[NOTE: I’ve added a lot of material over the last few hours to this post, and will continue to do so as commentary on the president’s failure at the Supreme Court grows. Scroll down.]

Man oh man oh Manischewitz. I really sweated this one. I LOVE MY COUNTRY.

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From Georgia’s response to this thoroughly rejected grotesquerie:

This election cycle, Georgia did what the Constitution empowered it to do: it implemented processes for the election, administered the election in the face of logistical challenges brought on by Covid-19, and confirmed and certified the election results — again and again and again. Yet Texas has sued Georgia anyway.

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Ben Sasse: “Every American who cares about the rule of law should take comfort that the Supreme Court — including all three of President Trump’s picks — closed the book on the nonsense.”

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Steve Schmidt:

‘You saw it coming this summer — the astounding moment when the Republican platform became nothing more than a loyalty oath to Donald Trump — an oath of obedience, complete obedience, to Trump. Not even a pretense of policy ideas in it…

So today’s an historic day… [We] can [sometimes] overstate the importance of an event, [but] today was a before and after moment in the life of the nation: 106 members of Congress broke faith with American democracy today. They did something the fascists, the Nazis, the Confederate army, were unable to do. They broke faith with the idea that the people are sovereign.

Democracy definitionally requires one side be willing to lose an election… What we saw today [was a] breaking of faith which followed the poisoning of faith and belief in the system — the American system, the American republic, which has endured since 1776. It was poisoned this month, … and we’re going to live with this now for all the balance of our lives. Because the competition in American politics is now between a democratic party, meaning a party that believes in democracy, versus an autocratic party. And we’ve never seen that.

When you see that many members of Congress breaking faith with their oath [in order to] overturn an election because they don’t like the result, we’re off the reservation to a place that we might not be able to get back on it from. … We’re one election away from losing the country to people who no longer believe in democracy.’

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“His whole life has been transactions and expectations [of a] degree of loyalty, and that’s a total misunderstanding of what to expect from the three justices he appointed, as well as a misunderstanding of [Justices] Alito, Thomas and Roberts. They’re not going to burn down their court to rescue Donald Trump… they’re neither stupid nor crazy. And for them to do what Trump’s asking them to do, they would have to be both stupid and crazy.”

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‘When the case was dismissed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the lawmakers who signed onto the lawsuit “brought dishonor to the House” and chastised them for choosing “to subvert the Constitution and undermine public trust in our sacred democratic institutions.”’

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‘“With each loss we get to celebrate the Biden/Harris victory all over again,” Ken Martin, a vice-chairman of the Democratic National Committee and the state party chair in Minnesota, said. “It’s like the gift that keeps on giving.”’

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“[O]ne of our political parties is openly hostile to our entire political system…

Too many Republicans have gone from being anti-Democratic — that is to say, hostile to the liberal political party — to being anti-democratic — that is to say, hostile to the liberal political system and antagonistic to the idea that the will of the people should prevail — and unwilling to accept political defeat.

This trend represents an existential threat to our system.

… Since the election, the party has only more fully warmed to Trump’s demagogy, moving from the uncomfortable passivity that Republicans used to adopt in the face of his provocations to downright enthusiasm for overturning a free and fair election…

[The Republican party] no longer respects the fundamental basics of our democratic process — voting and the peaceful transfer of political power — let alone good governance.”

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“This embrace of the president’s attempt to overturn the results of the election is both shocking and horrifying. As Trump’s fraud claims and legal cases have steadily failed, the arguments he has pursued have become more outlandish and absurd, and they have also become more disturbing. Many Republican voters agree, and in refusing to stand up to him and them, Republican officials have gone from coddling a sore loser to effectively abandoning democracy…

[T]hese Republicans have set a course of being willing to oppose the results of elections simply because they don’t like them. That is by definition antidemocratic…

Republican officials aren’t afraid of Trump so much as they are afraid of Republican voters. And Republican voters appear to be afraid of democracy.”

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“Sedition is a serious charge, but it’s the right word. Most House Republicans and 17 state attorneys general are standing against the right of Americans to choose their own leaders. As elected officials, they are using the power granted to them by the people to declare that the people should not have such power. Even if they lose this case, this time around, the fact that so many traitors hold elected office in America is a major crisis all by itself.”

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“The health of a democracy rests on public confidence that elections are free and fair. Questioning the integrity of an election is a matter of the utmost seriousness. By doing so without offering any evidence, [the Texas Attorney General] and his collaborators have disgraced themselves.

… This new policy of election denialism … is the latest manifestation of the Republican Party’s increasingly anti-democratic tendencies.

… This isn’t really about Mr. Trump anymore. He lost, and his ruinous tenure will soon be over. This is now about the corruption of a political party whose leaders are guided by the fear of Mr. Trump rather than the love of this country — and who are falling into dangerous habits.

… [W]here does a party that rejects democracy go from here?”

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David Frum, in 2018:

“Maybe you do not much care about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.

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Perhaps the very darkness of the Trump experience can summon the nation to its senses and jolt Americans to a new politics of commonality, a new politics in which the Trump experience is remembered as the end of something bad, and not the beginning of something worse. Trump appealed to what was mean and cruel and shameful. The power of that appeal should never be underestimated. But once its power fades, even those who have succumbed will feel regret.

Those who have expressed regret will need some kind of exit from Trumpocracy, some reintegration into a politics again founded on decency.”

Must-read opinion piece in the NYT. Here’s the heart of it:

Structural checks can be overrated. The survival of our Republic depends as much, if not more, on the virtue of those in government, particularly the upholding of norms by civil servants, prosecutors and military officials. We have grown too jaded about things like professionalism and institutions, and the idea of men and women who take their duties seriously. But as every major moral tradition teaches, no external constraint can fully substitute for the personal compulsion to do what is right.

It may sound naïve in our untrusting age to hope that people will care about ethics and professional duties. But Madison, too, saw the need for this trust. “There is a degree of depravity in mankind,” he wrote, but also “qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.” A working republican government, he argued, “presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.”

It is called civic virtue, and at the end of the day, there is no real alternative.

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But should this all be put in the past tense? The shits are still trying to kill us.

Look. The Republicans are doing their bit to undermine the election for Republicans, so that’s all good. But Democrats can’t take anything for granted. UD has been contributing to Jon Ossoff’s campaign for some time; she likes him, and she likes the fact that he’s part of the effort to flip the Senate.

At the moment, polls have him looking very good indeed.

“Deep state” isn’t the right term — its overtone is too clandestine, its undertone too nefarious — but let’s go with it, co-opt it, turn a put-down into a point of honor, the way gay rights activists did with “queer” and anti-Trump feminists did with “nasty woman.”

Let’s define it ourselves, not as a swampy society of self-preserving bureaucrats in Washington but as a steadfast, tradition-minded legion of public officials and civil servants all over the country, in every branch of government.

These officials and servants are distinguished by a professionalism that survives and edges out their partisan bearings, by an understanding that the codes of conduct and rules of engagement become more important, not less, when passions run hot. They’re incorrigible that way. Invaluable, too.

… Anthony Fauci is the steely superhero of my deep state, and he’s flanked and fortified by all the government health officials who also pushed back against the quackery of Scott Atlas, the Trump-flattering pandemic adviser who resigned on Monday.

They belong to a quiet and then not-so-quiet resistance that blunted, thwarted or tried to blunt and thwart Trump’s worst impulses when it came not just to public health but also to foreign policy, immigration, the environment. In The Times late last week, Lisa Friedman described such efforts within the Environmental Protection Agency.

“With two months left of the Trump administration,” she wrote, “career E.P.A. employees find themselves where they began, in a bureaucratic battle with the agency’s political leaders. But now, with the Biden administration on the horizon, they are emboldened to stymie Mr. Trump’s goals and to do so more openly.”

That’s the deep state rearing up. That’s the deep state roaring.

A determined autocrat in the White House poses a grave threat to our democratic institutions and can severely undermine faith in our elections, particularly when backed by partisans in Congress.

It’s about time. My beloved country will get over Trump’s threat to our democracy.

I have such confidence in the soundness of our democratic foundations that I never lamented; but I certainly felt anger and anxiety along the way.

A sense of surreality and a sense of humor helped a lot; you don’t spend decades teaching modernist literature without knowing that the world can turn kafkaesque, and that the absurd is as comic as it is tragic. But you’re never entirely prepared for a truly wild turn of events.

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And what is left to say about The Genius of the Carpathians, America’s Père Ubu? Only that I hope his behavior over the last two weeks has begun to unsettle some of the people who follow him out of a desire for an authoritarian government. I hope they come to realize how grotesque that desire is; I hope they begin to perceive how grotesque he – like all authoritarians – is. Especially grotesque on American soil.

I understand how America made the conman; I’ll admit to having a hell of a time understanding how America made the conman president. Biden’s strong showing vindicates the belief I’ve held throughout these last months: America has always been under there — under the cruelty, ignorance, and arrogance. Virtually all Americans recognize that when a White House is represented by Rudolph Giuliani and Sidney Powell there is absolutely nothing to recognize; we are fundamentally a sane rational earnest practical people, and when our government degenerates into curdled cynicism and idiot fanaticism, we know, most of us, that we have entirely lost our way.

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And now Mary’s uncle settles into a new persona: Sideshow Bob, eternally popping up to try to vanquish Joe Biden.

The dark romanticization of death displays itself nowhere more vividly than in Governor Kristi Noem’s South Dakota. Robert Mapplethorpe has nothing on Kristi and her fellow macabre mid-Americans, with their heavy drinking and smoking, home suicide arsenals, meth addiction, traffic fatalities (Noem herself “has received 26 traffic citations, including 20 speeding tickets from 1989 to 2010, stop sign and seat belt violations, no driver’s license, failure to appear notices, and two arrest warrants.”) and of course on top of all that covid, which the governor welcomes as yet another source of the frisson that comes with defiantly asserting your absolute personal freedom — and if you’re a South Dakotan, this means the freedom to achieve the death you desire.

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This Brit snob, writing for the Guardian, really does not get it:

[T]he terrifying surge of Covid-19 cases … is battering the state under Noem’s contentious leadership. South Dakota has been listed by Forbes as one of the 10 most dangerous states in the Union, all of them in the Midwest.

Coronavirus in South Dakota is running at an intensity only surpassed in the US by its neighbor North Dakota. The state has an alarming positivity rate of almost 60% – nearly six out of 10 people who take a Covid test are infected – second only to another neighbor, Wyoming.

Viewed through the lens of cases and deaths, South Dakota is also at the top of the league table. More than 66,000 South Dakotans have contracted the disease and at least 644 have died, a number likely to rise as hospitals reach breaking point.

Amid this devastating contagion, Noem is rigidly sticking to the strategy she has adopted since the pandemic began. It consists of a refusal to accept mask mandates and repeated denial of the science around the efficacy of wearing masks; resistance to imposing any restrictions on bars and restaurants; no limits on gatherings in churches or other places of worship; and no orders to stay at home.

While the statistics are clear – the virus is running wild in South Dakota – Noem has turned a public health emergency into an issue of “freedom” and “liberty”, consistently lying about the trajectory of the disease under her watch. “We’re doing really good in South Dakota. We’re managing Covid-19,” she has said.

So let UD explain, starting with that last thing. South Dakota really is doing really good because South Dakota seeks death. It’s none of our goddamn business – and certainly not the federal government’s business – how South Dakotans perceive existence. Widely scattered, solitary, freezing on vast fields of abandoned churches, they seek out the viral “danger,” “terror,” and “intensity” from which the trembling little Guardian writer flees. Read Blood Meridian, you fool! Learn something about the places you write about before you start writing.

Live free and die! Live fast die young! These are the nihilistic mottos of a state which realizes it has run out of reasons to exist.

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UPDATE: “His staff are appalled.”

Must not be from around those parts.

When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine’s Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression.

I don’t agree with Christopher Hitchens that religion and stupidity are hateful; I do agree that some human extremes of behavior deserve hatred, or, if you like, naturally prompt hatred, and that there’s nothing all that wrong with feeling this emotion if it’s truly warranted.

Peter Wehner, anticipating the departure of Donald Trump, urges that we avoid getting “sucked into a vortex of hate” in regard to him; he quotes from a King sermon: “Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.”

Indeed Wehner’s is altogether a religious column; he begins with Bonhoeffer and ends with Isaiah. Yet for people like UD and Hitchens, no purely religious appeal not to hate will persuade; after all, the religious/racial bigotry of some evangelicals and other religious has had a lot to do with making Trump possible. Religion’s legacy, in other words, ain’t exactly hateless, no matter how pretty its rhetoric of love and forgiveness. Wehner is free to choose among big-hearted Christians for the purpose of the column he’s writing, but he could have chosen among an equally generous basket of Christian hate-mongers if he wanted to argue the opposite of what he has chosen to argue.

So let’s decouple this from religion, and simply suggest that there are at least a couple of kinds of hate. Wehner has in mind hot hate, the kind that steams you every day and generates rage and self-righteousness and rejection of the humanity of, in this case, anyone enthusiastic about Trump. This hate – drawing on the language Wehner has used – is low; it is a vortex. It controls you.

But think of what James Joyce calls his inner “refrigerating apparatus,” his capacity to contain strong emotions while remaining emotionally controlled, and even cold. Surely our “disgust” and “moral revulsion” (to use a couple of commonly used descriptions of widely shared feelings about Trump) need not overtake and distort us; we can hold them thoughtfully and intensely; and we can certainly agree that they ought not extend to Trump voters. Every Trump voter I’ve encountered, talked to, and known (one of my neighbors – a dear friend since elementary school – is a Trump guy) seems to me a perfectly decent person. I don’t even hate white power Trumpians, having seen enough documentaries about them to feel mainly pity – for these are the true hot-haters, and they are eating themselves up alive.

Far from wanting to keep hating – hot or cold – on Trump, UD cannot wait to see the back of him, and indeed cannot wait to stop having his perversity dominate the news in a way that again and again generates intensely negative emotions in her. I have nothing good to say about Scientology; but I have always liked their phrase going clear. Someday soon, inshallah, UD will be able to go clear of a pernicious character who has commanded the attention of Americans.

In the meantime, what I’m okay with our calling hate focuses and organizes my otherwise rather scattered responses to our current president.

Above all, I hate this man’s cruelty. Liberals, argue Judith Shklar and Richard Rorty, are people who believe that “cruelty is the worst thing we do.” The worst – worthy of hatred.

What a bizarre – almost unbelieveable – fact it is that America has had as its president the very embodiment of extreme cruelty. We need to do a lot of thinking about how that came about. Think of Charles Koch suddenly deciding that his massively funding the vicious tea party was a big mistake. What was your first hint, man? But better late than never.

Because each vote still counts, because no state has seceded yet, because a “gunned-up” population has not taken up those guns, the country I love appears to be emerging from the Trump nightmare. It is not yet free of the tentacles of his derangement. To beat back the defeated president’s ongoing assault on truth, the rule of law, and the institutions of democracy has been the absolute moral imperative of our times.

Having the US criticize democratic erosion and the abuse of human rights around the world? Perish the thought!

[T]he results are not really close.

With many ballots still left to count in heavily Democratic cities, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was leading President Trump on Friday by more than 4.1 million votes… Mr. Biden’s current vote margin is larger than the populations of more than 20 states…

Boris Badenov scripts the next few weeks of Trumpian complaints about the whole political franchise thing.

Look, if this is the dude my fellow Americans want, okay.

I’ll cop to always having taken for granted the essential dignity and reliability of American democracy; I’ll admit it seems wrong to me that the president of the country is claiming he won an election that isn’t over yet — a claim that seems just fine with his millions of enthusiastic supporters. Okay.

After all, nowhere is it written that UD gets to spend her entire incredibly fortunate life in a fundamentally unimperiled democracy. Things have never really been bumpy for her in any way, and now they’re bumpy. Okay.

Christopher Hitchens writes about George Orwell and the common capacity for / effort toward ethical and intellectual integrity.

Democracy’s keenest enemies are willfully ignorant and fanatical cultists, most vividly on display in America’s covid-indifferent, Trump-besotted ultraorthodox Jewish communities. No demographic in this country will have higher Trump vote totals. As in Israel, if you want to chart the decline of democratic instincts and institutions, there’s no better place than in the heart of this withdrawn, uneducated, law-flouting, and violent group. Herd obedience to authoritarian religious leaders means it will deliver, today, a virtually solid Trump vote.

As the returns from all over America come in, let us see if reason, civic sentiment, and morality can triumph over passion, indifference to the public realm, and cruelty.

Led by women (lots of that going around – look at Belarus), the angry citizens of Poland confront their own Mad Trump with the biggest challenge to his power yet.