It is impossible to deny that there is an equivalence between former President Donald Trump and the Democratic Party when it comes to threats against democracy, something that Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) is happy to remind us time and time again.
Raskin is now claiming the Department of Justice should force Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas to recuse themselves from cases involving Trump and Jan. 6 riot defendants. Thomas’s crime is having a wife who has her own opinions, and Alito’s crime is that he flew a flag that was flown by San Francisco up until a few days ago. Based on those media hit jobs, Raskin wants to prevent both of them from ruling on cases, which conveniently works in Raskin’s favor by pushing the court toward his preferred outcomes.
“But Raskin is simply one House member. You cannot compare him to a former (and potentially once-again) president in Trump,” you may say. And yes, in a vacuum, you would have a point. Sure, Raskin is authoritarian to his bones in demanding that a Democratic administration prevent Supreme Court justices he disagrees with from ruling on matters. Yes, he is an election denier who tried to overturn the results of the 2016 election before it became the liberal media’s No. 1 crime. Yes, he does want to destroy the entire election system as it currently exists because his team doesn’t win every single time, but he is just one House member.
There are two problems with that simplistic view, though. For one, Raskin is one of the most important Democrats in Congress, according to his own party, being named the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee in 2022 and being named to the Jan. 6 commission, his own election-denying history be damned. Secondly, far more Democrats than just Raskin believe the Supreme Court and our electoral system should be forcibly bent to their whims through court-packing, media hit jobs against justices, overriding state election laws because of “voter suppression,” and more.
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And, yes, as many conservatives have been hammering for years now, Raskin’s election-denying is just as much the norm in the Democratic Party as the GOP. Indeed, this has been the case for far longer. Prominent Democrats delegitimized presidential losses in 2000, 2004, and 2016, as well as other races, including Georgia’s governor race, in which Democrats indulged and agreed with Stacey Abrams’s evidence-free claims that the race was stolen from her.
Like it or not, Trump is a mirror of many of the same toxic views the Democratic Party has held for years, even to the point of his moral responsibility for riots (remember Kamala Harris helping bail out violent rioters in Minneapolis during the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020?). You cannot sanctimoniously anoint yourself a defender of democracy while uncritically boosting the Democratic Party and its sore loser, “burn it down if it doesn’t make us win” mindset of Raskin that has been blossoming in the party since the turn of the century.