Posted on 03/16/2021 7:19:37 AM PDT by SJackson
An audacious maneuver to steal an election.
The 2020 election cycle is over. Or so we thought. More than 4 months after Election Day, the Democrats in control of the House of Representatives are still eyeing a House seat won by Republican Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa. The scorched-earth Democrats would like to snatch her seat away and give it to the loser of the race, Democrat candidate Rita Hart.
On November 30, 2020, Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate announced that the state canvassing board had officially certified Republican Miller-Meeks’ victory over Democrat Hart in Iowa’s second Congressional district race. “The official result in #IA02 is @millermeeks 196,964 to @RitaHartIA 196,958. 6 vote difference,” he tweeted.
Sore loser Hart (at left above) decided to bypass a further challenge in the Iowa courts and to instead petition the House of Representatives directly to overturn the officially declared election result. Hart claimed that 22 ballots were wrongly excluded, despite multiple recounts.
Under Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution, “Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members.” The Supreme Court has ruled that each congressional chamber’s final judgment is not reviewable by the courts because it is “a non-justiciable political question.” This extraordinary power to potentially override the will of the voters has historically been used quite sparingly.
Congress passed the Federal Contested Election Act, which permits losing candidates in a state election for a House seat to bring a challenge before the House by filing a motion with the House clerk. But Hart skipped over a vital step before taking her petition to the House of Representatives. Candidates have been required in the past to exhaust all their state election contest remedies first before seeking a ruling from the House as a final resort. Hart couldn’t be bothered, however, with following such an orderly process. She reached out immediately to her political allies in the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi grabbed at the chance to pad her Democrat majority margin in the House by any means necessary, keeping the door open to Hart’s challenge. Pelosi said last December that “the issue relating to Iowa is an issue for the House Administration Committee” and that the “House decides who it will seat.” To buy some time while the committee decided what course to take, Pelosi agreed only to “provisionally” seat Rep. Miller-Meeks in the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives when the new 117th Congress convened on January 3, 2021.
According to a report issued by the Congressional Research Service in 2016, “Since 1933, it appears that an explicit provisional seating of a Member-elect, with express referral by the House of the question of the final right to a seat to the committee of jurisdiction, has occurred in only two instances.” Pelosi’s maneuver has now added to this tiny handful of instances.
Pelosi’s House Democrat caucus is responsible for half of the proceedings to impeach a president in this country’s more than two centuries of history. Therefore, it should be no surprise that Pelosi and her House comrades would set in motion such an audacious abuse of power to take away Rep. Miller-Meeks’ seat and give it to her defeated Democrat opponent.
As a result of Pelosi’s despicable power play, Rep. Miller-Meeks has been serving her constituents under a cloud of uncertainty since she was provisionally seated. On March 10th, the House’s Committee on House Administration decided to keep Hart’s challenge alive, not addressing Rep. Miller-Meeks' motion to dismiss the challenge on its merits.
Pelosi replied “of course" when asked at a press conference on March 11th whether she envisioned a scenario in which the House could overturn the state-certified victory of Rep. Miller-Meeks. "I respect the work of the committee. I did see, as you saw in the press, what they decided to… And they were following my, as I read it, the requirements of the law as to how you go forward. And how you go forward is the path you’re on and we’ll see where that takes us. But there could be a scenario to that extent. Yes."
What lies ahead on the “path” the committee is taking will undoubtedly be a drawn-out, biased proceeding conducted by the Democrats' partisan majority. This could involve depositions, interviews, subpoenas for witnesses and documents, a committee-conducted recount, and physical examination of disputed ballots and registration documents. After the committee makes its recommendation, the whole House gets to weigh in by a simple majority vote. Just in case, Rep. Miller-Meeks should be prepared to look for another job.
The Committee on House Administration’s ranking member, Rodney Davis, R-Illinois, respects the state election certification process as a matter of principle. He did not object to the certification of Electoral College results in January out of deference to the states’ certification processes. And Rep. Davis remains consistent in declaring his respect for Iowa’s certification process in Rep. Miller-Meeks’ case.
The Democrat House members who decried any effort by Republicans to exercise their constitutional right to challenge a state’s certification of presidential electors are the hypocrites. These same self-righteous blowhards are perfectly willing to entertain Hart’s challenge to Iowa’s state-certified election in which Rep. Miller-Meeks was declared the winner following the state’s multi-layered, bipartisan review process.
If Hart had followed her state’s election procedures for an impartial judicial adjudication of a disputed vote count before running to her friends in the House of Representatives, she would have taken her case first to Iowa’s court for the trial of contested elections. This is the court that conducts a trial of contested presidential and congressional elections in the state and reaches a considered judgment as to the legitimate winner. Instead, Hart did an end run of Iowa’s process for judicial review of an election dispute. She deliberately prevented a complete record from being assembled, reviewed, and formally judged at the state level by an independent judiciary. Not that the Pelosi gang would have deferred to the Iowa state court’s findings of fact or law anyway. The Pelosi gang is getting set to serve as partisan judge and jury in Hart's behalf.
Rep. Miller-Meeks is understandably outraged. During a March 12th interview on Fox News’ Special Report, she said:
“What my opponent wants to do is to violate Iowa law, go against Iowa law, and go against the representation of the voters of Iowa, and disenfranchise 400,000 voters because she didn't get the results she wanted… States should rule their election, voters in that state should decide who represents them. This is a process where they want to go against the laws of our state, the election laws of our state, against the voters of our state, and to determine who they want to seat in Congress.”
The House Democrats’ willingness to overturn the state-certified results of the Iowan congressional election is a shameless indication of what the left will do to establish one-party rule in Washington. Even more ominous is the falsely titled “For the People Act” (H.R.1), which the House passed on March 3rd and sent over to the Senate. This horrendous bill runs roughshod over the states’ constitutional authority to determine the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives” (Article I, Section 4). For example, H.R.1 would override perfectly constitutional state voter identification laws. H.R.1 would prevent states from outlawing fraud-prone vote harvesting or from limiting the scope of distribution of mail-in ballots to voters with reasonable cause to vote by mail. And it would do away with rigorous state signature matching requirements. These provisions and others in H.R.1 were designed to blur the line between legal and illegal votes, a stratagem that helps Democrats to illegitimately pad their vote count. Confirming the partisan intent behind H.R.1, it transforms the Federal Election Commission (“FEC”) from a bipartisan, six-member body to a five-member body subject to the control of a partisan majority.
H.R.1 also violates the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of speech from government infringement. Nine former FEC members warned in a letter to leaders of both the House and Senate that H.R.1 contains overly burdensome disclosure and political advertising requirements as well as other provisions that would have a “harmful impact on First Amendment speech and association rights.” They concluded their letter by cautioning that the partisan direction H.R.1 takes would have a “likely ruinous effect on our political system.”
Rep. Miller-Meeks voted against H.R.1, which, she said, “would undermine state election laws and voter’s trust in their elections.” The Pelosi gang would like nothing more than to silence Rep. Miller-Meeks’ voice by unconscionably stealing her own well-earned House seat in violation of the Iowan voters’ will.
"Under Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution, “Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members.” The Supreme Court has ruled that each congressional chamber’s final judgment is not reviewable by the courts because it is “a non-justiciable political question.” This extraordinary power to potentially override the will of the voters has historically been used quite sparingly.
...but taken to this extreme, the House & Senate can (and likely would) render moot all popular elections. If the above constitutional provisions and ensuing judicial decisions effectively mean that the House & Senate can disregard the vote of the people and the rules of elections as established by the respective states and simply seat members it deems fit to serve, then we no longer have a Republican form of government. Last I checked, the Constitution demands a Republican form of government.
So, which constitutional provision will the Court follow? BTW, to whatever extent the Nation had a 'birth defect,' that defect was the Framers lived at a time when integrity actually meant something. It's clear the Founding Fathers didn't intend to cede to the Legislature the power to override the states and popular votes of picking members. And, because of that, they didn't even think this clause could be - would be - abused by someone as unscrupulous as Nancy Pelosi. But, here we are.
Democrats are increasingly aggressive because Republicans never stand up to them or wield power when they have it. Consequently, Democrats have no reasons to fear or respect Republicans.
Weakness invites aggression. Always has, always will. Until the Repukes learn this lesson and start REALLY fighting for what they want nothing will change. In fact, it will only get worse.
It's OK, we'll vote 'em out in '22.
If they’re smart they will let it go and concentrate on the rematch in 2022. Hopefully they’re not smart, Pelosi will overturn the election, and make their claims about Trump trying to overturn the 2020 election the height of hypocrisy.
Like political impeachments and no filibuster for judges, Democrats will find themselves on the other side in the future. In the past this has usually been due to corruption or criminal activity. The only exception, Louis C. Wyman (R) who wasn't seated due to a close election in which two recounts gave different results. But his opponent wasn't seated, the seat was vacant until New Hampshire held a special election. It's a very damaging precedent.
The weakness is intentional, the GOP has been this way for decades. If you want a tough party, it will have to be a new one.
Republican Motto:
“This is not the hill to die on!”
I'm not so sure. I'm wholly unconvinced the Democrats are going to lose their grip on power any time soon, or even anytime in the foreseeable future.
Joe Biden barely left his basement and 'beat' a Republican incumbent who received 5M more votes than the previous popular vote record. How did Biden do that? Mail-in voting. Unless we stop mail-in voting, Republicans are not going to win back the Senate or House, much less the White House.
This says nothing of the existential threat of another amnesty. If they manage that, it really is the ball game for a generation or more.
If you want a tough party, it will have to be a new one.
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I agree. There are potentially 75 million people who could support it. Anything would be better than the feckless GOP IMO.
If this outrage happens, EVERY democrat politician needs to be pounded with it when they come to the famous Iowa State Fair or “test the waters” pre-Iowa caucuses.
Anything would be better than the feckless GOP IMO.
I disagree......we clean out the GOP of every RINO, Elitist, Moderate Republican and build from there. President Trump has already said a third party will not succeed.......splitting the vote for one thing. If these (what I’ve heard lately) assistant Demonrats (Republicans that suck up) want to run, let THEM form their own party from scratch!!!!!
Do it. Then have Trump dump all his evidence from the election and watch Nanzi try to squirm her way out of that
It must be a miserable life to be a democrat never happy and always greedy.
The RATS pull that crap because the wussy pubbies don’t stand up to them.
The rats are always gnawing on something.
I would disagree that Mrs. Miller-Meeks does not have a judicial remedy, because any Pelosi-led end run around a statute is reviewable. If you are interested in this subject, please take a look at Powell v. McCormack, 395 U.S. 486 (1969).
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/395/486/
Adam Clayton Powell successful challenged his exclusion from the House, despite having won the election to be his district’s representative.
I think a reviewing court would find Rita Hart’s failure to exhaust her remedies in the Iowa courts fatal to her cause. I think it might also be likely that the federal courts would rule that since Mrs. Miller-Meeks has been seated, even “provisionally”, that it would take a 2/3 vote of the House to expel her, which is never going to happen.
I also think that Iowa’s two GOP senators, Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst, have a role to play in this—both of them should together take to the Senate floor and announce that if Mrs. Miller-Meeks is denied her seat in the House, both Grassley and Ernst will block the consideration of any House-passed bill from being taken up in the Senate, as any House proceedings where Rita Hart is a member would be illegitimate.
“I disagree......we clean out the GOP of every RINO, Elitist, Moderate Republican and build from there.”
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With all due respect I don’t think you understand what the GOP really is and how it functions as an organization. I can explain in detail but the short version is that the GOP is basically an intrenched political machine that (1) only serves the interests of it’s big donors, (2) converts newly elected people into subservient loyalists by making them dependent of party support and funding, and (3) votes to grow the government behemoth and protect the parochial interests of the party.
Trust me, the GOP is what it is and its never going to change. Reagan couldn’t reform it nor could Trump, whom the party resisted for four straight years. In fact the GOP played him like a fiddle. (Trump was successful through force of personality and pressuring the GOP, not through their willing cooperation.)
Your intentions are good but the reality is that voting out the bad apples isn’t going to solve the problem. Bear in mind that the awful GOP leadership stays in power because the rank and file allow it. They could remove them but they don’t.
People close to me have worked several inside national GOP organizations. I can assure you that the party knows how to defend itself against any and all efforts to force change. They’ve been doing it for a LONG TIME and know how to deal with such threats. The one thing the GOP is good at is protecting itself.
The RATS pull that crap because the wussy pubbies don’t stand up to them.
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The Repukes never give the Dems any reasons to fear or respect them. I hate to say it but the Dems are stronger and more determined than the Reps, so they win. Simple as that.
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