Emmer knows Biden won, which means he knows Trump committed a crime against democracy

U.S. Rep. Tom Emmer, who represents the 6th District and has risen quickly in Congress to become the Republican majority whip, is all-in with the coup plotters. 

In the hours after former President Donald Trump was again indicted — this time charged by a grand jury for conspiring to overturn the Georgia election he lost — Emmer charged:

What we’re not falling for is that Emmer actually believes any of this. 

He voted to certify the election results on Jan. 6, which is an acknowledgment that President Joe Biden won the election. 

Having accepted Biden as the winner, Emmer must somehow pretend that Trump made no effort to illegally overturn the results, even though Trump has been talking about it for years. 

No doubt Emmer heard the relevant bits of the phone call Trump made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, in which Trump sought to “find” the votes necessary to win Georgia and made vague threats of criminal liability should Raffensperger not accede to his demands. 

And Emmer must also be familiar with the fake electors, and Trump’s effort to persuade Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election. “The American people deserve to know that President Trump and his advisers didn’t just ask me to pause — they asked me to reject votes, return votes, essentially to overturn the election,” Pence said recently. 

When Pence refused, Trump’s supporters — with a wink and a nod from Trump — went hunting for him in the Capitol, looking to harm him. Surely Emmer is familiar with all this. It’s been in the news. 

And if Biden won the election, as Emmer’s vote acknowledged, and if we know Trump sought to overturn the results and keep himself in power, then Emmer must surely know that the former president committed the gravest crime imaginable of an American president. It’s the crime of a would-be tyrant who violated our most profound principle of self-governance. We pick our rulers. If we reject an elected official, they leave office. 

Emmer knows that, which means he also knows the hard-working law enforcement officers and prosecutors who have rounded up all the evidence on Trump are just doing their duty to keep the country free, and that claiming these honorable Americans are mere pawns being “weaponized” by Democrats is a smear. 

Emmer knows this. He’s not a fool. 

But if he knows all this, then why would he continue to defend Trump? 

Because Trump is a great man, a man of character who is deserving of the weighty office of the presidency? I’m not falling for it, Emmer. 

Last year’s elections were something of a proxy for how we considered the Republican attack on democracy. (It also proved to be an up-or-down vote on GOP efforts to ban abortion.) The public largely rejected Trump’s authoritarianism, especially in swing districts and swing states. 

But now Trump will be on the ballot, and to Emmer and every Republican running for the Legislature down to the GOP dogcatcher, the question must be posed: What should the consequences be for conspiring to overturn democracy?