Jeff Greenfield writes:

That breeze you felt recently was a national sigh of relief that the 2020 election might finally, at long last, be over. Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and the other close states have, or soon will have, certified the results. Judges have unceremoniously thrown out the dubious legal claims that thousands, or hundreds of thousands or millions of votes should be disallowed. Foreign leaders and business tycoons are reaching out to President-elect Joe Biden, and that General Services Administration bureaucrat—with the reluctant approval of President Donald Trump—is finally allowing the mechanics of the transition to begin. On Tuesday, the Dow cracked 30,000, in an apparent celebration of stability.

The guardrails held, right?

Not so fast. Though it appears the rightful winner is heading to the White House in January, this postelection season has revealed that those “guardrails” are dangerously weak, and in some cases nonexistent. It was heartening to see state and local officials of both parties, and state and federal judges, resist the demands of Trump and his allies to reject the results. But the fact that it came to that at all is troubling—and shows just how plausible it would be for things to break the other way next time.

It takes no great leap into speculation to show that Trump has taught his would-be successors very powerful lessons in just how to steal an election. Indeed, he’s shown that there’s already political and judicial structure in place that will make it far easier to pull off in elections to come, at least for Republicans, who hold most of the reins in state legislatures. Like the German military who saw the Spanish Civil War as a testing ground for the Luftwaffe, the GOP may come to see 2020 as the election that illuminated the path to seizing power over the will of American voters. [Continue reading…]