Henry Olsen has, in my opinion, a superb column on why, as he concludes, “Congress should pass the [Senate ECA reform bill] proposal rapidly and with a large, bipartisan majority.” Here’s part of it:

“Together, [the bill’s] provisions would help prevent a sore loser from using temporary control over the political process to overturn an election. It would ensure that the people’s choice, as mediated by the electoral college, would prevail, and it would push any challenges to a state’s result into courts rather than political bodies.

That’s the right approach in both cases. One need only think about our national principles a little to see why. The Founders made clear that one of the biggest threats to republican government was the ability of a politically interested actor to seize power without popular consent. Their concern was an overly powerful executive, which they feared could turn into a monarch. But any entity with the motive and power to entrench an individual in office is a threat to our system of government.

Trump’s attempt to use the ECA for precisely that end shows that Congress had inadvertently given itself that power. The proposed reforms substantially remove that threat.

Our democracy is suffering from many problems, the greatest of which is our increasing tendency to view one another as enemies rather than adversaries. The longer such divisions fester, the more we will see election outcomes as an existential threat. Against that backdrop, anything that reduces the temptation to break our democracy under the pretext of saving it is a good thing.“

Exactly.