“Let the people decide.”
How many times have we heard some politician talking about a salient ballot question or a hotly contested upcoming election between two opposing viewpoints when he or she suddenly cuts off the monologue and defers to a standard line like the one listed above? This political default position completely ignores the fact that in razor-thin voting, about half of the “people” opt for the loser.
Static elections are imperfect, and “letting the people decide” doesn’t always produce a satisfactory – or even good – outcome. Yet is there a better way to pick a leader or settle a controversy than placing the power in the hands of those who must live with the decision?
But what if the choice is limited to those whom the powers-that-be deem worthy of being up for election in the first place? There’s currently a movement afoot to deny Republican voters in some locales of the ability to select their man. Yes, it’s no joke. In an article titled “Trump’s foes want to boot him from ballot for insurrection stemming from Jan. 6 charges”, Susan Ferrechio reported at The Washington Times last week:
“Liberal groups and other Trump opponents are working to convince state election officials across the nation that former President Donald Trump’s name should be blocked from the 2024 general election ballot for president if he wins the Republican nomination.
“His staunchest opponents say some of the criminal charges in four indictments should disqualify Mr. Trump from appearing on the ballot. Pretrial proceedings in the cases threaten to sideline Mr. Trump from the campaign trail as he defends himself in court.
“Republicans have threatened to retaliate by seeking President Biden’s removal from the ballot over allegations of corruption related to his son Hunter Biden’s foreign business deals.”
In other words, the potentially explosive partisan-divide could get even worse, if that’s possible. Ferrechio’s report quotes several conservative experts who suggest the liberal mission to bar Trump’s name from ballots couldn’t possibly succeed in the long run. Individual interpretation of the 14th Amendment wouldn’t hold up when the Supreme Court rules on the issue. But how long would it take to reach the high court?
Nobody talks about it these days, but how much of the Supreme Court’s time is destined to be taken up deciding legal/political questions ahead of the 2024 election? As the Democrat criminal witch hunt cases proceed, what argument could possibly be upheld against a major political party’s candidate and his free speech rights? Will all of this just come tumbling down once the courts issue judgments?
Would the federal courts accept a local jurisdiction’s jury verdict which effectively cancels a former president’s (who was in office at the time) free speech and executive privilege rights? All of these issues will need to be fully litigated, which will take a long, long, long time. And the process will take money, of course, which is what Democrats are ultimately banking on – that Trump’s campaign time will be spent battling these stupid charges and his campaign money be gobbled up by his lawyers defending him.
Whatever happened to allowing the “people” to decide? Democrats are all for letting humans determine the outcome as long as it’s their people doing the deciding, all too often paid by leftist agitators going out and harvesting ballots or finding other means to play monkey business with mail-in votes.
And now they don’t even want Trump’s name on those ballots. How far will this go?
In watching an already strange situation involving a former president being brought up on various charges in various courts in various jurisdictions, it’s evident that any semblance of restraint and respect for process went out the proverbial window long ago. What was heretofore politically unthinkable – attempting to not only indict an executive for crimes, but to jail him as well – is now seemingly just the tip of the iceberg.
Reasonable people might expect that there’s someone, somewhere, in a conference room when this stuff is being discussed to say, “Maybe we shouldn’t ought to do this,” but if such a person exists anymore, his or her voice has been drowned out by a new generation of lawfare-loving leftist kooks who probably toss a spaghetti strainer full of Donald Trump allegations against a wall in hopes one noodle sticks.
Recall how conservatives and Republicans looked-on in semi-horror seven years ago as liberals seemingly pulled out all the stops to get Trump before he even made it to the ballot in November, 2016. Remember? Behind the scenes, the Deep State (led by FBI Director James Comey and CIA Director John Brennan) cooked up “Crossfire Hurricane” to sniff out reported (by Trump’s enemies) “Russian collusion” between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin.
Simultaneously, Crooked Hillary Clinton’s campaign dodged ongoing investigations into her sinister dealings with her private email server while also putting forward nutso-level accusations against Trump for non-issues like his past “fat shaming” of Venezuelan beauty queen Alicia Machado -- and who can forget the decade-old infamous “Access Hollywood” tape where Trump was recorded without his knowledge engaging in “Locker room talk” with Billy Bush?
As if those sorry scenes weren’t enough, there was the Phoenix airport impromptu (or so they claim) tarmac meeting between Bill Clinton and then-Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch, where, according to Democrat apologists, the two merely talked about “golf and grandchildren.”
Here’s how the conversation likely went down: Bill C: “Hey Loretta, how’re the grandkids?” Loretta L: “Fine, Bill, growin’ faster than the pot plants at a weed farm in California. How’s the golf game, Bubba?” Bill C: “Terrific, Loretta, but lots of companions have been playing my balls out of turn lately, though. It’s gettin’ me all upset and bothered. Say, can you promise me here on this hotter-than-you-know-what tarmac that you won’t go after Hillary for that email thing? We’re worried that Huma Abedin’s ex-hubby Anthony Wiener might’ve planted some funny stuff on my wife’s machine. We can’t risk subpoenas.” Loretta L: “Sure, Bill, no problem. That’d be embarrassing. I’ll get with Jimmy C. when I get back to DC, and he’ll take it off the table before the summer ends. Gotta run, okay? Good luck with that ball playing problem.”
Somebody, somewhere in liberal land spotted the obvious illegality of the Crooked one’s actions and said, “Maybe we ought not to be doing this” and the Obama law enforcers agreed. How else was the Big O’s legacy going to be assured if Hillary wasn’t elected to do it? If not, what would be their last hope, a hyped-up Chinese virus scare and the election of dimwit Joe Biden? Not likely!
Naturally, the establishment media cooperated with the liberal shapers one-hundred percent of the way, and everything eventually fell into place.
Then, Democrats never quite got over the “people” deciding not to elect Bill Clinton’s wife, so they turned over every rock to find something to pin to Donald Trump. And now they’re working just as hard to make sure Trump doesn’t get his chance at reelection by removing his name from the ballot before voters even have an opportunity to choose him. Which gets to the real heart of the matter: whenever the issue gets too important to leave to a straight-up yay or nay-type choice for the “people to decide”, Democrats move mountains to change the rules. They impose mail-in voting because an obscure but infectious virus might be spread by millions of “people” voting in person. Of course, to leftists, it’s okay if mask wearing activists collect bundles of ballots and drop them into anonymous and unguarded boxes, but it’s not kosher to require “people” to register their votes by running them through a sterile machine by themselves.
And anyone who implies that this manner of voting could be subject to fraud or abuse is branded as either racist, sexist, homophobic, paranoid or prone to questioning whether an election is legitimate. Also, that Americans should automatically trust that every election is on the up-and-up, or at least the ones where a Democrat supposedly wins, because, to liberals, there’s no such thing as voter fraud – Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi said so!
The same leftists who swear that the 2020 election was legitimate are probably the ones leading the effort to remove Trump’s name from the ballot now just so the “people” can’t decide. Why risk losing an election when you can assure victory beforehand?
“The Terminator” sci-fi movie series was premised on sending a cyborg (human-like robot) back through time to kill the mother of the eventual leader of the resistance before he’s even conceived, a “retroactive abortion” as one of the characters labeled it. Aren’t Democrats doing essentially the same thing here by pushing for a cleansing of Trump’s name from next year’s ballots before the “people” decide?
Democrats instinctively understand that too much is beyond their control when the “people” actually weigh-in. Those ignorant Trump-favoring rubes value gun rights, or believe a baby’s life begins at conception or that dumping hundreds of billions into combatting “climate change” is a waste of money… or that the southern border should be enforced, or city streets should be safe and clean rather than defunding the police to promote the “woke” agenda.
Yes, letting the “people” decide is random and dangerous to Democrats.
Nothing surprises in this day and age of cutthroat politics, so the fact some leftists and Democrats are working to deny conservatives and Republicans a chance to vote for Donald Trump again – by having his name taken off ballots – hasn’t generated much outrage. Democrats will do anything to stop Trump, including performing a “retroactive abortion” on his campaign. Shouldn’t we just let the people decide?
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