It’s the same old story.
Democrats routinely make an absolute mess then scream at Republicans, “Why haven’t you fixed this?”
That’s true whether it's the border crisis, rampant inflation, the crime pandemic...or anything else.
That’s also the Biden ballot brouhaha in a nutshell.
Democrats apparently didn’t bother to check state deadlines for putting their presidential nominee on the ballot when scheduling their national convention.
Ohio’s ballot deadline is August 7. The Democratic National Convention is August 19-22. These are the geniuses nominally running our country. Explains a lot, doesn’t it?
Fortunately for them, the Ohio GOP knows how to get things done.
Senate President Matt Huffman has assured everyone that Biden will be on the Ohio ballot even if the Democrats cannot come up with a solution of their own, whether it happens via the courts or legislation.
But the Ohio state media had already lost their marbles over the non-issue.
The Democrats’ screw up became a big story when Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose gave the Donkey Party the courtesy of informing them, in a letter on April 5, that they were in danger of missing the Ohio deadline.
The media immediately attacked the messenger.
Cleveland Plain Dealer Editor Chris Quinn, as is his custom, unleashed an unhinged rant accusing LaRose of threatening to keep Biden off the ballot.
“He is playing dirty. He plays dirty all the time. He’s the worst secretary of state we’ve ever had,” fumed the editor who guided his paper to a jaw-dropping 21-percent drop in circulation last year.
But who is really playing dirty?
President Biden actually is trying to keep his opponent off the ballot.
Furthermore, as Biden rails he is trying to “save democracy” by preventing the re-election of former President Trump, the evidence shows he is actually trying to destroy democracy by eliminating his opponent.
It is Biden who is committing massive election interference by conducting politics by lawfare.
Biden’s minions tried to keep Trump off the ballot in Colorado by claiming he had supported an insurrection on January 6, 2021.
The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously said no. That would be disenfranchising voters.
Even liberal Justice Elena Kagan asked, “Why a single state should decide who gets to be president of the United States?”
Maine’s secretary of state tried the same gambit but reversed her decision to remove Trump from the ballot after seeing the justices' writing on the wall.
Anti-democracy Democrats in Illinois tried the same tactic but failed for the same reason.
Biden’s minions have filed a total of 91 criminal charges against President Trump in three states and the District of Columbia in a blatantly transparent attempt to disqualify him from the ballot.
But it’s not working out exactly as they’d hoped.
A New York Times editorial this week by a Boston University law professor is headlined: “I Thought the Bragg Case Against Trump Was a Legal Embarrassment. Now I Think It’s a Historic Mistake.”
Prosecutors look either incompetent, unethical, or both. And the more they flail, the higher Trump climbs in the polls.
It gets worse. Biden apparently dispatched his own henchman to run the New York prosecution.
There was no case before that.
Both the Justice Department and the Federal Election Commission investigated and decided there were no grounds to charge Trump for allegedly falsifying business records during his 2016 campaign for president.
Even Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg decided the evidence was too weak to prove that amounted to election interference, and suspended the investigation indefinitely in 2022.
Then, inexplicably, Matthew Colangelo left his job as a top DOJ official to take a much more lowly position as senior counsel in the Manhattan Attorney General's office.
He revived the investigation and filed charges against Trump four months later. He is now the lead prosecutor in the case.
"It's very odd. It’s usually the other way around (Colangelo’s career path). . . . And frankly, that sounds to me like somebody who thought, 'Ah, here's an opportunity to go and get Donald Trump,'" said attorney and former member of the Federal Election Commission, Hans von Spakovsky.
Boston University law professor Jed Handelsman Shugerman summed up the prosecution’s case in the New York Times thusly:
• As a reality check, it is legal for a candidate to pay for a nondisclosure agreement. Hush money is unseemly, but it is legal. The election law scholar Richard Hasen rightly observed, “Calling it election interference actually cheapens the term and undermines the deadly serious charges in the real election interference cases.”
• In stretching jurisdiction and trying a federal crime in state court, the Manhattan D.A. is now pushing untested legal interpretations and applications.
• Eight years after the alleged crime itself, it is reasonable to ask if this is more about Manhattan politics than New York law. This case should serve as a cautionary tale about broader prosecutorial abuses in America — and promote bipartisan reforms of our partisan prosecutorial system.
• This case is still an embarrassment of prosecutorial ethics and apparent selective prosecution.
So, there is no real legal case.
But there is an excellent chance of a conviction.
Consider the jury pool.
Biden got 86.7-percent of the Manhattan vote in 2020.
Now Biden is showing America how to defeat an opponent without a vote.
And that’s how democracy dies.
Just keep destroying democracy by claiming to be saving it.
“A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.”
— Daniel Kahneman, author and former Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs Emeritus at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
— Carl Sagan, author and astronomer
Senator Terry Johnson represents Ohio Senate District 14