Republicans eat one of their own

You could bury yourself under a pile of "My Pillows" and still hear them licking their chops.

Michigan State Senator Ed McBroom on his dairy farm.

You’ve probably never heard of Ed McBroom, but you should remember his name.  He’s the Republican state senator from Michigan who authored the report by the senate Oversight Committee on whether there had been fraud in the 2020 presidential election.  A story by Tim Alberta just published in the Atlantic details his investigation of the election and the slings and arrows he has suffered since his report came out.  Alberta reports, “His committee interviewed scores of witnesses, subpoenaed and reviewed thousands of pages of documents, dissected the procedural mechanics of Michigan’s highly decentralized elections system, and scrutinized the most trafficked claims about corruption at the state’s ballot box in November. McBroom’s conclusion hit Lansing like a meteor: It was all a bunch of nonsense.”

That was his second mistake.  His first mistake was being one of them.  McBroom could best be described as an arch-conservative.  He is a farmer from the state’s most conservative region, the Upper Peninsula.  He is and always has been staunchly anti-abortion.  The American Conservative Union gave him a strong endorsement for voting with the goals of that organization 95 percent of the time, the highest rating it gave to any Michigan state legislator.  He is the music director of his Baptist church.  He heads up an extended family of 14:  his wife and their five children, plus the seven children and widow of his brother who died in a car accident in 2018.  In short, he is a kind of idealized Republican – a family man who embraces family values and all the issues good Republicans used to care about.

Except one.  His report on the Michigan election of 2020 did not track with the ravings of Donald J. Trump. McBroom took on all of the conspiracy crap Trump and his conspiratorialists have been pushing about the state, that dead people had voted, that more than a hundred thousand people voted in Detroit than there were voters registered in the city, that there had been a late night dump of absentee ballots and that those ballots (at least the ones for Biden) had been counted multiple times, that Dominion voting machines in Antrim County had switched votes from Trump to Biden.  His findings?  No dead people voted, all the voters and voting rolls matched up, there was no “dump” of suspicious ballots at midnight, and the tabulation of the vote in Antrim County was accurate and Trump had won the county by 3,800 votes. 

In his report, McBroom wrote “The Committee finds [that] those promoting Antrim County as the prime evidence of a nationwide conspiracy to steal the election place all other statements and actions they make in a position of zero credibility.”  According to the Atlantic, McBroom went further and “stunned his GOP colleagues by referring to Michigan’s attorney general for possible prosecution ‘those who have been utilizing misleading and false information about Antrim County to raise money or publicity for their own ends.’”

McBroom’s report doesn’t make this specification, but if such a prosecution were to be undertaken, among those who spread “misleading and false information” would be Donald Trump, who made reference to the fake charges about Antrim County, Michigan, in his address to his mob of followers on the Ellipse only moments before he sent them on their march to the Capitol.

McBroom has been accused of all manner of crimes against the Big Lie since his report was published, including trying to silence his fellow Republicans and legitimizing Biden’s win.  “Fraud is fraud,” McBroom told the Atlantic.  “If they lied to people to make money off people, that’s a crime.”  He has received hostile emails and texts and late night phone calls accusing him of being “bought off” by China and being in the pocket of Joe Biden.  Several of the late night calls have been threatening, making him worry about leaving his family alone on the farm when he is in the state capital, Lansing, doing his job as a senator.

“I’ve encountered some folks who are like, ‘Maybe it’s time to rise up’—you know, ‘refreshing the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots,’ that stuff,” McBroom told Alberta. “And I say to them, ‘Are you seriously going to go looking for people with Biden signs in their yards? I mean, is that what you’re going to do? Make a list? Is this what this is coming to? You’re ready to go out and fight your neighbors? Because I don’t think you really are. I think you’re talking stupid.’”

The Atlantic piece closes with these grim lines uttered by a conservative dairy farmer from Michigan who has stared into the maw of the Trump base and come away frightened by what he saw. “These are good people, and they’re being lied to, and they’re believing the lies, and it’s really dangerous.”