The thing everyone is overlooking about today’s criminal charges against Michigan’s fake electors

The Michigan Attorney General criminally indicted sixteen “fake electors.” We still don’t know how this fits with Jack Smith’s new target letter Donald Trump for January 6th, and Smith’s reported targeting of fake electors in various states. We’ll see. But in the meantime, two things stand out about these charges.

The first, and most obvious, is that these are serious charges that potentially come with dozens of years of prison time. They seem aimed at motivating the fake electors to flip on bigger fish like Donald Trump and his henchmen. But there’s also another aspect to this.

If you look at the list of the sixteen fake electors who were charged today, most of them are involved in state or local level Republican politics in Michigan. These people weren’t indicted because they’re Republican officials; they were indicted because there’s strong evidence that they committed crimes. But this does have the side effect of wiping out a fair number of Republican officials in Michigan if they’re convicted.

This is potentially going to leave at least some degree of a leadership gap in Michigan Republican politics. Not that Michigan Republicans have much leadership these days to begin with. They keep running increasingly non-viable extremist unhinged candidates and losing. But now some of the people who have been helping run the Michigan Republican Party into the gutter are earmarked for prison.

Someone will step in and fill that leadership gap. Of course the concern is that the next round of Michigan Republican leaders might end up being even more unhinged, given the direction of the Republican Party of late. But this does come at a time when the leadership vacuum is being created because the previous leaders abused their powers to commit crimes and got indicted for it.

Maybe, just maybe, today’s indictments (and the ones forthcoming) will scare people into realizing that going into politics in order to commit crimes is risky business. Maybe it’ll help keep the worst people from entering politics to begin with. And just maybe it’ll bring the Republican Party back from the lunatic brink. One can only hope.