“People violate laws any time they want.”
Those words, shrugging off an alleged unlawful move last week, did not come from some Chicago gangbanger or Washington car thief. Those words of wisdom came from Democrat Commissioner Diane Marseglia in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
They came in response to the fact that the Democratic majority on the election commission had decided to ignore a binding state Supreme Court ruling in an attempt to engineer the election of Democratic incumbent Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.).
Rather than prompting a degree of introspection, the loss of both houses of Congress and the White House has had a curious effect on many Democrats, dropping any pretense of protecting democracy over partisanship.
Despite polls showing that the public trusted former president Donald Trump more than Vice President Harris in combating threats to democracy, Democrats made “saving democracy” the thrust of this election.
The polls reflected a certain common sense of the public when harangued with predictions from President Biden, Harris and a host of politicians and pundits warned that this would likely be our last election. Few believed that after over two centuries as the most stable and successful democracy in history, all three branches would collapse in unison and embrace dictatorship. Even fewer believed the predictions of the rounding up of homosexuals, journalists and political critics for camps in what some described as an American Third Reich.
American voters are not chumps and what they saw were strikingly anti-democratic positions from those claiming to be the defenders of democracy, including:
- Seeking to strip Trump from ballots under an unfounded theory rejected unanimously by the Supreme Court.
- Fighting to block opponents of Biden from ballots in the primary and general elections.
- Suing to keep Robert F. Kennedy on ballots after his withdrawal in swing states, in order to confuse voters and reduce the vote for Trump.
- Calling for blocking dozens of incumbent GOP officials and legislators from ballots as “insurrectionists.”
- “Protecting democracy” through the most extensive censorship in history and the blacklisting of opponents.
- Engaging in open and raw lawfare in the prosecutions of Trump in places like New York.
Each of these efforts ultimately failed to stop Trump and was opposed by a majority of voters even before the election. So now, Democrats are dropping the pretense for open partisanship.
That was evident in Bucks County, when a motion arose to reject a challenge to count provisional ballots, including undated or invalidly dated mail ballots.
It should have been easy.