Editorial: The Disgrace on Capitol Hill

[brooklynite]

Wall Street Journal

To the extent that the congressional debate was allowed to happen, it went in the right direction. Mr. Trump has been publicly pressuring Mr. Pence, the presiding officer of the joint session, to invalidate Mr. Biden’s electors. As Congress gathered, Mr. Pence released a statement saying he would refuse to do so. “My oath to support and defend the Constitution,” he wrote, “constrains me from claiming unilateral authority to determine which electoral votes should be counted and which should not.”

This is correct in law. Anything else from Mr. Pence would have been a power grab, precipitating a constitutional crisis. Don’t forget, as our friends at the New York Sun point out, that the Vice President is his own duly elected constitutional officer, not the President’s lackey.

But Mr. Trump’s vision of loyalty consists of loyalty only to himself. “ Mike Pence, ” he tweeted soon after, “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”

Senator Cruz’s effort to defend objections to Mr. Biden’s electors was woeful. “Recent polling shows that 39% of Americans believe the election that just occurred ‘was rigged,’” he said. “What does it say, to the nearly half the country that believes this election was rigged, if we vote not even to consider the claims of illegality and fraud?”

[scarletwoman]

1. Ending paragraph:

Mr. Biden will become President at noon on Jan. 20, and until then the police need to restore order with as much force as necessary. Republicans especially need to speak against trespass and violence. As for Mr. Trump, to steal some famous words deployed in 1940 against Neville Chamberlain : “In the name of God, go.”