OPINION
In the late 18th century, radical English politician John Wilkes was jailed multiple times, shot at, vilified relentlessy, and expelled from parliament on numerous occasions, and banned from sitting. Yet, his enthusiastic supporters kept re-electing him, to the fury of the establishment.
For vaguely insulting President John Adams, Matthew Lyon was thrown into a small, freezing cell for treason, under the newly-passed Alien and Sedition Act. From his prison cell, he ran in the House elections and won in a landslide.
Socialist firebrand Eugene Debs ran for president from his prison cell in 1920, where he’d been banged up for violating the Sedition Act, for an anti-War speech. “Prisoner 9653”, as his campaign buttons proudly proclaimed, only garnered 3.4% of the vote, but run, he did.
America under the Democrats makes all of those incidents look like paragons of freedom and open democracy.
If four indictments don’t succeed in knocking Donald Trump out of the 2024 presidential race, Democrats have come up with a “break glass” option: prevent his name from appearing on the ballot in the first place.
The potentially ingenious plan wouldn’t require any judicial process or even a vote, merely a decision by top state election officials – elected politicians in the US – to rule Trump unfit for office before voting in late 2024.
If polls are correct, Trump is currently unbeatable, not just in the Republican Party primaries, but in an election against Joe Biden. And the Democrats are worried.
Early on, it was clear that the Democrats wanted Trump to run, on the theory that he was so hated that, as in 2020, Americans would vote for even a senile crook rather than the Bad Orange Man. This is why, for instance, the Dems spent $20 million funding pro-Trump candidates in the ‘22 mid-terms.
But that tactic seems to have backfired. With every indictment the Democrats can cook up against the former president, his popularity only rises. His own campaign knows it: they made his mugshot — from the same sheriff’s office which once took Martin Luther King Jr’s mugshot — into a campaign t-shirt.
So now the Dems are resorting to some truly dictatorship-level stuff.
The idea has become the talk of the town in Washington, prompting numerous reviews in the Washington Post, New York Times and a favourable 126-page treatise by two self-styled conservative law academics in the Pennsylvania Law Review, published last month.
“Self-styled conservative law academics”: in other words, establishment goons. Add them to the roster of Deep State cronies.
Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat and Secretary of State for Michigan, last month said in a radio interview “valid legal arguments” could be made to keep Trump’s name off the ballot in her state, ideally in concert with other states.
The Justice Department in New Hampshire, a state led by Republican governor Chris Sununu, a trenchant critic of the former president, last week said it was investigating the “potential applicability [of the 14th amendment] to the upcoming presidential election cycle” […]
Others, such as MSNBC contributor David Frum, worry allowing state election officials to unilaterally decide who can and cannot appear on state election ballots would be “misguided and dangerous”, for obvious reasons.
“The use of the section to debar candidates would not stop at Trump. It would become a dangerously convenient tool of partisan politics,” he wrote last week in the Atlantic.
The Australian
“Dangerously convenient tool of partisan politics”? Nothing could better describe the prostitution of nearly every office and arm of the state under the Democrats.
Remember when they screeched about fascism coming to America? They forgot to add that it was them bringing it.