Welcome to the show, kid.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell delivered a floor speech yesterday in
which he offered a pointed welcome, of sorts, to New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries,
whom House Democrats unanimously selected this week as their new leader in the
upcoming Congress. As we've mentioned previously,
Jeffries can be a conspiratorial hothead, an election denier, and an arsonist
of governing institutions. He's repeatedly suggested that President
Trump's 2016 was "illegitimate," using the same smear to delegitimize
the Supreme Court over rulings he dislikes. McConnell mentioned these reckless partisan
spasms in his remarks:
“It
has been one of the big, unfortunate ironies of the past several years: Many of
the same individuals and institutions on the political left who spent the years
2017 through 2020 yelling about the importance of norms and institutions have
themselves not hesitated to undermine our institutions when they’re unhappy
with a given outcome. For
example, the newly-elected incoming leader of the House Democrats is a past
election denier who baselessly said the 2016 election was, ‘illegitimate’ and
suggested that we had a, ‘fake’ president. He has also mounted reckless attacks on our independent judiciary
and said that Justices he didn’t like have, ‘zero
legitimacy.’ Unfortunately, when it comes to attacking our independent
judiciary, the Democrats’ new leader isn’t an outlier, he’s a representative
sample. In
the last few years, we’ve seen my counterpart the Senate Democratic Leader
threaten sitting Justices by name on the Supreme Court steps. We’ve seen
President Biden and Attorney General Garland refuse to enforce federal law and
put a stop to illegal harassment campaigns at Justices’ private family homes.
And we have seen coordinated efforts by Democrats and the media to use smear
campaigns to personally punish Justices whose legal reasoning they don’t like.
In reporting Jeffries' ascension as House Democratic leader,
wire services Reuters and
the Associated Press each
failed to mention his conspiracies, election denialism, and anti-institution
broadsides -- instead focusing on the historic nature of a black man becoming
leaders of the caucus. The news media has been positively fixated on
election lies and 'misinformation' as a grave threat to democracy that threaten
to upend cherished norms. Oddly, their concern and outrage seems to be
rather selective, as I pointed out on Twitter:
Don't hold your breath. It remains true that the
self-appointed 'norms, institutions, and democracy' crowd doesn't actually have
much meaningful fealty to any of the above, so long as undermining them serves
a political purpose, in service of their own raw power. Note what New Hampshire Democrats are doing to
erode faith in an election outcome they don't care for. Count all the
votes, they scream, unless the votes result in a Republican
win:
In
New Hampshire at least, the Democratic Party seems eager to reclaim its place
of dishonor as the cynical party that rejects the will of the voters. Not two
weeks after the Democrats ran a national campaign saying that “our democracy is
on the ballot,” New Hampshire Democrats sued the Secretary of State to stop counting
ballots and disenfranchise voters. Here’s what Secretary of State Dave
Scanlan believes happened during a recount of the Hillsborough District 16 race
for House of Representatives: The number
of voters didn’t match the original tally because a stack of 25 votes went
uncounted (the people counting the ballots are volunteers, by the way). Because
they were not all counted, the recount was incomplete. So, he reasoned, let’s
keep counting. That’s when the Democrats sued. Without that stack of 25 votes,
you see, their candidate would win. But with that stack of 25 votes, the
Republican would win. New Hampshire Democrats literally sued so that the
Secretary of State could not count all the votes.
The
plaintiffs “want this court to disenfranchise New Hampshire voters in the name
of ‘finality’ and ‘fair elections’ to preserve an administrative error in a
recount rather than allow the process to continue,” read a tersely worded memo
aimed primarily at Democratic Sen. Donna Soucy, the ringleader of this sad affair. Superior
Court Judge Amy Ignatius agreed straightaway that Scanlan’s
explanation made sense and permitted the recount to continue, which the
Democratic candidate lost. Gov. Chris Sununu, like most observers, was
stunned by the Democrats’ behavior. “In an effort to subvert the will of voters, New Hampshire Democrat
leaders engaged in appalling, hypocritical, and outrageous behavior to prevent
all legal votes from being counted. I thank @NHSecretary Scanlan and the Court
for protecting the voice of voters and integrity of our elections,” he said.
In his speech, McConnell also mentioned another disturbing
instance of insidious and disturbing illiberalism on the Left. There is an
authoritarian rot in big law: "Earlier this week, a longtime female
partner at a major law firm explained in an op-ed how she was forced out of the
firm after she dared to enter into a ‘‘safe space’ for women’ and share her own
personal views on the Dobbs ruling. As she tells it, simply being a woman who
agreed with the five-justice majority of the Supreme Court was a fireable
offense," he explained. "Some of
her colleagues claimed that merely hearing her express a dissenting view caused
them to, ‘[lose] their ability to breathe.’ This past summer, two wildly
successful appellate litigators — including a former United States Solicitor
General — were drummed out of another prominent firm because they won a Supreme
Court victory for the Second Amendment. In their telling, they were basically
told to either abandon their pro-Second-Amendment clients or hand in their
badges." Here is the first attorney mentioned relaying her story in
the Wall Street Journal, describing the immediate backlash she
faced after defending the Dobbs ruling:
The
outrage was immediate. The next
speaker called me a racist and demanded that I leave the meeting. Other
participants said they “lost their ability to breathe” on hearing my comments. After more of the
same, I hung up. Someone made a formal complaint to the firm. Later that
day, Hogan Lovells suspended
my contracts, cut off my contact with clients, removed me from email and
document systems, and emailed all U.S. personnel saying that a forum
participant had made “anti-Black comments” and was suspended pending an
investigation. The
firm also released a statement to the legal website Above the Law bemoaning the
devastating impact my views had on participants in the forum—most of whom were
lawyers participating in a call convened expressly for the purpose of
discussing a controversial legal and political topic. Someone leaked my name to
the press...Three weeks later I received a letter stating that the firm had concluded
that my reference to comments labeling black abortion rates genocide was a
violation of the antiharassment policy. Never mind that this view has been
expressed by numerous mainstream commentators, black and white, including in
these pages. My [counter] complaint was dismissed, my contracts with the firm were terminated, and other firms, wary
of the publicity, blackballed me—all after an unblemished 44-year career.
I'll leave you with another famous leftist election denier angling for yet another partisan reward for her democracy-threatening mendacity. An infamous conspiracy-peddling hyper-partisan liar becoming a powerful bureacrat at an influential agency that regulates communication? What could go wrong?
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