The Patriot Post® · Dems Attempt Election Overthrow in Iowa
One can’t help but wonder: If we had an honest, accurate, and unbiased media, would Democrats be less brazen and more embarrassed at their endless hypocrisy and lies?
After claiming President Donald Trump was a danger to the very fabric of the American republic because he highlighted and demanded accountability for election fraud and/or malfeasance, Democrats are brazenly attempting to steal another election — Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District seat.
In that race, Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks led Democrat Rita Hart by 282 votes on election night, a lead that shrunk to 47 votes after all mail-in ballots were counted (Iowa law allows ballots postmarked by Election Day). When the recount was completed and all things accounted for, Miller-Meeks had won by a mere six votes.
Hart could have gone to court to contest the Republican victory by providing evidence of fraud or counting errors, but instead she waited two months until the Democrat-controlled House had been seated. She has now petitioned House Democrats to overrule Iowa’s recount, evict Republican Miller-Meeks, and seat her instead.
Hart’s justification is that she objects to the fact that different Iowa counties used different recount standards, yet Hart herself pushed machine recounts in Republican-run counties while calling for hand recounts in Democrat-run counties (not at all suspicious).
The Democrat hypocrisy is so glaring that even a few Democrats are grumbling about it.
Democrats ridiculed every effort by President Trump to ensure election integrity. They called his accusations of fraud a danger to American democracy and condemned the dozens of lawsuits filed by Trump and the Republican Party to contest the legality of votes cast where Democrat governors, secretaries of state, and unelected judges unilaterally rewrote election law under the guise of accommodating COVID restrictions.
And though far too late to make a difference, courts are now ruling that Democrats did indeed violate the law and the limits of their constitutional authority.
Apparently, claims of fraud, election rigging conspiracy theories, questioning the legitimacy of elections, and working to overturn election results are only bad when done by Republicans.
Unfortunately, as National Review’s Dan McLaughlin points out, “If misbehaving Republican politicians often embarrass the party’s intellectuals, misbehaving Democrats have their side’s scholars and pundits whispering in their ears like Iago, urging them to ever-more-radical steps.”
He’s referencing in particular a recent California Law Review article by Harvard Law School professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos calling on Democrats to take insanely radical steps to permanently rig elections in their favor. In support, he pulls from the recent writings of former Stanford Law School professor Pamela Karlan, who now serves as the deputy attorney general for the Civil Rights Division of Joe Biden’s (Social) Justice Department.
Stephanopoulos calls for Democrats to do what they have already threatened to do — end the Senate filibuster, stack the Supreme Court, grant statehood to DC and Puerto Rico, enact the National Popular Vote scheme, etc.
What makes Stephanopoulos’s rantings so dangerous is that he calls on Democrats to give their naked power grab the patina of legitimacy by using constitutional authority in ways never considered or authorized before.
For example, Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution grants Congress the power to “be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members.” Stephanopoulos wants the Democrat-controlled House and Senate to evict Republican members who win under Republican-written state election laws.
Additionally, Article IV, Section 4 grants the president emergency powers under the Guarantee Clause, which ensures every state has “a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion…”
Stephanopoulous calls on Biden to use this power to dictate the terms of state election laws by executive order, invalidating any elections not conforming to his demands. And not just to federal elections, but elections and policies down to the local level.
He openly acknowledges his attempt to short-circuit constitutional checks and balances, contemptuously arguing, “Desperate times call for desperate measures.”
And what has brought about these “desperate times”? According to Stephanopoulous, “American democracy is in real peril thanks to the malapportioned Senate, the obsolete Electoral College, voter suppression, gerrymandering, and so on…” The first two are written into the Constitution, and his definition of voter suppression includes requiring photo ID.
And why these specific recommendations? Because they have the advantage of bypassing constitutional checks and balances, giving Democrats “tools that can be blunted by neither a Senate filibuster nor a hostile Court.”
When discussing his proposed weaponization of the Guarantee Clause, Stephanopoulos says, “The President [as] head of the executive branch … could take whatever steps she thinks are necessary to prevent states from lapsing into nonrepublicanism or to remedy antirepublican abuses. The only limits on the President’s discretion are that exigent circumstances must exist and that Congress must be unwilling or unable to act.”
Congress’s refusal to act, to be a rubber stamp for a dictatorial president, is the exact same justification Barack Obama used when he unilaterally and unconstitutionally used his “pen and phone” to create law.
Make no mistake: The Democrats’ endeavor in Iowa is not just part of a power grab. It is one skirmish in an all-out assault on America’s republican, federalist form of government. It is an effort to destroy checks and balances on power and usher in a permanent Democrat rule. It is an assault on the very concept of Liberty and self-government.
It must be stopped.
Update 3/31: Hart has withdrawn her challenge, no doubt because Democrats realized what a political loser it is to try to steal an election after accusing Republicans of the same thing.