An outfit called the Conservative Action Project yesterday published a group letter opposing near-term Republican cooperation with Capitol Hill Democrats on reform of the Electoral Count Act. This is among the first indications that much of anyone besides former President Donald Trump himself is cool toward ECA reform. The letter and signers are here.

A main theme of the letter is that Democrats will try to pack into ECA reform the ton of bad stuff that was in the now-failed election omnibus bills. Of course GOPers could just respond, “Nothing doing, but we’re happy to work with you on a clean bill.” But that would be too easy.

The letter also suggests that there should be no rush, and no reason not to postpone taking up the ECA until closer to 2024. Is that plausible? It seems to me that the nearer to the circus atmosphere of a presidential election year, the lower the chance of dispassionate bipartisan agreement.

One arrives at the central grievance in the third paragraph: the letter claims reform of the ECA is meant “to make it harder for Congress to do anything about election fraud in a presidential election.” That’s both tendentious and at odds with a sound interpretation of the Constitution.

The Framers took care that Congress not be allowed to assume a role as all-purpose arbiter of whether a presidential election vote itself had been run and counted properly. That way might lie, in effect, a deciding power. Instead its role was sharply limited to counting electoral votes.

Note that only by accepting this constraint does Congress respect the states in their proper and legitimate Constitutional role of laying out rules for the underlying vote ahead of time and certifying winners afterward. To permit these matters to be re-litigated on the floor of Congress is to usurp the states’ power. (Congress does sit in judgment over a range of much narrower issues, such as whether an electoral vote has been signed properly and cast on the right day, whether the certificate does in fact issue from the state government in question, and so forth.)

There is a further angle, one of backstory, without which it would be hard to put the new letter in accurate perspective. That backstory has to do with the group letter put out by the same outfit, Conservative Action Project, on Dec. 10, 2020, also regarding the Electoral College.

For reasons that may be evident in a moment, I want to emphasize that the signer list on that earlier letter, while overlapping, was by no means identical to that on the new. Many persons signed the new letter but not the old, even though the same outfit put out both.

With that important caveat out of the way, what was the point of the earlier CAP letter from late 2020? Here is its title: “Conservatives Call On State Legislators To Appoint New Electors, In Accordance With The Constitution.”

As you may have guessed, this was a letter backing Trump’s failed scheme to overturn the election results by ousting and replacing electors who’d already been picked on Election Day. This wasn’t “In Accordance With The Constitution.” It wasn’t even legal, as GOP statehouse leaders in states like Pennsylvania and Georgia recognized, because the choice by law had already been made. No state went along with this palpably improper scheme.

I suppose this isn’t the time and place to pronounce moral judgment on a bunch of self-described conservatives, some quite well known, openly and publicly endorsing a scheme to overturn an election by inventing new rules after the fact. You can probably imagine what I think of it anyway.

The more immediate point is: why be surprised that an outfit that had put out the first letter would also oppose Congressional efforts that might bar the door against such schemes in the future? Among the many issues that could be clarified by ECA reform, for example, are who speaks for a state government in the certification process, or how to handle a certification whose issuance is in ongoing violation of a court order.

For a certain number of the signers of this letter, in short, ECA reform would curb the sorts of election-overturning steps they themselves had urged in December 2020. No wonder they would be unenthusiastic about it.