The long running campaign to paint Republicans as a threat to democracy has backfired.
Approximately a week after voters shocked Democrats by electing Donald Trump as president, Democratic donors and high-ranking officials met to discuss “taking back power,” from Trump. As noted by Politico, “if the agenda is any indication, liberals plan full-on trench warfare against Trump from Day One.” The attendees included House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi. In mid-December the speaker’s daughter, Christine Pelosi, one of the electors appointed to cast a vote in the Electoral College, helped launch one of the most audacious efforts to reverse an American presidential election in history. She and many of her co-conspirators had a plan to defeat Trump by flipping the electors who performed the little-noticed but crucial task of representing actual voters to the Electoral College.
Christine Pelosi and her co-conspirators wrote the director of national intelligence to demand a “briefing” on the “intelligence” supposedly showing collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. She wrote,
The Electors require to know from the intelligence community whether there are ongoing investigations into ties between Donald Trump, his campaign or associates, and Russian government interference in the election, the scope of those investigations, how far those investigations may have reached, and who was involved in those investigations. We further require a briefing on all investigative findings, as these matters directly impact the core factors in our deliberations of whether Mr. Trump is fit to serve as President of the United States.
We know now that Pelosi was referring to the Steele dossier, the original source of the Russia collusion hoax. Steele wrote it while in the pay of Hillary Clinton herself. She commissioned it to smear Donald Trump with a whispering campaign meant to distract from her own legal problems and kneecap her political rival. The Steele dossier was a work of fiction and a fraud. Although the Pelosi plan did not influence the final outcome in the Electoral College, it did result in two Trump electors disregarding thousands of lawfully-cast ballots to substitute their own judgment.
Last month, the Washington Post finally acknowledged the failure of the long running campaign to paint Republicans as a threat to democracy. Like so many other political messages, it was carried out by multiple supposedly independent news outlets. Business Insider recently wrote a headline typical of the genre, “The GOP has proven to be an even greater threat to democracy than Trump in 2021.” What’s really being said is that the very existence of a party in opposition to the Democrats “threatens democracy.”
Yes, we could be so much more democratic if we had only one party like that Jeffersonian paradise in the People’s Republic of Korea. Business Insider went on to repeat verbatim the official talking points justifying a one-party regime.
But are Republicans actually seeking to shut down democracy? No. Instead the article equates opposition to the highly partisan election-related legislation now pending in Congress with opposition to “saving” democracy from the bogeyman of “voter suppression.” Opposition to the bill, in the logic of the Business Insider author, is exactly the same as opposition to democracy itself. Neat trick.
The Heritage Foundation, which maintains a database recording more than 1,000 incidents of confirmed voter fraud, has challenged the central claim of this pending legislation, i.e. that it will “save democracy.” Instead, Heritage argues, “H.R. 1 is an 800-page monstrosity that would usurp the role of the states. It would not only eliminate basic safety protocols, but mandate new, reckless rules and procedures.” These new procedures include a provision that would...
