Lawsuit support says nothing good

Oh, good grief.

Anyone who has spent five minutes with Rep. Jim Banks, read his press releases, or looked at his voting record knows that he prides himself on being a conservative Republican.

What we did not know was that he was willing to help undermine democracy in America so that his party could hang onto the White House.

Rep. Banks, in case you missed it, was one of five Indiana members of Congress who joined an amicus brief calling on the Supreme Court to hear a loony lawsuit brought by the attorney general of Texas that would have tossed out the votes from four states that happened to favor Joe Biden over Donald Trump.

Legal observers had made it clear that the lawsuit was completely without merit. No credible evidence was ever provided of voter fraud that could have changed the outcome of the election.

So it’s no surprise that the Supreme Court declined to hear the case at all.

Joe Biden is president-elect of the United States of America.

Donald Trump lost by 7 million votes.

An American election was conducted securely and fairly. And we should be proud of that as a nation.

But what does it say about Republican politicians like Jim Banks that they were so willing to put party over country, that they participated in an ongoing attempt to undermine confidence in this country’s electoral process and that they suggested — even for a moment — that Americans in four states should be disenfranchised simply because the current occupant of the White House didn’t like the outcome?

There will be plenty of spin in the weeks ahead that this was all just a Republican effort to assure election security. Don’t believe it.

Instead, it was a borderline seditious effort to cripple this country’s democratic institutions.

And what does it say about Jim Banks that he was a part of it all? Nothing good. — J.R.