"He's picked a battle he can't win. It's just a matter of time. The only thing we don't know is how long it will take — and whether it will be peaceful or bloody."
That was Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, speaking in January 2019 of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who was doing everything in his power to stay in office following a national election.
Nearly two years later, Rubio and Sen. Rick Scott — also a vocal Maduro critic — are enabling a wannabe strongman who's refusing to concede an American election, once again sowing chaos and confusion.
Rubio and Scott say what they're really concerned about is whether the U.S. presidential election was held fairly and squarely. As much as we'd like to believe that, they've bowed and scraped before Donald Trump since the day of his election.
Now they're busy sowing national doubt about Trump's defeat by Joe Biden, a Democratic victory that looks to be equal to or more decisive than Trump's win in 2016.
They — along with the lion's share of the Republican Party — refuse to acknowledge the numbers before their very eyes. They could acknowledge that and Biden's status as president-elect while simultaneously saying legal challenges need to play out. That's not what they're doing.
Instead, they're undermining the results at every turn, along with virtually every other prominent figure in Florida politics, from Gov. Ron DeSantis to Attorney General Ashley Moody to Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis.
DeSantis made the shocking and un-American suggestion that Republican legislatures bypass voters and just pick their own winner. Patronis went so far as to post a meme suggesting all Democrats cheat when it comes to voting. Disgusting. Moody joined nine other states in a GOP lawsuit to throw out Pennsylvania ballots received after Election Day because the state had extended the deadline. Predictably, the party isn't making a fuss over North Carolina, where Trump is leading, for doing the very same thing.
Florida's senators and state leaders either don't understand the long-term damage they're doing to this nation or they don't care. We suspect it's the latter.
They've joined with Republicans across the nation to gin up some kind of widespread election wrongdoing or, alternatively, treat seriously accusations that have yet to yield any substantive evidence, with a goal of either keeping Trump in office despite his loss or temporarily salving his wounded ego.
All of this to protect a president who, the day after the election, declared on Twitter his campaign had "claimed" several states as wins, even though the vote counting wasn't close to being finished. In one tweet he wrote "we hereby claim the state of Michigan ... " — a state where Biden now holds a 150,000-vote lead. The very next day, he was tweeting a demand to "STOP THE COUNT!" Maduro would be proud.
All of this is particularly ironic for Rubio, who once called Trump, among other things, a "con artist." Who's doing the conning now, senator?
Keep in mind that all of this doubt-sowing is taking place as Biden's lead grows in Georgia — Georgia! — as well as in Pennsylvania and Nevada. Depending on which electoral map you choose, Biden is projected to already have won either 279 or 290 electoral votes, more than the 270 needed to win.
He is the president-elect, just as Donald Trump was the president-elect in 2016, which then-President Barack Obama acknowledged with an invitation to the White House.
So far, none of the Trump campaign's legal challenges have gone anywhere. In fact, a much-discussed allegation by a postal worker in Pennsylvania turned out to be a fabrication. (But not before a GoFundMe page had raised $136,000 to help the worker.)
This is the field — unproven or false allegations that elections in multiple states were rigged — on which Florida's Republican Party has chosen to go to war against the institution that works on behalf of voters to select our leaders.
The consequences of what the party is doing today will likely haunt our nation in every subsequent election.
Florida's Republican leaders should feel a deep sense of shame for undermining the essential ideals of America, starting with the truth.
But that assumes they have any shame remaining.
They don't. It's been replaced by a lust for power.
