The Jan. 6 hearings show vividly an ongoing threat to democracy

Fraudulent efforts to sabotage the mechanisms of our democracy persist.

The words of witnesses in Tuesday’s hearing of the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol expose the attempts — and news items from across the U.S. this week further illustrate it.

In Texas, the Republican Party approved a 2022 platform that rejects the legitimacy of President Joe Biden’s election win — and baselessly warns of Democratic fraud in upcoming midterm elections. In Missouri, Senate candidate and former Gov. Eric Greitens released a video of him with a shotgun suggesting he’d “hunt” Republicans in Name Only. 

In New York, none of four Republicans debating Monday for the party’s nomination for governor managed to muster a full-throated assurance that, despite former President Donald Trump’s fraudulent effort to reverse his loss at the polls, Biden legitimately won the race.

The hearings Tuesday meanwhile continued to expose a startling pattern and plan by Trump to reverse his loss. Trump has spread this brand of poison from his perch atop the GOP — and so many of the state and local officials he and his lawyers harassed, abused and tried to manipulate into illegal service were, and are, hard-core Republicans.

Compelling, emotional testimony came from 69-year-old Arizona House of Representatives Speaker Rusty Bowers, a longtime GOP admirer of Ronald Reagan. He took a call one Sunday after the election from Trump and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, pushing Bowers to try to decertify his state’s legitimate Electoral College members. Bowers had just returned from church, he said, and described in bedrock conservative language why he refused their dubious entreaties: “It is a tenet of my faith that the Constitution is divinely inspired.”

One young Trump campaign staffer, Robert Sinners, recruited as a fake "elector" for the president — with phony "certificates" and all — in a scheme to supplant real Electoral College members, told the committee: "We are just kind of useful idiots or rubes at that point."

Similar statements came from Pennsylvania's legislative leaders. The already-storied GOP Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Republican election official Gabriel Sterling added to the pile of eyewitness testimony about the attempted fix.

All received foul threats. The most disgraceful instance was revealed in the emotional testimony of Georgia's Shaye Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman — election workers Trump and Giuliani falsely accused of nonexistent crimes. They were forced into hiding and faced racist death threats from Trump loyalists.

Facts new and old are forming a vivid picture of a deliberate plot. It's becoming clear that Republican Party members, in particular, must choose between the strong electoral institutions they once upheld and those seeking actively to undermine them.

If more true patriots don’t join in actively snuffing out Trump's hoaxes by adhering to the example of these witnesses, future election results will be more endangered than the last ones.