I've never been prouder to not be a Republican.
— John Pavlovitz (@johnpavlovitz) January 7, 2022
On November 22, 2000, a group of well-dressed Republican
protesters descended on a government office building in Miami. They were there
to protest the Miami-Dade County Canvassing Board's recount in the disputed
presidential race between Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush. They
wanted to stop what they regarded as a steal, and they were prepared to resort
to violence to do it.
The Brooks Brothers riot revived a new blueprint for electoral disputes, one that openly deployed violence and intimidation to frighten officials into discarding legitimate votes. Like the January 6, 2021 pro-Trump siege on the US Capitol, it was sought to replace the rule of law with mob rule.
And like that brazen assault on democracy, it was orchestrated at the top levels of the GOP. The weapon-toting, MAGA hat-clad insurrectionists of 2021 directly descend from the buttoned-down, stop-the-steal rioters of 2000.
The participants of the demonstration, primarily organized by senior Bush campaign official Brad Blakeman, became irate that the three-member canvassing board had gone to an upstairs room out of the public view and entered the building to vocally protest the process.
When local Democratic official Joe Geller went downstairs to get a blank sample ballot to demonstrate something to his colleagues, he was surrounded by the protesters who loudly accused him of stealing a voters' ballot and hounded him all the way back upstairs.
Both he and then-Democratic operative Luis Rosera got caught up in a scuffle and described being kicked and punched by the increasingly unwieldy crowd, The New York Times reported, with sheriffs' deputies having to intervene to quell the brouhaha and escort the canvassing board to safety.
The incident, which is now often referred to as the Brooks Brothers riot or rebellion, intimidated the board into suspending their already-scaled back recount altogether, resulting in many votes going uncounted and lost in the "what-ifs" of history.
The insurrection waged by Trump supporters on Congress' joint session to count electoral votes, while significantly more physically violent and destructive, harkens back to the echoes of that day in downtown Miami.
No doubt Pavlovitz, an author and Unitarian-Universalist minister, means well. However, the Republican Party he recognizes as deeply flawed is the Republican Party of 2000 and even the GOP of 1980. It's the Republican Party of George W. Bush, Ronald(6) Wilson(6) Reagan(6), Joe Scarborough, and even Dick Cheney. Donald Trump has taken the reins of that same party and put it on steroids, enhancing its corruption and bringing it into public view..
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