
The reason I think it’s hard to separate the “Old Guard Bush-Cheney” types from the Trumpers is because…they’re the same people. No one got killed, but the “Brooks Brothers Riot” was an attempt by mostly astroturfed Republican activists to physically intimidate an election process that they didn’t like, only in bad faith suggesting there was something wrong with it. And you know what? What if the Supreme Court didn’t bail them out in the end. The wink and nod agreement after Bush v. Gore was that, shucks, there was no valid way to count those hanging chads so they should just pick one so things can happen in time.
But that was total bullshit then and always was. The result was partisan hackery it destroyed the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. The Constitution has a process for all of this. And as recently as 1960, Hawaii had taken much longer to get its vote counted. The House could have voted Bush in by the book. But the Guardian Council of Nino Scalia and Clarence Thomas decided to step in.
Trump trying to get away with stealing an election should be about as surprising as Putin’s attack on Ukraine. No one did much the last time. Yet we’re all surprised.
To steal from Yogi Berra, you lose democracy gradually and then all at once.