By Richard McDonough

“Tonight, Republican senators lined up to shake Kyrsten Sinema’s hand. Democratic senators should have given her the backs of their hands.” —former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, January 21, 2022

After the recent defeat of the Democrats’ “voting rights” bills, the Orwellian-titled Freedom to Vote Act and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act — which are really “Democrat Freedom to Cheat Acts” — many Republicans and conservatives are rightly praising the two “moderate” Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kirsten Sinema of Arizona, who both refused to kill the Senate filibuster rule, thereby preventing their passage.

The filibuster rule is designed to force bipartisan compromise by requiring senators to get 60 votes, not a mere majority, to pass a bill. Since these two Democrat senators were subject to considerable abuse and threats for their refusal to kneel to their Democrat Party overlord, Chuck Schumer, this praise was well earned.

Senators Manchin and Sinema, so far, have withstood a vicious onslaught by Democrats and media activists who, apparently, do not believe that senators are individuals free to decide how to represent their constituents but rather are members of a collective, a hive, that must vote en bloc in order to achieve the Democrat Party cause du jour, which is determined by their current party bosses. That is, Democrat senators no longer represent the constituents who voted them into office but rather represent the leaders of the Democrat Party. In the old days, Joe Manchin would be expected to represent the voters in West Virginia. On the new “woke” model, Manchin is expected to represent Chuck Schumer.

One of the most disturbing of these threats was Robert Reich’s tweet that Democrat senators should give a woman, Kyrsten Sinema, “the backs of their hands.” Reich apparently thinks that Sinema should be given not the back of one hand but that backs of many male Democrat senator hands. This is most unfortunate for a party that makes a great effort, when it is not working to destroy women’s sports, to promote the impression that it cares deeply about the abuse of women.

Of course, in keeping with our Orwellian age, Reich, upon receiving vociferous criticism for his call for multiple violent assaults against a woman, immediately deleted the tweet and explained that “striking Sinema with the back of one’s hand” does not mean striking Sinema with the back of one’s hand. However, the Free Dictionary explains that the primary meaning is “to strike someone with the backside of one’s open hand,” and the secondary meaning is “to reject, snub, or rebuke someone, to … show contempt, scorn or rejection,” none of which sounds very inclusive by the alleged “inclusive” party.

These threats and abuse by the allegedly “tolerant” party are all the more unusual because in 2005, when the shoe was on the other foot and the Republicans were thinking about ending the filibuster, Schumer expressed his opposition to ending the filibuster in strident terms:

[The] bottom line is very simple: The ideologues in the Senate want to turn what the Founding Fathers called “the cooling saucer of democracy” into the rubber stamp of dictatorship. … They want, because they can’t get their way … to change the rules in mid-stream, to wash away 200 years of history. They want to make this country into a banana republic, where if you don’t get your way, you change the rules. Are we going to let them? It’ll be a doomsday for democracy if we do.

It is now Schumer and his own Democrat Party “ideologues” who now, using Schumer’s own words, want to “wash away 200 years of history” by “changing the rules in mid-stream” because they “can’t get their way” via the time-honored democratic processes so that they can ram through their “voting rights” bill. By Schumer’s own words, it is now the Democrats whose agenda is “the stamp of dictatorship” and “a doomsday of democracy.”

Most commentators have, however, missed the real point of this story. The real story is not that two Democrat senators have refused to kill the filibuster that is designed to force bipartisan compromise. The real story is that in the recently radicalized Democrat Party, 48 senators fell in line and voted to kill this longstanding principle of bipartisanship in order to ram through their controversial bill.

The fact is that the 2016 election of Donald Trump so unhinged the Democrats that they are now determined to bring about dictatorship by any means necessary. Their “justification,” so to speak, for this power grab is that since the country (by which they mean themselves) cannot afford another Trump presidency, the system must be rigged so that the much-despised “deplorables” (approximately half of the country) can no longer be permitted to choose their own president. Schumer was right in 2005 when he said that ending the filibuster would be “the stamp of dictatorship” and “a doomsday for democracy.”

The difference from 2005 and the present is that ending democracy and enacting totalitarian rule by itself is precisely the current Democrat Party plan.

This, for true patriots, leads to one inescapable conclusion, namely that the current radicalized Democrat Party must not be put into a position in which it is capable of ending American democracy. Although Biden ran as a “moderate,” he is governing for his handlers on the far Left. Thus, the Democrats, even given their current razor-thin margins in the House and Senate, simply cannot be trusted to maintain the free and fair democratic traditions that have made the United States the envy of the world. They will literally say and do anything to win elections and then use that power to entrench their iron grip on power.

This danger must be forcefully and repeatedly put to the voters until a new Democrat Party emerges that explicitly and irrevocably abandons its current totalitarian scheme to end American freedom.