If and when Republicans reclaim power in Congress and the White House, priority No. 1 should be voting to install then-President Donald Trump as the country’s permanent king.
Democrats, of course, are welcome to have a seat at the table in deciding whether we embrace the primogeniture model (long followed by European monarchs) to declare firstborn son Don Jr. as his heir, or rather adhere to a more progressive model (likely supported by Trump) of allowing him to name his own successor.
Clearly, Ivanka is the favorite.
Hopefully there will be no partisan, contrarian objections from the Left, nor any attempts to clog the wheels of democracy while Congress enacts this much-needed reform.
The whole point, naturally, would be to spare the anxiety and agony of another acrimonious election season, full of nation-rending venom, which could potentially result in another invalid, stolen election and further undermine our global standing.
It would relieve all Americans of the persistent fear of election-meddling by Russia, China and others. Such concerns spread like wildfire or a virus—both things that were also within the Democrats’ 2020 political playbook—after Hillary Clinton first decided to use collusion claims to deflect from an FBI investigation into her intentional mishandling of classified State Department emails.
Furthermore, the move to crown the Trump family as US rulers in perpetuity would be entirely in line with the current efforts being waged by Democrats to secure their own tenuous stranglehold on unchecked power.
The specific arguments against their efforts to railroad the HR/S1 election bill through the Senate and to go nuclear on the filibuster, in order to avoid having to compromise with Republicans, already have been laid out elsewhere at length.
It is the dishonest, bad-faith framing of the entire debate that sometimes gets overlooked.
One of chief White House propagandist Jen Psaki’s go-to deflections is the disingenuous line that Republicans are welcome to submit their own ideas for consideration.
WH spokeswoman Jen Psaki on Romney plan: “We certainly welcome efforts or offers from our Republican friends for discussion in how we can improve the American Recovery Plan.”
— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) February 4, 2021
Likewise, the American people are free to petition their government for redress of grievances—so long as the government doesn’t actually have to listen.
In a form letter to those who reached out to his office about the HR/S1 ploy, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va.—who may be the last hope of preserving a democratic power-sharing system that relies upon constitutionally imposed checks and balances—called for a “bipartisan” approach to passing the federal election overhaul.
“Instead of arguing about the election reforms on which we disagree, Congress should be working together to enact those on which we can agree,” Manchin wrote.
Manchin referred to the bill by its euphemistically Orwellian name, the “For the People” Act—although GOP opponents like Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, prefer to call it the Corrupt Politicians Act.
“As the Senate prepares to take up the For the People Act, we must work toward a bipartisan solution that protects everyone’s right to vote, secures our elections from foreign interference, and increases transparency in our campaign finance laws,” Manchin wrote.
“Pushing through legislation of this magnitude on a partisan basis may garner short-term benefits, but will inevitably only exacerbate the distrust that millions of Americans harbor against the U.S. government,” he added. “We can and we must reform our federal elections together—not as Democrats and Republicans, but as Americans to restore the faith and trust in our democracy.”
In fairness, Manchin was specific about the objectives he felt could benefit from federal intervention in the election process, which is normally left to state legislatures to determine for themselves.
He supported expansion of the early-voting window and authorization of additional resources for voters who have been historically disenfranchised.
He also proposed improving election infrastructure to prevent foreign hacking, and finding ways to eliminate dark money from elections.
While those positions are hard to disagree with, the idea that they could make it through Congress without attracting some poison-pill rider tacked on just before the bill hits the floor would go against all we know to be true about Swamp politics.
Moreover, until there is some further acknowledgement and meaningful effort to address the prevention of wholesale vote fraud, like that which occurred in 2020 under the auspices of a pandemic “emergency,” any Democrat election ‘reform’ proposal is a nonstarter.
But, in reality, Democrats plainly want the opposite of that; at its very core, the HR/S1 bill is about legally codifying those illicit practices while unconstitutionally stripping states of their self-determination and ability to safeguard against the federal corrupting of elections.
One could argue that the same principle—forcibly seizing and retaining political control—rests at the heart of every proposal Democrats have put forward thus far during the Biden era.
In essence, simply playing ball with them by agreeing to meet in the middle on such outrageous demands deceptively presents a chimera of bipartisanship for what ultimately would be a net loss to democracy.
If given an inch in acquiescence, the radical Left will take a mile—undoubtedly reaching the point where even Manchin himself ceases to be a useful idiot to their devices and becomes a hindrance in need of dispatching.
By that time, of course, it will be entirely their ballgame.
Then again, it is possible that the Left’s power-grab could backfire on them catastrophically even if implemented.
With the elimination of the filibuster, for instance, there are nine states (AZ, GA, MD, MA, MT, NH, OH, VT, WV), including Manchin’s, where a Republican governor would be in charge of replacing a Democrat senator in the event of an early exit—be it scandal or medical leave or personal in nature. (The opposite is true in seven states with GOP senators.)
Tragically, we already have seen two elected Republicans in Congress (Rep.-elect Luke Letlow of Louisiana, and Rep. Ron Wright of Texas) die unexpectedly of complications related to the coronavirus.
With one vote hanging in the balance of a complete political reversal, it would take very little for Democrats to cede control of the Senate and resume screaming about how necessary a filibuster is.
It also seems highly likely, based on past experiences during the Obama administration, that Democrats in the post-Trump era will suffer greatly—despite the barrage of blatant media gaslighting—as voters who actually helped bolster their dubious 2020 victories face buyer’s remorse in such large numbers that even fraud cannot save them.
Thus, it makes sense that their leaders would swiftly want to address the inherent “unfairness” in the voting system, which puts Democrats at a political disadvantage due to their poor policies and obsession with wielding unilateral, unfettered control over everything.
However, rather than trying to triage the symptoms of an electorate so often prone to rejections of their leadership, perhaps they should turn their attention to the causes.
Follow Ben Sellers on Parler at https://parler.com/profile/Sellers.
