A lifelong Republican changes his mind

‘I have voted Republican in every presidential election since 1980, including voting for Donald Trump in 2016.” 

When you see a lead sentence like that on an op-ed column, the next sentence will most certainly begin with the word “But.”

The writer of this particular piece in The New York Times on July 30 is law school professor Steven Calabresi, who sought to assure his readers of his impeccable Republican credentials before making a rather un-Republican proposal.   

Before we get to that, it should be noted that Calabresi, a professor of law at Northwestern, is a co-founder and co-director of the prestigious conservative\libertarian Federalist Society, whose members have played prominent roles in the confirmations of Supreme Court Justices John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — almost half the court, if you’re counting. 

Since Trump became president, Calabresi has written op-eds and a law review article on why the Robert Mueller investigation was unconstitutional and an op-ed opposing the president’s impeachment.

And if voting for six winning and four losing Republican presidential candidates since Ronald Reagan wasn’t evidence enough of his party purity, further research into Calabresi’s career reveals he learned his trade clerking for two Republican judicial saints, Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia.

So what Calabresi had to say next was all the more startling:

“But,” he wrote, as anticipated, “I am frankly appalled by the president’s recent tweet seeking to postpone the November election. 

“Until recently,” he explained, “I had taken as political hyperbole the Democrats’ assertion that President Trump is a fascist.  But this latest tweet is fascistic and is itself grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment again by the House of Representatives and his removal from office by the Senate.”

Hard to say which action is less likely so close to the November election, but Calabresi was making a point. Here is the Trump tweet that prompted his ire:

“With Universal Mail-in Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good) 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history.  It will be a great embarrassment to the USA.  Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???”

The tweet was published, not coincidentally, I believe, the same day the U.S. economy contracted at its steepest pace since the Great Depression, the coronavirus death toll reached 150,000 and three former presidents warmly and eloquently eulogized an American hero who nearly died defending the right to vote five decades ago. 

Not the best day for Donald Trump to suggest illegally delaying the November presidential election.

The White House tried to walk back the tweet, claiming the president was only raising a question while the Democrats were “proposing an entirely new system (of massive mail-in voting) that will result in enormous delays in the election results.”  (The “new system” was first proposed by President Lincoln to let soldiers vote in the 1864 election.)

There is little doubt that the coronavirus will still be impacting large sections of the nation on Election Day and the Democrats have at least proposed a safer way to help people vote. The mail-in ballot will certainly slow the vote-counting process, but the president and both parties should be doing all they can to make it as efficient as possible.

Or come up with a better way to hold an election on Nov. 3, 2020. 

As noted above, while all this was going on, former presidents Obama, Bush and Clinton were honoring the memory of Congressman John Lewis, whose life nearly ended five decades earlier when state troopers beat him almost to death as he and other voting-rights demonstrators tried to march across a bridge in Selma, Ala.

“We live in a better and nobler country today because of John Lewis,” said the last Republican president, George W. Bush.

Trump wasn’t at Lewis’s funeral, but in an interview released a few days later, Axios reporter Jonathan Swan asked him about Lewis’s legacy and whether the president found his life impressive. Trump’s response:

“He didn’t come to my inauguration. He didn’t come to my State of the Union speeches. And that’s OK. That’s his right. And again, nobody’s done more for Black Americans than I have.” 

It makes you wonder how many other true Republicans are becoming as disenchanted as Professor Calabresi and waiting to express their disappointment, perhaps on a mail-in ballot Nov. 3.

Simsbury resident Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. Email him at rahles1@outlook.com.