The last time Congressional Democrats peaceably accepted a GOP victory in the Electoral College was 1988. In 2000, 2004 and 2016, Democrats in Congress objected, tried to object, and generally disrupted the process of certifying the Electoral College vote. They did so with no substantive grounds, instead just for the political theater of it.
Today’s certification of the Electoral College wasn’t just a ceremony, but it also wasn’t a debate over who should be president. The question before the chamber was whether the votes being presented were valid votes from valid electors. No Democrats made any case that the electors were improperly chosen or their votes cast or counted improperly.
Instead, a handful of House Democrats, rose to object to the electors of southern states. They lacked standing to object, because they lacked a senator signatory to their objections. And the nature of their objections — from what we could tell from their comments before they were gavelled down by Vice President Joe Biden, who was presiding over the session — were not germane to the law in question. The liberal members brought up voter suppression, Russian hacking and other reasons to be upset about the election — no evidence that the electors were somehow wrongly chosen or that, say, Hillary Clinton really won Alabama.
Twelve years ago, Democrats actually delayed the Electoral College certification. They got Sen. Barbara Boxer to object to Ohio’s Electoral College vote. George W. Bush beat John Kerry by 120,000 votes in Ohio, but Democrats got their debate and their vote on the electors. House Democrats used the occasion mostly to attack Ken Blackwell, Ohio’s secretary of state, who was a rising star in politics and — horror of horrors — a black conservative.
This was the first successful objection to a state’s electors since Reconstruction.
And in 2000, House Democrats pulled the same sort of thing they did today, speechifying out of order, and crying objection without a valid formal objection.
This is part of a pattern of a specific species of political norm-smashing where Democrats seem to be leading the way: Refusing to concede when they lose.
Mike Dukakis was the last Democratic presidential nominee to concede on Election Night. Liberal protestors in many states shouted and protested the Electoral College votes last month, without any valid grounds for objection.
President Obama didn’t help things when he reacted to his party’s losses in the House and Senate in 2014 by elevating the concerns of non-voters over those of the voters.
When Democrats lose they are a lot slower to concede, it seems. Maybe it’s a deliberate strategy. Maybe it’s a coincidence. Maybe I’m wrong in perceiving this pattern. But I expect this practice to spread, which won’t be good for politics.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
