Republicans continue the effort to break what’s left of democracy in the US.

Ted Cruz of Texas, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and nine other Republican US senators or senators-elect said on Saturday they will reject presidential electors from states where results are contested by Donald Trump’s campaign, “unless and until [an] emergency 10-day audit is completed”.

Which is anti-democracy, because they’re “contested” because Trump wants to steal the election. It’s like going into someone else’s house and screaming “This house is mine!!!” and then announcing that the ownership of the house is contested.

Cruz and Johnson were joined in issuing a statement on Saturday by Senators James Lankford (Oklahoma), Steve Daines (Montana), John Kennedy (Louisiana), Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee) and Mike Braun (Indiana).

Senators-elect Cynthia Lummis (Wyoming), Roger Marshall (Kansas), Bill Hagerty (Tennessee) and Tommy Tuberville (Alabama) also signed on.

“The election of 2020,” they said, “like the election of 2016, was hard fought and, in many swing states, narrowly decided. The 2020 election, however, featured unprecedented allegations of voter fraud, violations and lax enforcement of election law, and other voting irregularities.”

There again – the allegations are bogus. They’re just Trump screaming “This election is mine!!!”

Regardless, the senators said Congress “should immediately appoint an electoral commission, with full investigatory and fact-finding authority, to conduct an emergency 10-day audit of the election returns in the disputed states. Once completed, individual states would evaluate the commission’s findings and could convene a special legislative session to certify a change in their vote, if needed.”

The senators made reference to the most direct precedent for their demand, the contested election of 1876, which ended in the appointment of such a commission.

“We should follow that precedent,” the Republicans said.

Many well-informed voices would suggest that would be a bad idea, given that process led to a political deal which put an end to the process of Reconstruction and led to the institution of racist Jim Crow laws across the formerly slave-owning south

Unfortunately that’s what they like about it.

In August, the Pulitzer-winning historian Eric Foner told the Guardian: “The election of 1876 would not have been disputed at all if there hadn’t been massive violence in the south to prevent black people from voting and voter suppression like we have today. Now, voter suppression is mostly legal.”

Presciently, given claims by Trump and his supporters that mail-in voting used under a pandemic was widely abused by Democrats, he added: “Today, I can certainly see the Trump people challenging these mail-in ballots: ‘They’re all fraudulent, they shouldn’t be counted.’ Challenging people’s voting.”

Yay, we’ve gone back to 1876 and the murder of Reconstruction.