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ANALYSIS

Russian interference: Donald Trump threatens to wreck US democracy. Republicans are helping.

The events we've seen in the run-up to the inauguration of Donald Trump have only confirmed that he represents a threat to our democracy and governing norms in multiple unprecedented ways. But this isn't just a story about Donald Trump. It's also a story about congressional Republicans.

Trump is doing all he can to discredit the apparent CIA conclusion that Russia tried to interfere in our election, which might make a true accounting of this apparently unprecedented assault on our democracy harder. He continues to suggest he will do little to address all the potential conflicts of interests -- and possibility of corruption -- that are developing around his global business interests on a mind-boggling scale.

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Meet three of the men likely to be working at the top of US President-elect Donald Trump's administration- all of whom have affiliations with Russia.

He continues to claim -- after the election -- that millions voted illegally, to sow confusion and doubt about the real meaning of the outcome and the integrity of our political process.

Yet there are steps congressional Republicans could take to mitigate the damage of those things, but aren't:

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1. Republicans are already signalling they may hamstring efforts to get to the bottom of Russian interference. While Republicans say they want a vigorous probe of what happened, some appear to be taking steps that make this less likely. Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan want to run the probes through their respective bodies' intelligence committees. But as Demirjian reports, this means more GOP "control" over the course of the probes, and they are resisting calls for more bipartisan, independent forms the investigations could take. What's more, there is no indication that the findings of more limited probes would ever be made public.

Notably, even some Republicans -- such as John McCain -- also want more vigorous, independent investigations. Meanwhile, the position of GOP leaders such as Paul Ryan is logically absurd on its face: They claim that Russian interference would constitute an unacceptable attack on our democratic process, even as they appear to be disinclined towards steps that would make a full accounting more likely.

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Let's be clear on what's really at stake here. There is nothing wrong with Republicans expressing skepticism about the CIA's charge of Russian interference; it is unproven. Rather, what's at issue is whether we are going to determine whether this actually happened.

What's more, there is no imaginable scenario under which an accounting of Russian interference would change the election results. Rather, an accounting would make it easier to prevent an outcome (interference in our election) that Republicans themselves say is unacceptable from happening again.

2. Congressional Republicans are not taking steps to blunt Trump's conflicts of interest. Trump has now confirmed that he will transfer his businesses to his two sons. This does nothing to eliminate the possibility of conflicts of interest and indeed corruption later. But more to the point, it reaffirms the need for more transparency into Trump's holdings. Now that we know his sons will control them, we know there are going to be conflicts -- but, because we don't have a full sense of the scope and details of those holdings, we won't have a way of knowing whether these conflicts are taking place in many given situations. And we won't have a way to gauge the extent to which those interests -- his family's interests -- are benefiting from Trump's policy choices.

There are multiple things that congressional Republicans could do right away to, at a minimum, try to compel the sort of transparency that would improve this situation. They aren't doing them, and there are no signs this is going to change.

3. Republicans are standing by while Trump erodes confidence in our electoral system. Republicans have lied about vote fraud for years, to justify voter suppression efforts. But Trump has taken this to an unprecedented level. After claiming in advance that the election's outcome would be illegitimate (if he lost), he has since claimed that he won the popular vote but for the millions who voted illegally. This was obviously designed to inflate impressions of his popular support and continue sowing doubt about the integrity of the voting, perhaps to justify a future wave of voter suppression.

Given the chance to confirm that, no, millions of people did not vote illegally, both Ryan and incoming White House chief of staff Reince Priebus took a pass.

It's often argued that previous presidents -- including President Obama -- helped set the stage for the further erosion of norms we're likely to see under Trump. There's some truth to this. Obama could have taken more steps to close the legal door on many expansive tactics that George W. Bush put in place to fight the war on terror, and now we may see Trump expand them further, in horrifying ways. It's also true that the accretion of executive power and the erosion of checks on it have been part of a bipartisan trend long in the making.

But in the specific areas above, we're seeing something new and different. We're looking at the possibility of an unprecedented undermining of the integrity of our democracy; of mind-blowingly extensive corruption; and of a massive erosion of the very possibility of agreement on basic facts about our political outcomes. This goes well beyond anything we've seen in recent history, not only in the specifics, but even more so in the aggregate. And, presuming this will continue, the behaviour of congressional Republicans in response to it should be seen as an integral part of that story.

Washington Post

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