“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.” – Thomas Paine, The American Crisis.

Today, we owe our freedom and way of life to some true and heroic patriots, the Republican judges, secretaries of state, poll workers, and even donors, who put their country ahead of their party in a way that would have brought Thomas Paine to tears.

They deserve our thanks and respect, and I will vote for these Republicans every time I can and for the rest of my voting life. I might even join the party to check it out for a while.

The hypocritic and cowardly Republican Senators and congressmen men and women in Washington who hid and remained silent during this nightmare will go down in history with Benedict Arnold until now our most notorious and reviled traitor.

History is our final judge and will call him and some of his craven followers to account.

Trump not only turned on us, and our country, but on people and public servants who voted for him, donated money to him, and defended him for four years.

He has no love for anyone in the world but himself and is missing the soul necessary to be a complete human being.

He is a traitor to everything we hold dear about living freely and governing fairly and to everyone with a conscience and love of country.

The past few weeks tested our democracy in a new and frightening way. We learned that our two-century-old system, the pride of our democracy,  is much more vulnerable to people with no integrity or moral values than anyone had imagined.

I don’t use the word traitor lightly, but Trump is a traitor and so are some Republican leaders. A traitor, says the legal direction is “a person who betrays a friend, country, principle.”

In his raging war against or election process, Trump is guilty of all three crimes.

Finally, words matter and so do facts. It’s time to speak the truth and stand behind it.

Even though the incumbent President lost the election by six million votes nationwide, and has been rejected by nearly a score of Republican judges,  he continues to claim this honest election was fraudulent and continues to sow distrust and hatred for the very soul of our democracy – elections.

Our system stood firm and strong against the most intense assault ever by a dishonest and unscrupulous president in the country’s history. It was honest Republicans who saved it more than anyone else except voters.

“What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly,” wrote Paine, “it is dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods, and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.”

It is a strange thing.

Donald Trump gave us a whopping lesson in responsibility in the grinding days and weeks since the election.

We came to our freedom too cheaply and esteemed it too lightly. All tyranny needs to gain a foothold, said Jefferson, is for people of good conscience to stay silent.

Some of us – many of us – learned this lesson about speaking out and will take it to heart. Silence is indeed complicity, wrote Desmond Tutu. “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

Democrats and others fought back against Trump’s outrageous assault on the very structure and soul of this country.

But it was because of a Republican city clerk in Michigan, a Republican secretary of state in Georgia, a Republican county supervisor in Arizona, and mostly Republican judges and Republican donors and governors and attorneys general who stopped him in his traitorous tracks.

They showed the kind of courage and patriotism that built our country in the first place and they deserve credit and recognition for it.

They revealed the rotting soul of the Republican Party establishment and the integrity and patriotism of much of its core.

“Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy,” Judge Stephanos Bibas wrote for a three-judge panel of the Third Circuit Court Of Appeals in Philadelphia on Friday when it dismissed the lastest of dozens of spurious legal claims filed by Trump and his equally treasonous allies.

“Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so,” said the judge. “Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”

Donald Trump appointed Judge Bibas to the federal judiciary in 2017. Trump also appointed his fellow justices on the appeals court.

Many in the media and politics were painfully slow to call out Donald Trump on his lies for several years, and our country is paying the price for it now.

Not one single Republican senator or congressperson mustered the courage or will to support or defend the scores of Republicans all over the country who defended our constitution under the greatest pressure and threats.

They saved the election’s integrity, no longer in dispute by any sane, honest, or freedom-loving person.

“Listen,” wrote moral philosopher Hannah Arendt, speaking of the fascism that tore the world apart in the 1930s and ’40s, “nothing is not an option. Those who don’t fight wrongdoing are ultimately accomplices.”

The Republican men and women who defied Trump and his treasonous army have been threatened, assaulted, and badly bruised by the experience.

In many cases, reports the New York Times, millions of voters now question our political system and accept Trump’s claim that Biden’s presidency is illegitimate. Trump and many of his supporters promise vengeance and retribution, labeling their acts of conscience as disloyal to a dishonest President.

If there is any justice in the world, and I believe there is, Trump will pay for these crimes against democracy, either in this world or the next.

It’s important to know that those who have spoken out on behalf of our freedom have expressed no regrets. The Republican Party is so much better than the people who lead it.

The Times tells the harrowing, even tragic,  story of Tina Barton, who got a phone call in November she said would have been ridiculous if it had not been so serious.

It was from Donald Trump’s campaign asking that she sign a letter raising doubts about the November election results.

Tina Barton is the Republican clerk of the small Michigan city of Rochester Hills, and she helped oversee the election in that city. She knew the election was fair and accurate because she did her job in helping make it so.

The threats and insults she received after she defended the results caused her to upgrade her home security system out of fear for her family’s safety.

“Do you know who you’re talking to right now?” she asked the Trump campaign official.

Many National Republicans accepted or pretended to accept Trump’s demonstrably false and unproven charges of a multinational conspiracy run by Joe Biden to defeat him.

So did much of the slavish conservative media. Trump’s lawyers were laughed or run out of the courtroom after courtroom by mostly Republican judges who often tossed their lawsuits in the most scathing terms.

Republicans in Congress mumbled platitudes or hid from reporters. Some secretly called Joe Biden to congratulate him.

Republicans at the state and local level choose to serve their country, not their supposed leader and the alleged champion of the free world.

“I’ve got a pretty thick skin,” Barton told the Times, “but it’s hard not to feel shook by it all,” she said. “We take our job so seriously that it’s devastating to us to have something like that happen. I cried every day for a week, every time I thought about it. My biggest concern was, we’re already living in a time when so many people have so little confidence in the process, and to give them more reason not to trust the results was absolutely devastating to me.”

In Arizona, where Trump supporters complained that the use of Sharpie pens invalidated ballots because they bled through paper, Clint Hickman,  the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors and a Republican, sent an open letter to a colleague saying they were concerned about “the misinformation spreading about the integrity of our elections.”

Mark Brnovich, the state’s Republican attorney general and a likely candidate to run for governor in 2022 announced he would investigate the use of the Sharpies. A day later, he tweeted that he was satisfied that the pens did not influence the election in any way.

The state’s Democratic secretary of state received threats to kill her family and pets and burn down her house. Hickman issued another letter calling on Republicans to “dial back the rhetoric, rumors and false claims.”

But Donald Trump rejected those pleas from Republicans.

Rusty Bowers, the Republican speaker of the Arizona state House of Representatives, refused to bow to what he called “an enormous amount of pressure” for lawmakers to choose their own electors to support Trump.

“I took an oath to support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution and the laws of the state of Arizona,” he said.

In Georgia, President Trump and his allies were thwarted by Brad Raffensperger, the Republican Secretary of State and a loyal and committed Trump supporter.

Raffensperger, like almost all of the federal judges appointed by Trump, is a staunch conservative who was endorsed by the President when he ran for office two years ago and promised to protect the voting system from illegal immigrants.

He was stunned when Trump and his supporters, joined by Republican Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, called for his resignation for defending the accuracy and integrity of the George vote, which Biden won narrowly.

Trump took Raffensperger to court. The dispute ended up in the court of United States District Court Judge Steven Grimberg, who was nominated by Trump and was a member of the Federalist Society, which has provided lists of conservatives from which the President has chosen his Supreme Court nominees.

The judge was visibly agitated by the lack of evidence from the Trump campaign showing any serious voter fraud in Georgia. He turned down the suit, noting it would require halting the certification results in a state election in which millions of people have voted.”

In fact, Trump and his campaign have filed lawsuit after lawsuit seeking states to do just that, disenfranchise millions of Americans who voted for Joe Biden. The Trump campaign did not ask judges to halt the certification in any voting districts were voted predominantly for Trump.

The next day, Raffenspberger became an American profile in courage and a patriot when he rejected the intense pressure he was under and certified Biden’s victory in Georgia. “Numbers don’t lie,” he said.

In Pennsylvania, Trump’s legal efforts to overturn the election there failed seven times in succession, mostly at the hands of Republican judges.

Two weeks ago, federal court Judge Matthew Brann, another Federalist Society member, and conservative Republican called the Trump team’s claim of fraud nothing more than “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations and refused to delay certification of the election.

“In the United States of America,” he wrote, “This cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state.”

One Democratic lawyer who was involved in defending the assault on the election told a reporter, “this period of time, with all the things that the Trump campaign were throwing, I viewed as very much a stress test on what I will shout from the rooftops is the best legal system the world has ever seen interms of independence, of the judiciary and the rule of law. At both the state and federal level, the system has come through with flying colors.”

But Constitutional scholars said it was close and could easily have been much worse.

People who care about our democracy are worried that many voters have lost confidence in our electoral system because of Trump’s lying and ranting.

It was primarily Republican voting officials and judges who rebuked and rebuffed Trump’s assault on tour electoral system, who has worked reliable and with trust since the birth of the Republic.

Even Emily Murphy, another Republican Trump supporter and the wary head of the General Services Administration went around Trump to authorize the formal transmission process last week, something Trump said he would never permit.

I believe the leaders of the Republican will pay for what can only be called treachery and sedition, if not worse. I’ve learned not to generalize about Republicans and Conservatives; I will look for every rational opportunity to vote form and be wary of hysterical generalizations about judges and elected officials.

I’m thinking about joining the Republican Party for a while, perhaps to support the good and honest people who saved our freedom from a tyrant with no conscience.

I think Trump has done the party a lot of harm in the Georgia Senate runoff elections. A friend of mine who works on the Atlanta-Constitution says the race for those two Senate seats is already closer than most people think, mostly because of Stacey Abrams and her phenomenal organizing efforts and because of Trump’s assaults on members of his own party.

Trump has already been defeated in Georgia, it is certainly possible for it to happen again.

It turned out that patriotism is real and strong and proved stronger than a madman grasping for power by any means at all costs. Until the election, I did not really believe Donald Trump was a grave threat to our democracy.

He was and is.

Oddly enough, the election has reaffirmed my faith in the strength of our democracy, not weakened. Thomas Paine is a hero of mine, and he was wise and strong about the perils and duties of democracy.

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, he wrote, gives it the superficial appearance of being right. But the tumult soon subsides, he wrote. Time makes more converts than reason.

I’ve never loved my country more or seen its flaws more clearly. Like Paine, independence is my happiness, and I try to view things as they are, without regard to person or label. My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.

We owe a lot of Republicans a lot of thanks.