Thread by @whstancil

Feels like the endgame argument is taking shape: "The Constitution says state legislatures set the rules for elections."

Like states' rights claims of the past, this bogus principle is a feeble pretext for another aim: ending fair elections so the GOP can declare itself victor.

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1363512058025762816

The GOP's final demand is going to be to end democracy in the states they control. Even if that were acceptable as a matter of principle, it cannot coexist with a system where the national executive is determined by a series of state elections instead of a single popular vote.

The electoral college has created a situation where the integrity of national democracy is reliant on the integrity of state elections, so the GOP's insistence that states get to pick their own winners is a declaration of war on the whole American system.

The Democrats who control Congress could quickly quash this threat with a single congressional act, but like northerners in the 1850s, they're divided between those wanting to meet the crisis head-on and those wanting to placate and accommodate in hopes that it solves itself.

Like many northerners in the 1850s and early 1860s, many modern-day Democrats cannot figure out that radical reactionaries will not be soothed by conciliatory gestures or appeals to mutual interest, only emboldened.

You wonder how future historians will write about the decision (so far) to let Trump attempt an overthrow of US government and then leave for a comfortable post-presidency without consequence, much less the decision to leave his accomplices in Congress or invite them on TV shows.

I can't help but think that maybe the approach that seems "reasonable" and "sober" and "measured" now - letting Trump walk out, letting his allies off the hook, and moving on - will seem like the very height of riskiness and self-deluded passivity in a few decades.