One can always tell when the power dynamic is out of whack; it's when an administration pursues goals for which it has no mandate and does so with impunity – when it pays no heed to the tide of public opinion and ploughs its own furrow regardless. This can be done recklessly and unwisely and it can sometimes be punished in due course. It can also be done nonchalantly, in the certain knowledge that there is no force capable of altering (or even challenging) the outcome.
If a week truly is a long time in politics, the second impeachment of Donald Trump was a free hit. The mid-terms were nearly two years away and the chance that the Democrats would suffer some lingering opprobrium as a result of the attempt was more than offset by the possibility that they might be able to cast their nemesis into political outer darkness. Of course, it may well be that the canker of unpopularity is meaningless to the ruling elites; instant gratification can become a recurring indulgence if defeat at the ballot box is no longer a factor that needs to be considered.
It didn't take long. In fact, Congress had not even reseated itself after the Capitol riot on January 6th 2021 and already House Speaker Pelosi and a familiar gaggle of progressives (plus the inevitable Never-Trumpers) were in full-on hysterical-liberal mode. A flavor of the (mainly female) overwrought rhetoric:
“Pres. Trump lit the match that started an attempted coup in the Capitol. Congress must immediately impeach and remove this dangerous man from office.”(1)
“I believe the Republican members of Congress who have incited this domestic terror attack through their attempts to overturn the election must face consequences. They have broken their sacred Oath of Office.”(2)
“Our democracy is literally under assault. Donald J. Trump incited this violence and is directly responsible for this attempted coup. He must be impeached and removed from office immediately.”(3)
Never mind the fact that Trump's presidency would now only last another fortnight; his guilt was so overwhelming and democracy was so imperiled that he had to be banished immediately. All were agreed; if the Republicans wouldn't invoke the 25th Amendment (the transfer of power to the VP, usually temporarily, by reason of a President's unfitness for office), then the Democrats would impeach...again. The next day, they were still in full cry. It was Pelosi's turn to lay it in with a trowel:
“This is urgent, this is an emergency of the highest magnitude. Yesterday the president of the United States incited an armed insurrection against America.”(4)
It's not possible to find any part of that declaration to be unambiguously true. It wasn't urgent, the highest magnitude (such as a nuclear attack, for instance) was, on the contrary, orders of magnitude distant, Trump didn't incite anything other than a peaceful protest, it wasn't an insurrection and it wasn't armed. Apart from that, she was on the money. She also claimed, in amongst all the clutching of pearls, that the 25th Amendment could be invoked against former Presidents, which rather undermined her demand for immediate removal.
Oddly, this wasn't her first meddle with the 25th Amendment. Trump had allegedly caught Covid in early October 2020 (for which he had been given remdesivir, the medical establishment's drug of choice when culling the public during the pandemic)) and, upon his release from hospital, Pelosi made public her diagnosis, which was that the President was now in “an altered state”,(5) which just happened to remind her that she really ought to legislate to create a commission that would allow Congress, rather than the President's VP and cabinet, to potentially remove him from office.
This proposed commission would continually monitor the President's fitness for office and make Congress the final arbiter,(6) bypassing the amendment entirely as, if it doesn't cater for a soft coup, it clearly isn't fit for purpose to the Democrat mind. One assumes that this was an insurance policy, just in case the Democrats ran out of fake ballots in the days after the coming election.
The Republicans were never going to try and remove Trump in this fashion. Only those Congressmen who most exemplify the truth of the maxim that “stupid is forever” thought that supporting the Democrats' position was apposite. VP Pence, the man who would have to initiate the invocation of the Amendment, nonetheless took his time. It wasn't until 13th January that he definitely ruled it out:
“With just eight days left in the President’s term, you and the Democratic caucus are demanding that the Cabinet and I invoke the 25th Amendment. I do not believe that such a course of action is in the best interest of our nation or consistent with our Constitution.”(7)
Pelosi was not best pleased, accusing those across the aisle of “enabling the President’s unhinged, unstable and deranged acts of sedition to continue...”,(8) but by then, the Democrats were already full steam ahead with Plan B – two articles of impeachment. Leaving aside any angst about Trump being a sore loser, it is the President's duty under the Constitution to challenge fraud on behalf of the electorate who, ultimately, are the ones being cheated. But Trump is a special case as, in the opinion of the Left, he was unworthy of the office of President in the first place and, given that, any and every attempt to oust him is legitimate, regardless of the will of the voters.
The first article of impeachment was standard fare, alleging that the President had incited the mob who engaged in “violent, deadly, destructive and seditious acts.”(9) The second article was a little more left field, as it claimed that Trump had phoned the Georgia Secretary of State (SoS Raffensperger), urged him to find enough votes to overturn the election and “threatened him” if he didn't.(10) Raffensperger is, nominally, a Republican – but only with a capital R. He is no conservative, nor friend of the voting base.
In September 2020, Raffensperger ordered county election officials to wipe the Ballot Marketing Devices (BMDs) and install new software that hadn't been tested or certified, an illegal act that rendered the subsequent election uncertifiable in any normal world; but not in Raffenberger's. He then presided over one of the dirtiest elections in the country, one that was days late and marred by the now familiar anomalies; Trump ahead by 8% on election night, only to lose by just under 12,000 votes (0.2%) on volume approaching 5 million.
This was a state that registered an additional 2.3 million voters between 2106 and 2020, even though the state population grew by less than half a million.(11) The largest county, Fulton, had the distinction of being ground zero for no stub absentee ballots:
“The stubs number the ballots. When a ballot is used the manager keeps the stub to verify it was used. The ballot then becomes anonymous for the voter. With no stubs, there is no accountability of used/unused ballots.”(12)
Over a million were ordered as “back-up”, even though early voting had already started and despite the fact that the envelopes in which to send them were conspicuous by their absence, proof positive that these ballots were never going to be sent to voters. Georgia was also one of the epicenters of ballot harvesting, with “mules” depositing thousands of ballots each (into the infamous drop boxes), all of which were counted – the best estimate from witness testimony is that around a million were deposited in that manner, in a state that bans ballot harvesting.(13)
Then, add in many thousands of uncreased absentee ballots that had never seen the inside of an envelope,(14) 317,128 missing ballot images (a violation of state and federal law)(15) and, because even these measures weren't enough to overcome the Republican vote, an electronic transfer of 200,000 votes from Biden to Trump.(16) Raffensperger himself had gone in front of the cameras on the morning after the election to report that only 50,000 votes were yet to be counted, but 300,000 votes were then added to the totals.(17) Plus, the provision of voting machine remote log-ins with elevated privileges, even though the machine were allegedly off-line.(18) That was Georgia's election.
Much of this information leaked slowly, but there was enough out there before the certification date to furnish the necessary doubt as to the election's integrity; and doubt is enough, under Georgia law, to give pause, especially when an error rate of 0.0024% would change the outcome and the most cursory examination showed an error rate of 2%.(19) But rules mean nothing if they can be ignored with impunity, which they were, and Raffensperger simply certified the election, regardless.(20)
This is the background to Trump's January 2nd call and, once more, it should be remembered that, while the President was acting in his own interests, he was also acting on behalf of the electorate. During the discussion, Trump insisted that he won the state and enumerated many of the issues that had come to light at that time, including the fact that 18,000 ballots, produced from suitcases that had been hidden until poll watchers went home (all for Biden) had been put through vote tabulators – multiple times - in the middle of the night.(21) While constantly on the defensive, the SoS promised to work with the Trump team and go over the results. This he didn't do.
What he did do was record the phone call and then release selectively edited portions to the Washington Post, a prominent Leftist rag, which allowed the paper to claim that the President was trying to steal the election. Trump was alleged to have told Raffensperger to “find the fraud” which, in the court of the progressives, is an impeachable offence. Notwithstanding the fact that this isn't what Trump said in any event, even if it were it isn't evidence of malfeasance. Trump had just spent the best part of an hour setting out where the fraud had been committed; Raffensberger was the official responsible for certifying that the election was fraud-free. If Trump hadn't told him to find the fraud, he would have been remiss.
But veracity and sober judgement were in particularly short supply in progressive ranks in early January 2021 and the story, which broke on January 9th, nourished the Democrats' fever dream and was, therefore, uncritically accepted. (Two months later, the Post quietly printed a retraction which stated that – when they'd finally got around to listening to the whole recording – the President had actually urged the state's election investigator to “scrutinize Ballots in Fulton County, asserting she would find “dishonesty” there.”(22)) Which she most assuredly would have had she done her job, but one gets the feeling that not investigating was the default setting for all of Georgia's election officials, of whatever political hue.
Pelosi had already set the bar for impeachment at an unconscionably low level on the first go-around and talk of round two had been bouncing around the Beltway echo-chamber since November, because the Democrats were hyperventilating about Trump's attempts to “simply throw out the results of an election he lost by a comfortable margin”(23) (yet another lie – the margin was 42,918 ballots out of a total of over 155 million, or 0.027%). The outrage that this engendered was undoubtedly fueled by a healthy dollop of apprehension, as they knew what they had done and they also knew that Trump had a pretty firm grasp of the detail. However, I suspect the dominant emotion was, once again, anger at Orange Man Bad for not taking his beating lying down.
The Uniparty can always win (except when they get sloppy and believe their own hype, as in the 2016 election), but they can't always do so within the rules. This is of little consequence to them, because the ends always justifies the means and they don't care whether we notice what they're doing. Long term, of course, they are storing up trouble whether they realize it or not, but they just don't have the temperament to be tactically astute when slaking their thirst for victory.
And so, the House once again went through the motions of an investigation of the President's alleged “high crimes and misdemeanors”. This time, ten House Republicans jumped ship and voted with the Democrats, a mere two days after the articles were introduced. They didn't even pretend to investigate, in breach of yet more accepted norms:
“The House could also vote directly on the resolution, but in modern practice, it has not chosen to approve articles of impeachment called up in this fashion. Instead, the House has relied on the Judiciary Committee to first conduct an investigation, hold hearings, and report recommendations to the full House.”(24)
The process then got punted to the Senate for a trial, despite the fact that Trump left office on January 20th and the articles of impeachment weren't even delivered to the upper house until five days after that. It was immediately apparent that the votes weren't there; a two thirds majority would be required and, in a preliminary vote to dismiss the trial (due to the fact that it was unconstitutional as Trump had already left office), only five Republican senators voted with the Democrats.(25)
There had been one other occasion when an ex-office holder had been tried for impeachment, back in 1876. However, precedent isn't always a valuable guide, especially when it's wrong-headed. Despite regime efforts to obfuscate, the sole purpose of impeachment is to remove an individual from office. The Senate took it upon itself to simply bypass this requirement by holding that they could still try Trump regardless, but the Chief Justice (who presides over impeachment trials for sitting Presidents) wasn't having it – he refused to have anything to do with the trial,(26) thus forcing the Democrats to chose one of their own in his place, someone who voted to convict the President on the first witch hunt in 2019, thus further illustrating the partisan nature of the process.
Once again, the urge for retribution had overcome rationality; the establishment made it clear that their intention was to prevent Trump from ever holding public office again, but impeachment could only rise to that particular challenge if he was still in office. The trial took three days to produce the telegraphed result and Trump was acquitted, despite the best efforts of seven Republican senators who voted to convict, along with all the Democrats.
It's difficult to know what the Democrats hoped to achieve. Perhaps they genuinely thought that they could persuade 17 Republican senators to vote with them to oust a President who was no longer in office and, in the process, permanently remove him from politics. Perhaps the impeachment was merely tactical, a necessary prologue to what became the January 6th Committee. Or perhaps they simply wanted to further besmirch Trump's reputation with voters and indulge their latent vindictiveness. Whatever the true reason, they set themselves up for a chastening failure, which was duly delivered, and simultaneously managed to single-handedly rehabilitate the now former President, whose approval rating went from 41% (just after the Capitol riot) to 59% five weeks later.(27) Outstanding.
There were other clouds on the horizon. Although only an insider would know definitively, it seems reasonable to posit that Operation Fake Ballot did not go entirely to plan in the swing states in 2020, if we assume that advertising the existence of electoral irregularities and long counts was not a part of the original scheme. There may have been two primary problems; firstly, this was the inaugural nationwide deployment of the California model of almost universal mail-in balloting and it's likely that there were some cock-ups and teething problems and, secondly, the sheer volume of phantom ballots that were required may have flummoxed them. But shoddy work is always going to be vulnerable to close scrutiny and an audit might prove problematic if a state authorized one.
Republican legislatures from the swing states were conflicted about the recent election. Some of the genuinely conservative members were deeply unhappy with the way that Election Boards, Secretaries of State and Governors – acting in concert with Democrat plaintiffs and the judicial system – had ridden roughshod over election law. They had also been presented with tranches of evidence demonstrating that ballot fraud had been rampant. Other Republican lawmakers, typically holding leadership positions, were decidedly less enthusiastic about any course of action that might rock the boat or expose their own culpability. But pressure was building fast and Maricopa County, Arizona became the de facto battleground for the nationwide audit movement. All possible legal shenanigans and obstructive tactics would be trialed here first.
All audits are not, however, created equal. The “who” matters and so does the “what”, as in who it is that conducts the audit and what is actually being audited. A partisan actor with a stake in the outcome would not fit the profile of the ideal auditor, for instance and, while you and I may think that an audit is a simple concept, the adults in the room have been busy making it complicated. The advent of mail-in ballots has merely added to the mix; now there are envelopes to cater for, images on voting machines, drop boxes and chains of custody. In addition, any audit that does not also include a canvass is likely to be a waste of time. It's not enough to match a paper ballot with a vote cast – every ballot should represent an individual registered voter, who can verify that all is in order, if surveyed.
As might be expected, those with something to hide are prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to ensure that their malfeasance is not exposed to sunlight - so it was in Arizona. Maricopa County is the largest county in the state, home to Phoenix, with a population of around 4.4 million. The presidential election was already known to be plagued by “irregularities”, such as unmatched signatures, no chain of custody, a large discrepancy between mail in ballots counted versus electronic records of them and so forth. The state had initially authorized a hand count audit that simply sampled small numbers of ballots and proved nothing either way – Maricopa only looked at 0.3% of ballots cast and five counties didn't even participate.(28)
The state Senate was not impressed and it ordered the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to turn over the 2.1 million ballots cast in the 2020 election for audit.(29) Rather than complying with an entirely lawful request, the Board went to court, arguing that the ballots were secret and that the legislative subpoenas were invalid amongst other, less than compelling arguments but, for once, a court did its duty:
“There is no question that the Senators have the power to issue legislative subpoenas. The Subpoenas comply with the statutory requirements for legislative subpoenas. The Senate also has broad constitutional power to oversee elections....Production of the subpoenaed materials would not violate confidentiality laws.”(30)
This was simply the first of many skirmishes. The County Supervisors often refused to comply with lawful subpoenas and fought a rearguard action for months on end. This behavior is notable firstly because one might have thought (perhaps naïvely) that they would want to comply and, secondly, because the audit was never intended to be a belt and braces job; in fact, due to more court action, its scope became even further circumscribed. Cyber Ninjas (the independent auditors chosen) were prevented from reviewing signature matches and weren't tasked with a review of even the existence of signatures on envelopes.(31) They hand counted the ballots and envelopes and, unsurprisingly, the number of ballots pretty much matched the machine count.
That was never the issue. The issue was whether the ballots in the Biden pile came from real people and that was a question that Maricopa and its allies did their damnedest to avoid answering. There were, nonetheless, problems that were impossible to miss in even the most limited audit, such as the fact that all the ballot boxes were unsealed when initially handed over.(32) No chain of custody was provided (33) and the storage facility was dotted with shredded ballots.
Figure 1
In addition, 95% of the overseas military ballots were for Biden, despite the military traditionally leaning conservative. There were also 9,600 of them rather than the 1,600 there had been in 2016 and all were printouts with no chain of custody.(34) Notwithstanding the alleged match of ballots to machine count, there were on the scene reports of around 200,000 blank ballots, which seem to have been provided for appearance's sake, to make up the numbers.(35) There was also evidence showing that the voter database was hacked on 5th November, two days after election day, a circumstance that would have been impossible without an internet connection – no voting machines were supposed to be accessible online.(36) The county had also added 340,676 “voters” to the database between the 2018 mid-terms and the presidential election.(37)
It was further revealed that county officials didn't have control of the voting machines during the election; it was the machine manufacturers (Dominion) who enjoyed that privilege.(38) There was more; in the interests of muddying the waters further, the Board of Supervisors, shamelessly and without fear for the consequences, deleted election data to avoid complying with a subpoena.(39) Unfortunately, without a complete copy of all the software on the machines and the routers, a comprehensive audit of an election is not possible.
A combination of Democrat politicians, their lawyers and the DoJ continually hounded the audit team. Perkins Coie, Hillary's law firm, threatened the auditors with legal action if they followed through on a canvass, even (especially) those single locations where thousands of voters allegedly resided.(40) House Democrats launched an investigation into the audit while it was still ongoing (41) and the Department of Justice empanelled Grand Juries to probe the finances of anybody raising funds for any kind of auditing activity.(42)
The report, when it arrived at the end of September 2021, made for interesting reading, not that anybody connected with the legacy media was interested in anything other than whitewashing it. Among the facts not reported were the following:
“57,734 ballots with serious issues were identified in the audit. These issues include improper voter registration, improper votes, and discrepancies in the registration. This is a conservative estimate, as there were other identified problems that were not quantified nor included in that total, likely resulting in a much larger number of flawed ballots. Additional issues identified: backdated registrations, multiple voter registrations linked to the same voter affidavit, voters without records in a commercial database, and printing defects rendering thousands of ballots as suspicious.”(43)
There was also no identity match on a further 86,391 alleged voters, 73.8% of which were either registered Democrats or unaffiliated,(44) and there were no electronic records for a further 255,326 alleged early voters.(45) These are large numbers in a state decided by around 10,500 ballots. The report is fine as far as it goes, which is not very far. Much of the real work necessary to stress test the election was done by others, unconnected to the audit and less vulnerable to lawfare. Official canvasses are prone to being shut down by just a single complaint, which is the work of a moment if an activist group can persuade one of the canvassed to allege “voter intimidation”.(46)
The unofficial canvass – a random one that attempted to contact 11,708 voters and succeeded with 4,570 - found that 34.23% of those who allegedly did not vote in the election (according to Maricopa), actually did. Extrapolated, with a 95% confidence level, that amounted to approximately 173,000 disenfranchised voters. If anything, this may be an undercount as another canvasser, focusing exclusively on registered Republicans, found that 356 of the 710 contacted had sent a mail-in ballot that had not been counted. An additional estimated 96,000 votes were cast under the names of people who were either unknown to the residents or who had moved away prior to the election.(47)
Figure 2
These numbers have been accumulated without a specific focus on the most vulnerable aspects of industrial voter fraud; the invalid address such as a vacant lot or a commercial address and the use and abuse of drop-boxes. There was also no attempt to match signatures on ballot envelopes to ones registered with the state. Both of these audits, had they been done, would have pointed up further chaos. We know this because a small study of 499 ballots found a mismatch rate of 12% (sixty), which would equate to approximately 200,000 ballots rather than the 25,000 that the county identified.(48) (Later, another team compared the signatures on voter registration forms to the signatures on over 100,000 ballot envelopes and found an even higher error rate of 20%.(49) It was then discovered that 733,000 ballots allegedly retrieved from drop boxes had no chain of custody – they could have come from anywhere, and probably did.(50))
One might think that even what was uncovered might have resulted in some urgent action. It was clear that the election should not have been certified. It was also clear that election officials had deleted evidence that they were obliged, by law, to retain for 22 months. And yet, months later, the Arizona Attorney General issued an interim report which ignored huge swathes of evidence and provided no remedy for the 2020 election.(51) Nor was there any sanction for the violations of Senate subpoenas, a class two misdemeanor.(52) And he was a Republican. But, then again, so are all the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors.(53)
The moral of the story is that, in Maricopa County at least, the Democrats and the RINOs worked together and against Trump. The Republican National Committee, an organisation that ought to have been fully supportive of the audit, behaved as though it didn't have a dog in the fight. The opposition defense was layered – lawfare, a lack of cooperation, deletion of data and general obstruction first up, followed by a lack of follow through by law enforcement and a spot of misdirection and memory-holing by the press. If nobody who has been charged with taking action does so, the malefactors get away scot free, which is exactly what happened. The fact that their corruption is transparent is irrelevant if not enough people are paying attention, or if those that are can be intimidated into compliance. In either event, it's a problem for another day.
It was pretty much the same elsewhere. In Antrim County, Michigan a forensic audit provided direct evidence of manipulation within the ballot counting system.
“We conclude that the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results. The system intentionally generates an enormously high number of ballot errors. The electronic ballots are then transferred for adjudication. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency, and no audit trail. This leads to voter or election fraud.”(54)
There was even a lawsuit.(55) Nothing got done. Georgia, one of the dirtiest states of all, was also in the firing line via Fulton County; sworn affidavits from poll managers stating that they handled counterfeit ballots,(56) a familiar lack of chain of custody for drop box absentee ballots (404,000 this time)(57), an error rate in a lackadaisical hand count audit of 60%,(58) remote user access to the voting machines (yet again)(59), 2,600 voters allegedly living in a church,(60) video surveillance proving that suitcases of ballots were repeatedly run through tabulators (61) and a 200,000 shortfall in actual ballots versus the tally sheets for ballots.(62) Nothing to see here, move along.
In Wisconsin, it took until August 2021 (nine months after the election) before public pressure forced the Republicans' hand,(63) but despite thousands of absentee ballots bearing the same signature (64) and evidence that the voting machines were remotely connected to an unofficial IP address belonging to an NGO called WiscNEt,(65) no punishment was forthcoming. Pennsylvania's Republicans engaged in long drawn out, internecine warfare resulting in a hijacking of the audit movement by RINOs who succeeded in playing out the clock.
They had to – there was absolutely no way that even a fleeting glance at the election integrity of Philadelphia would have failed to reveal systemic fraud.(66) And so, eventually, the problem went away, which it was always going to because the political elites had a lock on the outcome. The audits were initiated by Trump loyalists and were duly deep sixed by the Uniparty apparatchiks who outranked them. The media simply ran cover as and when required.
By then, the Democrats had become bored with playing defense and pivoted to offence under the guise of collaboration. There is an art to creating the “bipartisan” project of the modern era. Note the use of the word project, not outcome – a bipartisan outcome is emphatically not what is desired. The appearance of moderation is what is required, not the practice of it, especially when there is an opportunity to tear MAGA Republicans a new one. Any investigation into January 6th was never going to be a genuine attempt to establish what really happened and how, because to do so would have involved exposing the Democrat House leadership, either by virtue of their incompetence (if one is of a hopelessly charitable disposition) or outright malfeasance.
The Republican Minority Leader (McCarthy) knew that. Everybody knew that, but that didn't stop him (and others) behaving like an ingenu if it served to disguise his true purpose. He knew that Pelosi and co. weren't interested in compromise – their ilk only trade in victories and any attempt to be reasonable was always going to backfire. The ersatz investigation would serve one purpose only – destroying Trump and the America First movement, which happens to be an aim that the Republican establishment could also get behind.
It is not possible to achieve consensus with ideologues who are simultaneously bereft of morality, unless one entirely capitulates. One cannot be reasonable with the unreasonable, nor can one utilize logic to educate those who have arrived at their positions without recourse to evidence. What McCarthy should have done was tell Pelosi to take a long walk off a short plank - and torpedo any semblance of intra-party unity - but, instead, he sent an emissary to the dark side and attempted to reach an agreement on the form and scope of a bill that would establish a 9/11 style Commission.
In a sign of things to come, the colleague he chose for this task was one of the ten Republican Congressmen who had voted to impeach President Trump.(67) Then, despite a deal that allegedly secured most of McCarthy's demands, the Minority Leader got cold feet and let it be known that he would vote against legislation that he had helped create. However, 35 of his colleagues did not and the bill passed the House before coming to grief in the Senate but, even there, Republican treachery was on full display as fifteen of the 50 could not bring themselves to vote against it.(68)
The bill would have mandated that, of the ten Commission appointees, five would be nominated by each party. Subpoena power would only have been available if a majority supported each individual issuance or if the (Democrat) chairperson and the (Republican) vice-chairperson came to an agreement.(69) Instead, far from being deterred by the failure, Pelosi simply moved ahead with plans to create a House Select Committee to accomplish the same ends. Due to the Democrat majority in the lower chamber (and their monolithic voting pattern, with nary a dissenter to be found), the passage of the resolution was a formality.(70) This time, twenty one Republicans didn't vote at all and two voted with the enemy.
However, the committee's set up was somewhat different to the proposed Commission. Democrats now had eight of the thirteen seats; only five Republicans were to be appointed in consultation with McCarthy, yet another break with past practice. Once again, subpoena power was to be available to the committee. The remit was wide-ranging, not that much store should have been set by that, given the Left's propensity for going off road when it suits them:
“The select committee must (1) conduct an investigation of the relevant facts and circumstances relating to the attack on the Capitol; (2) identify, review, and evaluate the causes of and the lessons learned from this attack; and (3) submit a report containing findings, conclusions, and recommendations to prevent future acts of violence, domestic terrorism, and domestic violent extremism, and to improve the security of the U.S. Capitol Complex and other American democratic institutions.”(71)
It's important to note that any such committee's power is constrained. The Supreme Court has held that Congress is not a law enforcement agency and cannot investigate someone purely to expose wrongdoing or elicit damaging information for political gain. Subpoenas can only be issued if they further a “legitimate legislative purpose”,(72) but that judgement necessarily relies either on compliance for its power, or on a further appeal to SCOTUS if compliance is not forthcoming. However, if one is prepared to ignore the rules (and can rely on the invertebrates across the aisle to keep pretending that they are powerless to intercede), one can make merry with impunity.
In addition, the powers of a committee are only available when said committee is constituted as per the resolution that creates it; they don't exist in isolation. And in this instance, it didn't take long before matters began to unravel. McCarthy nominated five Republicans, but Pelosi unilaterally deemed two of them to be unacceptable – for which read insufficiently supine and unafflicted by Trump Derangement Syndrome - and refused their appointment, despite their distinguished records on other committees.(73)
Apparently, their concerns about the legitimacy of the 2020 election represented a conflict of interest. Naturally, the fact that the Congressman that she appointed as chairman of the committee had recently sued President Trump, didn't disqualify him from service. Nor did another Democrat's former objection to Trump's 2016 election prove to be a stumbling block,(74) but Leftists believe themselves to be entitled to make the rules up as they go along and they cannot abide those that disagree with them.
Pelosi's blatant hypocrisy and unprecedented use of a veto blew up her own committee before it even got off the ground.(75) McCarthy withdrew the other three Republicans from the committee and the Democrats appointed a tame “Republican” in their stead. The Majority Leader had already appointed another alleged Republican, Liz Cheney, as one of her eight. This left the committee with a membership of nine, none of whom were appointed by McCarthy, which was a problem because
“...the resolution establishing the committee requires the committee to follow House rules on the ranking member and minority party representation. But since Pelosi removed the ranking member, its subpoena and deposition activities are at best questionable, and at worst illicit.”(76)
The dissonance didn't end there. Once the committee cranked into life and started hearing evidence, other fabulisms proliferated;
“January 6 Select Committee staff have been falsely telling witnesses that Republican staff will be present for interviews, according to multiple eyewitness sources and documents. In fact, not a single Republican-appointed member of Congress nor a single staff member representing the Republican conference is part of the controversial committee.”(77)
Effectively, all committee members were singing from the Democrat hymn sheet. House rules require consultation with the ranking member of the minority party before certain actions are undertaken, (“such as taking depositions, including those pursuant to subpoenas”),(78) but there was no Republican ranking member. Failure to adhere to the substance of the resolution and then, subsequently, to House rules, rendered the committee's subpoena powers null and void. Not questionable, illicit.
And everybody in Congress must have known it, because the flouting of protocol was so flagrant. The committee ran as a star chamber, in a manner that was diametrically opposed to its stated purpose. It was used to persecute political opponents. It fabricated evidence that was designed to impugn Republican lawmakers (79) while concealing genuine evidence that would have cast Democrats in a bad light.(80) In particular, any and all inquiries as to Pelosi's handling of Capitol security were met with deafening silence and non-compliance.
Strong Republican leadership or, at the very least, leadership that wasn't complicit, would have made loud and vociferous protests and ensured that the public was fully aware of the illegitimacy of the committee. Any Republican subpoenaed should have refused outright, citing the fact that no such power existed. Anybody that was then persecuted for failure to comply should have had their legal bills paid by the Republican Party. It should have been clear to all and sundry that this was a hopelessly partisan witch hunt.
But none of that happened. When Congress held four former Trump advisors in contempt (at the committee's behest) and handed referrals for prosecution off to the DoJ, Republican leadership sat on their hands. When two of the four were charged and convicted for defying the illegitimate committee, all one could hear were crickets.(81) The dynamic that rules interactions in circumstances such as these is normalization. Once an obvious lie has been allowed to go unchallenged (usually due to a lack of the courage that would be necessary to withstand the inevitable Leftist excoriation that would inevitably result), it becomes part of the “truth”. As it becomes increasingly embedded in the narrative, it becomes more and more impervious to exposure; in this case, the committee's lack of legitimacy isn't even mentioned by most of its opponents, not even in their own defense by those unfairly convicted.
Individuals are so chary of disrupting the official version of events that they exclude this arrow from their quiver, in the same way that climate “deniers” rarely (if ever) assert that more CO2 doesn't correlate to higher temperatures and the “vaccine hesitant” can't bring themselves to state that the clot shot is clearly designed to maim and kill. If the committee doesn't have the powers it says it does, then that's all she wrote. Everything else is downstream of that simple fact.
Which is not to say that the Democrats and their lackeys would agree. They clearly wouldn't. And it's not to say that the ruling class's institutions won't victimise dissenters, because they will. Their entire political agenda for the past seven years has been dominated by their obsession with Trump; this committee, like the investigations and impeachment attempts that preceded it, was simply another link in the narrative chain.
After nearly eighteen months of what they had clearly hoped would be a gripping, never-ending display of Trump-bashing that would keep the masses glued to their screens, the committee produced a report of 800 pages plus recommending four criminal referrals against the former President, which was yet another first. Despite the fact that even the FBI admitted that there was no evidence of an organised insurrection, one of the recommended indictments was for “assisting, aiding or comforting” one anyway.(82) In a sign of the committee's tenuous relationship with reality, even a Special Prosecutor who seems prepared to invent novel legal theories to indict Trump for exercising his right to freedom of speech (among other transgressions), hasn't been prepared to go anywhere near these referrals.
Much of the rest of the report is concerned with reheating lies, misrepresenting words and actions and ignoring constitutional rights while claiming to uphold them; or, put another way, following the standard Leftist play-book assiduously. How dare Trump protest when the ruling class takes back what they consider to be theirs, by any means necessary? Such effrontery cannot be tolerated by the elites who know that the Donald is the only individual they haven't manage to intimidate. Despite their best efforts, the Select Committee didn't make him back off either. Nor did they manage to convince the public of the efficacy of their thesis; polling demonstrated that a whopping 61% of respondents believe that government agents provoked the riot – this includes 57% of Democrats, which ought to be a huge red flag to the regime (but won't be).(83)
In one important way, however, the committee was a success. The vast majority of the raw information that was collected was sent to the National Archives (where it can be locked away for 50 years)(84), rather than being made public and anything that didn't find its way into the final report was deemed irrelevant and destroyed.(85) Further, the Blue Team that was supposed to be investigating security failures on January 6th was simply shut down early in the process.
Retaining the material that had been gathered was a clear requirement under House rules. Additionally,
"...it was clear in law they had to especially and, I mean, if there was any question, the fact that they used the videos in the hearings would dictate that it had to be preserved. The more we go in the more we're realizing that there's things that we don't have. We don't have anything about security failures at the Capitol, we don't have the videos of the depositions."(86)
That was over a month ago and, typically, nothing more has been done; just the usual wailing and gnashing of teeth from milquetoast Republicans who can't even bring themselves to openly criticize the Democrats nor to seek to censure them for willful malfeasance. But this failure was relatively inconsequential compared to their next effort.
Einstein may or may not have said “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”, but somebody did.(87) Republicans would much prefer they hadn't or, at the very least, that as few people as possible pay any heed to the aphorism, because not doing the same thing they didn't do in 2020 was very much the plan for the mid-terms of 2022. Partly, this is down to the need to continue subscribing to the Great Pretending. Neither party wants Trump; it's just the voting public that do, but it's essential to pretend otherwise. But only a party in control of the election infrastructure can afford to pay absolutely no heed to the wishes of the majority and that's the Democrats.
The Republicans still have to go through the motions, but an essential part of the act is the repudiation of election fraud; firstly, because their chums across the aisle would be angry with them if they went there; secondly, because they are also complicit, if only by virtue of neglect; and thirdly, because they cannot afford to support any initiative that will inevitably lead to an acknowledgement that Trump (and all that he stands for) is popular enough to keep winning elections.
They can't fight the fraud that the Democrats will now deploy at every forthcoming election – as long as absentee ballots reign supreme – because that will result in a Trump victory in 2024. They couldn't do much about the mid-terms either, because underperforming in those was a necessary element in the plan to rid themselves of his America First movement. The idea was that they would undermine as many of Trump's endorsed candidates as possible, both in the primaries and in the election itself, rely on the Democrats' fraud infrastructure to do the rest and then claim that the public had moved on and that the former President was a millstone pulling down the GOP across the board.
It's not easy feeling sorry for the Republican establishment (about anything), but they have been stuck between a rock and a hard place for seven years or more. As soon as Trump, a former Democrat, announced that he was seeking the Republican nomination in 2015, nothing has been as it should. They have had to walk a tightrope as they clandestinely attempt to sabotage him while publicly pretending to support him.
He's their champion, but the donors don't want him. He's a nationalist not a globalist, he doesn't start wars, he wants controlled immigration and he also wants to put money back in the pockets of the middle class – for the elites, these are all cardinal sins. However, the Republicans can't seem to get rid of him and, as long as he is their candidate for President, the red wing of the Uniparty cannot be allowed access to power. The GOP establishment knows this, so they keep their heads down and let the Leftists get on with stealing elections.
What they don't seem to understand is that a good proportion of the public can see right through them; for instance, 55% of Americans believe that DC Republicans worked with Democrats to keep Trump from being elected in 2020 – 67% of Republicans and even 51% of Democrats.(88) It seems that
“...working people and people on fixed incomes understand the value of America First and Donald Trump in/on their lives. Every other coalition is a small segment of elite minded snobbish people who think they know better. Keep watching.”(89)
The 2022 mid-terms were a particularly egregious example of what happens when rampant election fraud is allowed to go unchallenged. Even an average mid-term election usually trims around 30 House seats and 4 Senate seats from the ranks of the incumbent President's party. In House races, most polling organisations had the Republicans gaining between 10 and 42 seats; in other words, a convincing majority and a slap in the face for the administration.(90) There were, in addition, a minimum of seven Senate races in which the GOP had a viable opportunity to add to their cohort; Washington, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Nevada, New Hampshire, Georgia and Arizona. Even the left leaning polls (last time around, the average was 2% erroneously in favour of Biden's final tally) had Republicans ahead in three, tied in two and within the margin of error for the other two.(91)
In the end, the Republicans accumulated three million more votes than the Democrats nationwide. For reference, in the 2010 mid-terms conservatives were up two and a half million votes, which was enough to capture an extra sixty three seats.(92) This time, they gained nine. All this despite opinion polls showing that over 80% of the electorate – Republican and Democrat alike – were not happy with the direction the country is taking.(93) Also despite exit polls showing that nearly all of the above were still unhappy when leaving the voting booth (73%).(94)
Opinion polls taken over several months leading up to the election were equally bullish for the Republicans, especially in the swing states. There, they led Democrats by 3%-5%, except in Georgia where the margin was 11%.(95) Across the board, on the generic Congressional ballot, Republicans were up by 7% with an 18% advantage among independents.(96) Women moved 32% in favor of the GOP between September and October.(97) These are wipe-out numbers and even CNN, Democrats' cheerleader-in-chief was forced to conclude that
“...the picture that emerges...is an electorate deeply concerned about the state of the economy and not at all convinced that Biden is concentrating on it as much as he should. The poll also reveals that the anti-Biden voters are far more passionate than the pro-Biden voters, a mismatch that often predicts a turnout disparity. The poll, in sort (sic), reads like something close to a worst-case scenario for Democrats. And with less than a week until Election Day, it’s not at all clear what they can do to change it.”(98)
With a week to go, the Democrats were (publicly) certain that they would lose the House and perhaps all of those seven Senate races. Voters were keen to cast their ballots and angry with Biden.(99) In truth, this had been on the cards for months – even Democratic strategists were predicting a “biblical disaster” as early as April.(100) In Florida, a state that had actually attempted to, at least partially, curb the effectiveness of Democratic fraud, that's exactly what happened. DeSantis won re-election by 19% (as opposed to 0.4% four years earlier) and Miami-Dade, a county that Hillary had won by 30% in 2016, flipped red.(101) Elsewhere, not so much.
Republicans didn't win a single Senate seat. What's more, they didn't even come close. There was wide scale fraud in every single state; in the current era, there is (and will be) always, in every election – including primaries. Voting machines in every state are connected to the internet.(102) Each state's election, from precinct level up, is decided by an algorithm, which is different across states but uniform across the precincts within each state.(103) This is not conjecture or tin foil hat territory – it's provable. All that is left is the job of finding enough floating ballots to fill one party's quota and destroying the correct number of ballots accrued by the other party, so that a simple audit can be passed.
America First candidates are the current target of choice for both parties;
“If there is any election truism... it is that only America-First candidates appear to be victims. Phantom voters appeared in a state representative election in Wisconsin between two Republicans, one of whom was trying to unseat an unpopular guy. Guess what? Phantoms moved from their current homes, to this little state rep district, voted, then seem to have moved back. All in a couple of weeks.
Do you think this was a Leftist plot? Hardly.
Same thing happened in a Florida congressional race where an America-First candidate lost a primary to a RINO and there were about three times the number of phantoms in the final total as were needed to turn the race.”(104)
There are about 350 counties in the US (about 10% of the total) that have more registered voters than is mathematically possible and the Supreme Court has data that shows that around one in eight voter registrations are problematic. That's 24 million.(105) In California, matters are almost comically out of hand. An independent audit of the 2020 election found that the number of illegitimate mail-in ballots exceeded Biden's alleged margin of victory (which was 5.1 million votes).(106) 6.6 million ballots are sent to voters who have moved out of state. Theft and the fraudulent submission of ballots alone accounts for over 14% of the 2022 count.(107) There were many other blatant anomalies. And if, in extremis, all these cheats aren't enough, it's possibly to simply run the same ballots through the tabulators multiple times and get away with it – even if there is documentary evidence of same.(108) US elections are now totally corrupt and the 2022 mid-terms were business as usual.
And so the “red wave” was transformed into a red trickle. The Republican establishment blamed Trump, as per the plan. They said that his message didn't resonate, that people were tired of hearing him complain about the 2020 election and that the candidates he endorsed were of insufficient quality. Unfortunately, his candidates did exceptionally well:
“93% of the hundreds of candidates Trump endorsed won their primary contest in the 2022 election. Eighty percent won in the general. That is a far higher percentage of wins for Trump-endorsed candidates than ever before. In 2018, for example, only 59 percent of the candidates he endorsed won in the general.”(109)
And it wasn't just the Republican voters who were feeling sore about what had transpired; not with 70%-80% of the public unhappy with Biden and co. It was independents and some Democrats as well. And this time, it didn't take two years for a majority to believe that the election wasn't kosher; they were half expecting it not to be ahead of time. The only real question was how much arrogance would the regime display? We should have known the answer to that, although it's puzzling that the Democrats didn't steal the House as well as the Senate, especially as they were definitely trying to.
The late-called races that habitually go to Democrats (usually after Republicans have led handily) didn't materialize in the numbers required. Whether this means that there is a finite limit to the fraud that they are prepared to indulge in – as a result of insufficient phantom ballots or, less credibly, a failure of nerve – is not clear, but it would only have taken another five wins to retain a trifecta in federal government and there were at least nine House seats spread across seven states that the Republicans won by less than 2%.
Some states bucked the trend in a fairly obvious manner (with Ohio, in particular, recording infeasible swings towards the Democrats) and there were at least four Senate races that were anomalous when compared to the other contests within states, but the focus seems to have been on obtaining (and retaining) control of the executive offices of the states themselves; there were at least sixteen races, mostly in the swing states, that didn't pass the smell test.(110) One assumes that a high price is placed on these offices, as a recalcitrant Governor or Secretary of State might inhibit the certification of future stolen elections, as well as resisting federal blandishments aimed at locking down their public the next time Biden declares an emergency.
The ruling class were busy shoring up their position in other respects, also. The various election bills that the Democrats have attempted to ram through Congress are necessary at present (despite the opportunities for fraud afforded to them by absentee ballots), because cheating in elections is still labor intensive and vulnerable to discovery by a properly targeted audit. Fraud leaves tracks and the public are cottoning on. Plus, the lawfare required in the months leading up to an election is expensive and the preferential judgements that are usually handed down are subject to appeal and annulment.
Additionally, as the progressive Left's policies and general demeanor make them increasingly unpopular, it becomes difficult to maintain the fiction that they can genuinely muster the support that is necessary to win. In their minds, codifying their methodology into federal law is the best way of smoothing away the cognitive dissonance. The fact that, by attempting to mandate all manner of weaknesses and workarounds, they show their hand doesn't seem to occur to them because a), they think that the pervasive media gaslighting upon which they rely will convince the untermensch that black really is white and b), because they believe that if they make the illegitimate lawful, all debate is necessarily curtailed.
But they still feel the need to slather lipstick on the pig, for the sake of form, if nothing else, so we are treated to the time worn “voter suppression” trope one more time - according to the intellectually challenged Vice President
“...across our nation anti-voter laws could make it more difficult for as many as 55 million Americans to vote. That is one out of six people in our country.”(111)
Which is deserving of a four Pinocchios fact check, as it is a figure plucked from the ether with no basis in fact. The majority of voters favor laws that protect the integrity of elections as it provides them with an assurance that their vote will actually count, rather than have it cancelled out by a phantom ballot. They also understand that mass mail-in voting is vulnerable to fraud.
And so we had the misleadingly named For The People Act, introduced the day after the Democrat-controlled House commenced its term, which would have enshrined election fraud within the system. It wouldn't have to be done under cover of darkness or with the aid of algorithms any more. It could be done in the open. Had it been passed, it would have ensured insecure voting processes, by eliminating Voter ID and mandating mail-in voting. It would have registered tens of millions of illegal aliens to vote (who overwhelmingly favor Democrats) and would have also allowed 16 and 17 year olds to register. As it would be illegal (not just not required) to ask for ID, there would be nothing to stop people voting twice or voting underage.
The bill also required politicians to publish the identities of candidate donors; we can all see where that might end. It set up a commission to redraw boundary lines (a further insurance if the Census isn't helpful enough) and would have prohibited states from keeping paper ballots, thus ensuring that a proper audit would be impossible. A commission would examine whether five US territories should be granted voting rights, but not statehood (no-one ever sets up a commission to recommend the status quo).
As these territories are not viable entities without availing themselves of the largesse of the US taxpayer and as the Democrats are the ones who are particularly fond of spending somebody else's money, that could mean up to 10 senators and 18 Electoral College votes to the blue party. Now can you see why they aren't bothering to ingratiate themselves with the electorate?
“It should suffice, however, to reveal how insane today’s Democrat Party is that every single House Democrat, save one, voted for this bill. This is a voting bill that only totalitarians seeking a uniparty nation could love.”(112)
Just to top it off, the bill is unconstitutional on its face; in other words, unlawful. The feds are not in charge of elections, the states are and it would take a Constitutional Amendment to change that. We have entered such a post-truth zone that the governing party can put forward an illegal bill and expect to get away with it.
Unburdened by a scintilla of shame, the Democrats also pushed the Freedom To Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Taken together, this troika of unconstitutionality would enable a complete federal takeover of the election process. Two of the bills passed the House, when the Left had the majority and then died in the Senate.(113)(114) The Freedom to Vote Act is still bouncing around, but would need 10 Senators and five Representatives to commit collective hari-kari and vote to abolish a system of representative democracy for a one party state. One would hope that even the GOP isn't that stupid.
The substance of Democrat activity, enabled by an increasingly hamstrung GOP, is simply a continuation of the progressive agenda that first crowded out the moderates under Obama. As such, it predates Trump's arrival on the political scene, but its recent hyper-frenetic nature is a reaction to the 2016 election and Trump's continuing threat.
The character of the chief protagonists dictates that they will give no quarter; no abomination is a step too far. They don't seek a genuine mandate from the voting public - they simply seek power by any means necessary and they know that Trump is the only political threat that they face. And so, they have become locked into this dance of death with the former President. Their one and only instinct is to double down when they encounter resistance and Trump's is to always fight back, no matter what. As the contest plays out, we learn little more about Trump and much more about them, and none of it is good.
Citations
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4) https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/07/lawmakers-trump-25th-amendment-455832
(5) https://web.archive.org/web/20221207132931/https://www.speaker.gov/newsroom/10820
(7) https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/12/politics/house-vote-25th-amendment-trump/index.html
(8) Ditto
(10) Ditto
(12) https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/02/we_need_a_sarbanesoxley_law_for_voter_rolls.html
(19)
(22)
(23) https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a34726577/trump-impeach-lame-duck/
(24) https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R45769
(25) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/02/08/us/politics/trump-second-impeachment-timeline.html
(31) https://www.westernjournal.com/op-ed-maricopa-county-elections-department-not-anything-wrong/
(34) https://www.azleg.gov/videoplayer/?eventID=2022011066
(37) Ditto
(44) Ditto
(47) https://streetloc.com/view-news/election-2020-grassroots-canvass-report
(49) https://www.azag.gov/sites/default/files/2022-04/2022-04-06%20Fann%20letter.pdf
(53) https://maricopagop.org/elected-officials/#maricopa-county
(61) http://wiseenergy.org/Energy/Election/State_Select_2016-2020_Election_Data.htm
(68) https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/19/gop-mccarthy-jan-6-commission-489598
(69) https://edition.cnn.com/2021/05/28/politics/january-6-commission-vote-senate/index.html
(70) Ditto
(71) https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-resolution/503/text
(73) https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/explainer-can-congress-enforce-subpoena
(75) https://thefederalist.com/2022/01/05/pelosi-owns-the-j6-commission-and-thats-why-it-failed/
(76) https://www.wsj.com/articles/nancy-pelosi-vetoes-republicans-january-6-committee-11626904913
(77) https://thefederalist.com/2022/01/05/pelosi-owns-the-j6-commission-and-thats-why-it-failed/
(79) Ditto
(88) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/einstein-s-parable-of-quantum-insanity/
(90) Ditto
(93) https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/11/americas_great_political_unraveling.html
(94) https://thenewamerican.com/almost-80-percent-of-americans-dissatisfied-with-direction-of-the-nation/
(99) https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/02/politics/cnn-poll-democrats-midterm-elections/index.html
(100) https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/oct/26/even-democrats-now-realize-midterm-elections-will-/
(101) https://www.politico.com/news/2023/01/06/miami-democrats-feud-audit-2022-midterms-00076758
(106) https://www.lopmatrix.com/audit-reveals-massive-voter-fraud-in-californias-2022-midterm-elections/
(107) Ditto
(108) https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/08/chris-wray-strikes-again-georgia-poll-workers-caught/
(109) https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/12/nevertrump-fraternity-parties-on/
(110) https://www.politico.com/2022-election/results/
(113) https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/22/politics/senate-democrats-voting-bill/index.html
(114) https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/03/politics/john-lewis-voting-rights-act-senate-vote/index.html