Good people on both sides. On both sides.

After the Republican-dominated legislature in Wisconsin passed a package of bills to strip power from the incoming Democratic governor for nakedly partisan purposes, NBC’s Meet the Press host Chuck Todd spuriously claimed that such maneuvers were not unprecedented because Democrats had done the same thing to Republican governors in the past.

There is no evidence of that — and Todd offered none.

On December 9’s Meet The Press, after detailing some of the changes that Republicans are making — in both Wisconsin and Michigan — and describing them as “a couple of end runs around the November election results,” Todd said: “Now, this has happened before in many a legislature. Democrats, in fact, have done this in the past to Republican governors in lame-duck sessions in other states.”

But Todd failed to provide a single example of Democrats taking comparable action, simply shifting to start his interview with incoming Wisconsin Gov.-elect Tony Evers.

It’s been my impression that North Carolina was the first time any legislature has done that, and the ledge in question was definitely Republican. Maybe Todd is thinking of an incident in…I don’t know, 1810 maybe? Or a dream he had?

The obvious precedent for this situation is North Carolina in 2016. Republicans there used a special session for the sole purpose of pushing bills “to undermine [incoming Democratic Gov. Roy] Cooper by stripping him of his ability to make key appointments to state and local boards and mandating, for the first time, legislative approval of his cabinet.” At the time, Todd discussed the matter on Meet The Press, saying that what the Republicans were doing was “perfectly legal …but it doesn’t feel in the spirit of ending an election.” In the years since, some of these changes that Todd deemed “perfectly legal” have been rolled back following court challenges.

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This is all symptomatic of a larger problem: The mainstream media, and Meet The Press in particular, are ignoring growing GOP contempt for democracy itself. As Eric Levitz noted in the New York magazine, the root cause of what is happening in Wisconsin is not one party passing a law, but rather GOP fearing that the party that received the most votes in an election would actually have a chance to govern. In that sense, Todd declaring this power grab normal is no different than Meet The Press inviting an oil-industry funded guest who pushed climate change denial or a conspiracy theorist who talked about the need for civility.

Speaking of conspiracy theorists and the need for civility, I see Jerome Corsi is suing Robert Mueller. Takes brass nerve.