OPINION:
Elected Democrats are giddy that another left-wing prosecutor has lodged criminal charges against former President Donald Trump. They may come to regret what this will do to our system of government.
As much as Mr. Trump relished chants of “lock her up” at his campaign rallies in 2016, it was bluster. He had no desire to prosecute former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton once in power — a point that he and his campaign surrogates made clear well before Inauguration Day.
Lacking such scruples, Democrats are blinded by the prospect of easy victory over a jailed opponent and confident that few will ever read the rambling, 98-page indictment setting their strategy in motion.
Fulton County District Attorney Fanni T. Willis, a Democrat, charges Mr. Trump and his staff with engaging in “criminal activities including, but not limited to, false statements and writings” with which he attempted to “persuade Georgia legislators to reject lawful electoral votes cast by the duly elected and qualified presidential electors from Georgia.”
The indictment asserts that Mr. Trump’s first conspiratorial act was that he “falsely declared victory and falsely claimed voter fraud.”
Falsely declaring victory and claiming election fraud is an American political tradition. Just ask Georgia’s Stacey Abrams, who denied losing the 2018 gubernatorial election while alleging numerous irregularities in the voting process.
All of a sudden, allegations of irregularity have become criminal acts, with Mr. Trump standing accused of sending several felonious tweets about a state legislative hearing.
“Wow!” he tweeted. “Blockbuster testimony taking place right now in Georgia. Ballot stuffing by Dems when Republicans were forced to leave the large counting room.”
The indictment’s central complaint is that these tweets were part of a crackpot design to send votes from alternate Georgia electors to the Electoral College. While more will likely come to light about this in the months ahead, such an effort posed no threat to the republic.
In 2016, Mr. Trump’s opponents concocted a faithless elector scheme of their own, creating a campaign to pressure electors in several states into going rogue and casting their electoral vote for anyone but Mr. Trump. Contrivances of this sort are as old as the country itself.
In the 1960 election, John F. Kennedy secured a popular majority over Richard Nixon, but Georgia’s Democratic electors were inundated with correspondence urging them to cast their electoral votes for a Democrat more sympathetic to the South. Newspapers across Georgia became a part of the arm-twisting campaign that ultimately failed to alter the election’s outcome.
Our system of checks and balances ensures that the Electoral College can resist these misguided undertakings.
Federal law, for example, requires each state to provide a certificate attesting to the validity of its slate of electors. The alternate slates submitted in the 2020 election did not bear a state seal and did not purport to be government documents.
The alternative certificate submitted in Pennsylvania included the disclaimer that it was to be used “if, as the result of a final non-appealable Court Order or other proceeding prescribed by law, we are ultimately recognized” as the winning side in the election. The Democrats’ case is so hollow that it rests on the omission of a disclaimer in Georgia.
Even if it were otherwise, the elected members of the House of Representatives and Senate remain the ultimate judge of the validity of elections — a duty they have executed on multiple occasions in which slates of electors have come under question.
In 1872, for example, three of Georgia’s electors chose Horace Greeley over Republican Ulysses S. Grant. During the electoral count, Congress threw out their votes on the grounds that Greeley, a dead man, was ineligible to hold the office of president.
America has survived more than two centuries of post-election grousing and tumult. It remains to be seen whether it can survive one side’s attempt to imprison its leading opponent in advance of an election.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.