JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC

The Trump-created logjam finally broke today. Now we can move comfortably and confidently toward a Biden administration, starting Jan. 20.

After the Michigan State Board of Canvassers certified that state’s vote on a 3-0 vote — with one of two Republicans abstaining — GSA Administrator Emily Murphy, one of Trump’s front-line blockers — threw in the towel and allowed the formal transition to begin.

I’ve got to admit that although I was asserting last week that everything would be okay, Team Trump was causing me quite a bit of anxiety and discomfort. Descending to the worst case scenario, I tormented myself with thoughts of what might happen if every Republican who had anything to do with the certifications in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia got on board Trump’s runaway team and refused to acknowledge Biden’s victories in those states.

I entertained the possibility of a solid silo of Trump allies going along with his preposterous assertion that Grand Larceny had occurred and he was the victim.

But over the weekend, as I thought about it further and as Trump’s Trojan horse began showing signs of a limp, I came to the conclusion that good was going to win out over evil. It was this simple, I decided: There simply were not enough bad people — truly amoral or immoral — to pull that lame horse over the line.

It would have taken dozens, maybe scores, of spineless Republicans, including Supreme Court justices, to steal the election from Biden. Just a couple of chinks in the chain, I realized, could darken the lights on the three-ring circus that Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell were trying to produce at Trump’s urging.

Granted, several bad people did surface. One was Norm Shinkle, one of two Republicans on the Michigan Board of Canvassers. Undoubtedly yielding to pressure from on high, Shinkle pushed to delay the certification.

But the worst person involved in Trump’s grand charade, without question was Monica Palmer, a member of the canvassing board of Wayne County, who last week proposed certifying the statewide vote minus Wayne County, which includes Detroit and its tens of thousands of Black voters. For sheer audacity, Palmer the cake.

But let’s give credit to some of the good Republicans…those who refused to yield to Trump’s cajoling and arm twisting.

There was Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, an engineer before becoming a politician, who famously said, “Numbers don’t lie.”

And cheers, also, for Michigan Speaker of the House Lee Chatfield and Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey, whom Trump summoned to the White House last Friday. After that meeting, which had to have been extremely uncomfortable for the two men, they came out with a statement saying they would not interfere with the certification.

And, finally, today we saw 30-year-old Aaron Van Langevelde, the other Republican on the Michigan Board of State Canvassers, cast the vote that validated Biden’s Michigan win. Van Langevelde joined the two Democrats in a 3-0 vote, with Shinkle abstaining.

Before today, Van Langevelde, a lawyer, had not shown his hand. He declined interview requests from The New York Times and other news outlets. Today, though, he found his voice and showed his integrity when he when he said: “We have a clear legal duty to certify the results of the election, as shown by the returns that were given to us. We cannot and should not go beyond that. As John Adams once said, ‘We are a government of laws, not men.’ ”

It’s people like Raffesnperger, Chatfield, Shirkey and Van Langevelde who, in the waning days of the Trump administration’s sinkhole of lies and amorality, give us some hope for the present and future of our democracy.

We must all be grateful for those who wished the outcome would have been different but nevertheless held to their conviction that the Rule of Law came first.