From Esteban:
There is an episode of Game of Thrones (the TV show, not the novel) where Cersei Lannister, the former queen and the most Machiavellian character in the show, is about to finally get her due. She is going to be tried in public and in the previous episode her brilliant plan to escape justice was thwarted when her enemies banned trial-by-combat, rendering her monstrous FrankenKnight useless.
The hour of the trial arrives and the current queen, Margaery, notices that Cersei isn’t present. She hurries to the High Septon and points this out but he is unconcerned – if Cersei isn’t there the trial will go on and she’ll be found guilty anyway. Margaery presses him, don’t you understand, she knows what will happen if she doesn’t show up and she isn’t here! The High Septon remains nonplussed. At this point Margaery runs for the exit yelling at everyone to get out. Then the fire bombs start to go off.
So, on to Washington, D.C today. The party that wins the White House usually loses seats in Congress in the next election and the Democrats’ margins are razor thin. Add to this the anger over the “irregularities” of the 2020 election and a host of issues that should be very harmful to the Democrats: the border is a humanitarian disaster, a national security threat and a public health nightmare. Gas and food prices are rising. Crime, especially violent crime, is rising dramatically and the Democrats continue to endorse riots. The supposed moderate Joe Biden made a hard left turn that has swing voters with a strong case of buyer’s remorse. Conservatives (and political pundits of all stripes) are thinking that the 2022 mid-term elections are going to be a huge swing back in favor of the Republicans.
I fear that, like the High Septon, they’re missing something. Cersei wasn’t there because there wasn’t going to be a trial. I think the Republicans aren’t going to win back the House and Senate (or the Presidency in 2024) because there aren’t going to be honest elections. The Democrats are pushing hard on numerous fronts to make sure that they can’t lose on the national stage, such as:
· HR 1, a bill that would put the Federal government in charge of elections everywhere and permanently enshrine mail-in voting, no IDs, same day registration, etc.
· Packing the Supreme Court to eliminate a potential obstacle and create a court that will effectively write laws and re-write the Constitution. Given the current Court’s hesitance to intervene in election/voting disputes this hardly seems necessary, but if you’re going all out you shouldn’t leave any trick in the bag.
· Blue states will keep all the “easy voting” laws they enacted in response to Covid locking them down (electorally speaking) forever and making them deeper blue.
· Let’s make Washington, D.C. and possibly Puerto Rico states, adding 2-4 more permanent Democrat Senators.
· And let’s not overlook the potential impact of untold thousands of illegal immigrants who are likely to vote for the party that isn’t just opening the border for them but is providing cash and other benefits and promising citizenship muy pronto.
A number of red states have enacted (or are moving to enact) election reform laws that would presumably curtail a lot of the “irregularities” of 2020. This assumes that these laws will survive the judiciary. An expanded Supreme Court isn’t likely to accept these racist voter suppression laws. Among other tricks, Democrats are very good at timing their lawsuits so that they get a favorable ruling so close to the date of an election that appeals aren’t possible, or at least, a higher court feels it would be unseemly to intervene at the 11th hour. And, seriously, how much good will these laws be when in 2020 courts ignored their state constitutions to re-write voting laws and it was allowed to stand? I’m confident that there will be new crises to justify intervention, Hell, Covid keeps mutating, there may be a new variant in late 2022 that requires mass mail-in voting, your new laws be damned.
I do hope and pray that the consensus political opinion is correct and a major course correction is 18 months away. But like Margaery, I smell smoke. I just wish I knew where the exit was.
Apart from same day registration, HR 1 sounds like it would make US voting pretty much the same as in the UK, and we have very little problem with voting irregularities and it’s stamped on hard on the odd occasions it arises. We also insist that electoral boundaries are drawn up neutrally to avoid gerrymandering, which is simply corrupt, like the days of the old “rotten boroughs”.
In the UK The Electoral Commission, not the Government, is in charge of the voting process, a Returning Officer is appointed (not a political appointment), counting cannot be done by members of a political party, the candidates are present at the count and are able to walk round watching the count. In order to vote you have to be on the Electoral Register. Each year head of household is obliged to return a form showing names of all those at the address eligible to vote. Counting only begins and results declared only after all polling stations are closed. Postal voting… Read more »
Postal voting is still too high in the UK. Tony Blair extended it in order to capture the Muslim and welfare-scrounger vote.
The UK mails out ballots indiscriminately and lets partisan activists “harvest” them and bring them back to the polls with no supervision? The UK is ready to enshrine elections without personal contact? Call up “hr1” at congress.gov and get through the Table of Contents to peruse how many different things it proposes to break!
Gerrymandering is indeed done for personal and partisan self-perpetuation, but it is less flagrant than Parliament’s power to decide the date of the next election!
jgh’s comment below, on federalism, is crucial.
I find Esteban’s faith in the Republicanss unwillingness to retaliate through some election-bending of their own, quite touching.
Unless they acquire the majority they won’t be able to, and the Dems are firing on all cylinders to make sure they never do. That was kind of the point.
I say again, don’t these morons understand the word “federation”. It’s illegal, nay, *unconstitutional* for the Federation to be in charge of the states’ election rules.
Yes, but what’s unconstitutional depends on the votes of 9 or 13 or 35 Supreme Court justices.
All U.S. elections are state elections—even the selection of the states’ Electors for President. Last year’s ruling freeing sports betting in the states from federal regulation underlined the principle that Washington cannot tell the states how to perform state functions. (The Gore-era Helping America Vote Act and the Voting Rights Act, however, are still on the books, as are dozens of “state” rules of the road enacted under blackmail of losing federal grants. The line between state and federal ambits remains greasy: Congress could have declared betting “interstate commerce.”) Mohave Greenie is right that anything is possible through court-packing. But,… Read more »
They may not need to pack the court, the current 9 seem unwilling to intervene often enough in anything involving elections. If there is an excuse in Nov 2022 to override state election laws – a new variant of Covid, widespread “peaceful protests”, etc. a judge here or there may decide that mailing ballots out indiscriminately is necessary again.
See above under federalism. Texas really has no standing to sue even for flagrant violation of the Pa. Constitution, considered and waved away by the elected Pa. Supreme Court. On an actual federal issue—Democrats’ interstate compact directing Electors to follow the nat’l popular vote, evading the Constitution—the Court will be back.
They won’t need to overturn the electoral college, they just proved that.
PS—Conservatives are spending far too much time asking why 3 conservative Justices including two of Trump’s refused to fix cases to keep Trump in office, as Trump’s VP insisted on counting Electors submitted by the states vs Electors submitted by the Trump campaign. It’s a fine lesson in peaceful transfer of power but many prefer to see the hand of Satan.
True, it was a peaceful transfer of power, but the election was stolen.
Esteban has bought Trump’s disastrous, Hillary-esque take on 2020—that “We wuz robbed!” by ballot-reading machines with Ethernet ports through which the late Hugo Chávez entered and reassigned votes—and moreover, that the situation is so dire that there will never again be an honest election!
In fact, the many careerists in Congress understand that the nearly-tied status of both houses and Biden’s vagueness then course change does not spell a mandate. H.R. 1 is best seen as another “kayfabe”—a manifesto that even some Senate Democrats won’t support (nor court-packing nor ending the filibuster)—necessary to show the moonbat base “we tried!”
I don’t know about Hugo Chavez, but I have seen video from 3 Dem run cities where “irregularities” were significant (cases of ballots pulled out from under tables in the middle of the night after all the witnesses were sent home). And in numerous states the legislature and/or the courts violated the state constitution to change the voting rules. And in numerous states people received multiple ballots in the mail that they could have filled in and returned. And there are thousands of affidavits. Other than that…
Huge numbers of absentee ballots were counted last, overturning Trump leads; they were stored in bins under tables, they were transported in vans with out-of-state tags (coz they were RENTALS for Election Week), and yes, some poll-watchers were given distant seats.
The key trickery was that Covid is the Plague, and Trump lost when he bought in and allowed his legacy to be undone and his voters to be demoralized and bankrupted.
After the Congressional GOP shiv’d Trump I hold no hope for a solution coming from there. The fight is now in the states with Federalism, sanctuary policies, and nullification. Unfortunately, the states are moving really slow on too few issues.
Why the hell do you think everyone is buying guns and screaming about the ammo shortage? You’re not the first person to think of this.
Normal Americans aren’t concerned, because Jefferson was correct.
It’s simply time to refresh the Tree of Liberty.