The desperate effort of the Democratic majority in the House to push through statehood for overwhelmingly Democratic Puerto Rico and then impose their massive omnibus budget before relinquishing the speakership betokens a mischievous energy. Democratic leaders will do what is needed to create a one-party system unless stopped by the other side.
Unfortunately for those Republicans who ooze bipartisanship, making nice to the other side while avoiding the slings and arrows of the legacy media is not going to work. There must be pushback before it’s too late, and the areas to pursue pushback most vigorously are early mail-in voting, and voting without adequate self-identification, a practice that is still permitted in some states.
To be sure, the media—the mouthpieces of the woke Left and the Democratic Party—will scream bloody murder if this advice is followed. Further, I’ve no doubt the Democrats will pull out all their fixers and legal challenges before giving up any dishonest advantage. But the Republicans, if they wish to survive as a credible opposition, must not abandon this work. They must labor to make sure that federal and state elections take place in properly supervised polling locations within a set time.
Unfortunately, too many elections have already been forfeited. In Arizona a remarkably taciturn—and, to all appearances, vacuous creature of the Left, Katie Hobbs—supposedly won the gubernatorial race against the far more articulate and media-savvy Kari Lake. This came after voting machines mysteriously broke down in Maricopa County and after the now-usual avalanche of late mail-in ballots appeared with the now-customary magic. Hobbs, who is secretary of state, refused to recuse herself from overseeing an election in which she was a candidate. She was trailing in the polls before election day, by which point she had ceased to give palpable signs of life.
It seems foolish to talk about the future electoral victory of Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, or any other Republican presidential candidate unless the mail-in ballots can be stopped, and voter identification can be enforced. Unless those things happen, I’ll put my money on John Fetterman or Kamala Harris winning a presidential race against Ron or Don. It’s also important that neither the tech giants nor the FBI be allowed to rig any more elections or be allowed in any way to cooperate in this shady enterprise. In a recent radio interview, I was asked if I want the Republicans to “cheat like the Democrats.” I responded that I would be satisfied if the other side merely lost its opportunity to cheat.
There should be no more early balloting, a gimmick that turns elections into perpetual canvasing competitions. Needless to say, ballots sent to questionable addresses and questionable voters should not be counted in any legitimate election. And no votes harvested from Zuckerberg-funded drop-boxes, which Democratic hirelings have filled with their own ballots, should ever have been allowed in the first place. A surefire way to make sure these rampant abuses cease to occur is to have in-person voting and to hold elections on Election Day. Let’s ignore the excuses for why college girls or inner-city inhabitants lack the physical skills to go to a voting booth.
Exhortations to Republicans to learn to deal with the early voting campaign of the Democrats are misguided. The Democrats do not win simply because of their technical skills at canvassing and ballot distribution. They also significantly play games with the ballots they send out, which presumably the Republicans have not yet mastered. Moreover, it is foolish to ask Republicans to agree to early voting at whatever point the Democrats decide to push back elections. What happens if the Democrats decide it’s to their advantage to have perpetual mail-in voting? Should Republicans be obliged to adopt that course in order not to be bested in the final vote count or to incur media displeasure?
The Federalist recently published a story demonstrating considerable merit in the 28 cases in which Trump’s team disputed election outcomes in 2020. The courts in almost all these cases threw out the challenges on technical grounds and studiously avoided dealing with the substantive questions that the litigants raised.
In my own state of Pennsylvania, the very partisan Democratic Governor Tom Wolfe encouraged the use of mail-in votes, even though the measure was rejected by the state legislature, which is the only institution under the state constitution that is authorized to approve such an innovation. Although courts can defuse such divisive matters, our courts did nothing of the kind in 2020. They tried to stay out of the line of fire. Sixty-one percent of Republicans, according to a recent Rasmussen poll, still strongly believe that Biden was not properly elected president. This feeling, moreover, is shared by more than 30 percent of independents. Because certain matters were left unresolved in 2020, we have just experienced déjà vu all over again. And unless Republicans address Democratic election procedures decisively, they should prepare for another licking in 2024.