Detroit Free Press editorial: MI Republicans are riding stolen election lies to political oblivion

(Detroit Free Press) In January 2021, four days after the now-infamous assault on the U.S. Capitol, the Free Press published an editorial documenting the roles 28 Michigan Republicans had played in the unsuccessful attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Headlined “People of the lie,” the editorial described how a small group of elected leaders and GOP operatives in our state plotted to prevent the presidential candidate Michigan voters preferred from succeeding the incumbent he had defeated – first by pressing bogus claims of election fraud, then by delaying certification of county and statewide election results, and finally by seeking to invalidate the electoral votes Joe Biden had won in other swing states.

Like most Americans, we had been shaken by what fact-finders would subsequently expose as a coup attempt months in the making, and we thought it important to memorialize the complicity of Michigan Republicans. But our outrage was tempered by the recognition that a critical mass of principled Republican officials had refused to participate. So in addition to pillorying the 28 who had abetted the scheme, our editorial saluted eight GOP leaders who had upheld our state’s election laws and helped assure the peaceful transfer of presidential power. In their honorable conduct, we found reason to believe Michigan’s democratic institutions would withstand a lawless cabal’s efforts to undermine them.

We harbored no illusion that a post-Trump Republican Party would abandon the policies and priorities the former president had during his four years in the White House. But was it so naïve to hope that Michigan’s next generation of GOP leaders would look more like Liz Cheney, and less like, say, Marjorie Taylor Greene?

Apparently it was. ..............(more)

https://www.freep.com/story/opinion/editorials/2022/10/02/editorial-michigan-republicans-riding-stolen-election-lies-to-defeat/69531227007/