Jordan keeps pushing falsehoods

U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan isn't like the boy in "The Emperor's New Clothes" who calls out the ruler for his nakedness. No, Jordan pretends that the bareness of President Donald Trump's claims of election fraud isn't laughable precisely because others are gullible enough to believe it happened. "We have more than a third of the electorate which believes the election was stolen," Jordan, R-Urbana, said Dec. 16 in an interview on Newsmax. "That is not a healthy situation for the nation. So for that reason alone we should be doing everything we can to investigate this. We should be having more hearings so we can get to the truth and reassure the American people that in the future we're not going to have the kind of complications and problems and shenanigans that went on in this election." Funny how many times the supposed thievery already has been investigated and dismissed as unsubstantiated. Jordan, who represents Elyria, Amherst, Oberlin and other communities in central and western Lorain County, wants Congress to pursue the matter further Wednesday, when it's scheduled to certify the Electoral College vote and the victory of the Democratic candidate, President-elect Joe Biden. Already, of course: • Officials in states where Trump contested his losses have certified election results, sometimes after recounts. • Federal and state courts have rejected virtually all of Team Trump's objections to results. • Former U.S. Attorney General William Barr, a Trump appointee, has said the U.S. Justice Department found nothing to suggest widespread voter fraud sufficient to overturn election results. • Christopher Krebs, former director of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and another Trump appointee, deemed the presidential election "the most secure in American history," a pronouncement that promptly got him fired. (For the offense of seeing with the same unbiased eyes as the boy who "undressed" the emperor.) If Jordan were really concerned that too many Americans believe fraud tainted the presidential election, he would do everything in his power to disabuse them of that notion and to discredit Trump, even though he's a fellow Republican. But Jordan is using his power for a nakedly political purpose: to please Trump and his most ardent supporters. Jordan has been rumored as a possible primary challenger to Republican Gov. Mike DeWine in 2022, and he surely knows that Trump diehards are likely to remember fondly his determination to "get to the truth" about Trump's defeat. Politically tainted investigations, by the way, are a specialty of Jordan's. Think of Benghazi. Until last week Jordan and other GOP representatives determined to challenge the Electoral College results had not gotten a public commitment from a U.S. senator to join them. Members of both houses must object to force debate. But Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, did so Wednesday. Like Jordan, he is considered a potential candidate for higher office, the presidency in his case, perhaps as soon as 2024. Another ambitious Republican senator, Ted Cruz of Texas, announced Saturday that he's leading a related effort to challenge the results. A successful challenge is all but inconceivable because both houses of Congress would have to vote to overturn the results, a step the Democrat-controlled House has no incentive to take. Which serves only to make plain the nakedness of the objectors' schemes: They want to prove their loyalty to Trump and force other GOP legislators to choose between supporting him and the candidate the voters elected: Biden. The choice could be especially agonizing for those up for reelection in 2022, such as Sen. Rob Portman, R-Cincinnati. Jordan, Hawley, Cruz and the other objectors risk ruining their credibility because they're pursuing "complications and problems and shenanigans" — to use Jordan's phrase — that Team Trump had ample time to document in courts and either failed to do so or failed to convince judges were worthy of a remedy as drastic as overturning an election. Worse is the damage they threaten to do to the faith citizens deserve to have in the central rite of democracy: voting. To say the election went off without a hitch would be absurd. Nothing humans do is utterly free of error. But the country, with the help of state election officials dedicated to their task, nonetheless achieved something remarkable during a pandemic: the casting of more votes for president than ever before in the nation's history, based on a turnout that was the highest in a century. Election officials tested the results repeatedly and repeatedly found them dependable, with courts agreeing. To amplify Trump's falsehoods about a stolen election or add to them at this point is shameful. It is a refusal to recognize a success that should make Americans proud of their democracy. It is a refusal to say that the emperor has no clothes. Andy Young is editor emeritus of The Chronicle-Telegram. Contact him at (440) 329-7111 or ayoung@chroniclet.com.