Friends, my latest article discusses in stark terms just how close America came to forsaking pluralistic, multiparty democracy in 2020-22. It isn't because of the inveterate "fascism" of Donald Trump, either. It's because of the electoral success of Democrats, and the determination of Democrats to refashion the ground rules of democracy to their (permanent) advantage. The recently defeated election takeover bills were just one arrow in their quiver. So, yes, we've held the barbarians at the gates. That's the good news. The bad news is that they're still swarming the ramparts, and sooner or later they may well get the chance to wreck our democracy once and for all. Beating them decisively in 2022 and 2024 gives us our best, and possibly our only, hope of avoiding that miserable fate.
Read all about it at World Net Daily!
A Narrow Escape
Conservatives
are celebrating the
defeat
of the Democrats' “voting rights” bills on Capitol Hill. They
ought to, since these bills were a brazen attempt to federalize
election administration, in clear violation of the Constitution,
which gives power over elections to the states, and they would have
watered down election integrity safeguards to a level that most
genuine democracies would find laughable – or alarming. We can
thank our lucky stars that Democratic Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe
Manchin stood up to a storm of abuse from members of their own party
and did what they felt was right for our nation. As a result, the
filibuster, and our electoral norms, live on, even if both grow more
shopworn by the day.
Our celebration
of this victory, however, should be tempered by a realization of how
close we came to a mammoth defeat. Sinema and Manchin's votes were
only determinative of the outcome because the Democrats failed to win
an outright majority in the Senate in 2020. Instead, Democrats and
Republicans both have 50 votes in the chamber.
Imagine instead
that Democrats had “won” in 2020 by the sort of margins that they
and pollsters expected. Imagine that the Democratic majority in the
House had grown instead of shrinking to next to nothing. Imagine that
the Democrats could command 53, or 54, or 55 votes in the Senate.
These are not unreasonable suppositions, after all. As recently as
2009, the Democrats had 60 votes in the Senate!
Had
the Democrats won more robust majorities in both houses, it's a
foregone conclusion that their election takeover bills would have
passed – and, in fact, Democrats probably would have been
emboldened to make them more
ambitious, which is to say more imperious
and dismissive
of state authority. Only the Supreme Court would have stood between
one political party and its complete domination of the rules of the
game of American politics. We know that the Democrats would have
rewritten those rules to make the detection and deterrence/punishment
of election fraud and election law infractions virtually impossible –
since, from their perspective, it's a racist myth that violations of
election laws occur in the first place. Democrats would have ensured
that everyone
was registered to vote, and that every voter received a ballot in the
mail regardless of whether they wanted one or not. And, undoubtedly,
most of that veritable mountain of ballots would have found its way
back to counting rooms in boards of election across the country,
regardless of who filled them out, making it difficult, if not
exactly impossible, for Democrats ever to lose an election again.
Had the Democrats possessed the safe majorities in the House and
Senate that we talked about above, though, the transformative changes
to our government would only have begun with election law reforms.
Democrats want to add additional states to the Union – all of them,
needless to say, reliably blue – giving them permanent, guaranteed
control of the Senate. Democrats want to ramp up federal gun control
laws, imperiling our Second Amendment rights. Democrats want to
expand government intervention in health care to the point where the
distinction between a public and private system – between
socialized medicine and free market medical care – becomes largely
academic. Democrats want to use the FCC, woke social media companies,
and speech codes on college campuses to censor and silence
conservatives. Democrats want to unseat members of the opposition
party in the House and Senate and exclude them from running ever
again in federal elections. Worst of all, Democrats in increasing
numbers favor packing the Supreme Court to ensure that a majority of
Justices will blindly support whatever further authoritarian measures
progressives deem expedient. That would eliminate any check on the
ability of Democrats and liberals to impose their will on the
American people.
All
of these horrors, which, in sum, really would amount to the
extinguishing of American democracy, could easily have come to pass –
if only Democrats had been a little more successful in the 2020
elections than they were. In other words, in 2020, we survived the
effective end of competitive, multiparty, pluralistic democracy by
the slimmest of margins...but not for the reason that the partisan
January 6th
Committee claims.
Conservatives
should celebrate our historic victory over Democratic schemes to
manipulate our elections, therefore. But we should also be thoroughly
chastened and downright horrified by the fact that the opposing party
has warmly embraced two very dangerous ideas: one, that the GOP has
lost all legitimacy and is a racist, sexist, fascist cabal, “a
dagger at the throat of America”;
and, two, that the overturning of virtually any past democratic norm
and/or constitutional principle is justified in order to prevent
Republicans from retaking power.
It doesn't take a genius to intuit where such views can lead: to
tyranny and oppression. And they will lead us there, and in record
time, unless the Democratic Party is defeated in 2022 and 2024. With
any luck, those defeats would force Democrats to rethink their
extremism and their betrayal of American and Western political
traditions, and to return to some version of democratic normalcy.
Think of it this way: just a few years ago, Republicans controlled
the House, the Senate, the presidency, and the courts, including the
Supreme Court. Despite possessing that kind of sweeping power, they
never seriously considered radically transforming the ground rules of
our democracy. They supported the filibuster, even though it
inconvenienced them, and they bowed respectfully to the edicts of the
Supreme Court. They accepted, in short, that even a seeming monopoly
over the levers of federal power does not convey unlimited authority
or permanent dominion.
Now, a few years later, the Democrats show no such restraint. They
are a party bent on entrenching itself in power and eliminating the
opposing party as an effective political force.
That is why they must be beaten at all costs.
Dr.
Nicholas L. Waddy is an Associate Professor of History at SUNY Alfred
and blogs at: www.waddyisright.com.
He appears on the Newsmaker Show on WLEA 1480/106.9.
https://www.wnd.com/2022/01/narrow-escape-senate-time/
***
In other news, Virginia's new Governor is attempting to redefine "diversity, equity, and inclusion", and among the changes he hopes to make is deemphasizing race and replacing "equity" with "opportunity". This is a welcome change in tone, but one has to wonder whether any of the "diversity" professionals out there will take any notice.
https://richmond.com/youngkin-names-a-new-diversity-officer-for-the-state-orders-a-new-focus-for-the/article_fdbb1fdd-e6c9-581e-a7ad-b82e456843e8.html
New York City is turning its back on Teddy Roosevelt. No surprise there. The only question is when Franklin Delano will bite the dust too!
https://www.npr.org/2022/01/20/1074394869/roosevelt-statue-removed-natural-history-museum
Our old friend Robert Reich is in hot water because of his fierce rhetoric targeting Senator Kyrsten Sinema. Poor Bobby. I just hate to see such a nice guy besmirched...
https://www.foxnews.com/media/ex-labor-secretary-reich-sinema-filibuster
The lasest Trafalgar poll contains oodles of bad news for the Dems, including an almost 14-point deficit in terms of the generic ballot question. Ouch! Do I believe that margin will hold? Not a chance. Do I believe the Dems are in big, big trouble in 2022? You better believe it!
https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/20/trafalgar-38-7-approval-rating-for-biden-voters-prefer-gop-over-dems-55-7-to-42-2/
Finally, natural immunity against COVID has been deprecated by Democratic politicians and the scientific/medical experts alike, because, as you may have heard, nothing matters but those precious vaccinations. Well, now it appears that natural immunity is arguably superior to vaccination when it comes to battling the delta strain of COVID. My guess would be that omicron is even more vaccine-resistent. That doesn't make vaccines useless, of course, but it does limit their usefulness, and it makes our discrimination against COVID "survivors" positively absurd.
https://dailycaller.com/2022/01/19/cdc-natural-immunity-outperforms-vaccination-covid-19-coronavirus/
