In an ideal world, it wouldn’t be hard for the Republican Party to do two things. The first is to acknowledge that former President Donald Trump’s claims of widespread, result-altering election fraud are false and corrosive to public confidence in elections. The second is that what happened on Jan. 6 was an inexcusable outburst of violence, fueled by the lies (or delusions) of the then-president, for which people need to be held accountable if they are indeed culpable.

One can believe the above lines of thought and still be a Republican, still be a conservative and still think the Democratic Party has the wrong ideas for America. One can even believe there are weaknesses in the integrity of America’s elections and still believe those things.

Yet here the Republican Party is today: The former president is continuing to make patently false claims about the 2020 election, while the Republican National Committee is trying to make political martyrs out of people involved in the riotous events of Jan. 6.

The former president recently declared that former Vice President Mike Pence had the power “to overturn the election,” implicitly blaming him for not exercising this non-existent authority.

Let’s pause for a moment and think about that. A former president is claiming that a vice president had the authority to overturn a presidential election. All one needs to do is review the Constitution’s straightforward explanation of the ceremonial counting of certified electoral votes to...

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