On Saturday, Mr. Trump lost yet another court case, as a federal judge in Wisconsin, Judge Brett H. Ludwig, who was appointed to the court by Mr. Trump this year, said his claims “fail as a matter of law and fact.” The case was dismissed with prejudice, meaning Mr. Trump is barred from bringing cases on similar grounds in that district.
But civil rights attorneys saw the potential for long-lasting damage outside of the legal realm where the Republican efforts — and the lie that Mr. Biden’s win was the result of widespread fraud — have so definitively failed.
Republican state legislators across the country are already contemplating new laws to make voting harder, as they continue to falsely portray the expansion and ease of mail-in voting during the pandemic as nefarious. Many of them view this year’s expanded voting ranks as bad for their party, despite Republican successes further down the ballot. Their consideration of new voting restrictions amounts to an ongoing attack on the integrity of the voting system, involving still more false and debunked claims.
“There is an anti-democratic virus that has spread in mainstream Republicanism, among mainstream Republican elected officials,” said Dale Ho, director of the Voting Rights Project at the A.C.L.U. “And that loss of faith in the machinery of democracy is a much bigger problem than any individual lawsuit.”
Indeed, after the Supreme Court’s ruling, the Texas Republican Party effectively called for secession by red states whose attorneys general joined in the Texas suit.
“Perhaps law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the Constitution,” a statement from its chairman, Allen West, read. It followed an observation Rush Limbaugh made earlier in the week, when he said, “I actually think that we’re trending toward secession.”
The talk of secession came during a week in which election officials across the country, from both political parties, said they had become the subjects of menacing threats of violence, including to family members, for standing by Mr. Biden’s victory.
