by WorldTribune Staff, January 5, 2024
Democrats are using the legal system in an attempt to have 126 Republicans removed from the 2024 election ballot.
Lawfare is apparently seen as the preferred strategy after losing in the court of public opinion.
New Jersey Democrat Rep. Bill Pascrell has sought to bar 126 members of Congress using the 14th Amendment theory that those who challenged the 2020 election somehow incited an “insurrection” on Jan. 6, 2021.
Similar legislation from Missouri Democrat Rep. Cori Bush to disqualify members got 63 co-sponsors, all Democrats, including New York Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, and Ritchie Torres and “Squad” members Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.
On Tuesday, an activist filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Court aimed at removing Republican Rep. Scott Perry from the 2024 primary ballot. The activist charged that Perry on Jan. 6, 2021 violated the 14th amendment insurrection clause.
A campaign spokesperson for Perry told the Philadelphia Inquirer that the lawsuit is “frivolous, filed by a fringe activist whose claim to fame is an inflatable pink pig.” Gene Stilp, known for his public advocacy campaigns, used the inflatable pig to protest wage increases for state legislators in 2005. Stilp also made headlines by burning MAGA flags with swastikas outside courthouses.
Mike Davis — a former chief counsel to Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who has been rumored as a possible attorney general in a new Trump administration — told the Washington Examiner that the fact that Perry is now facing a similar legal threat as former President Donald Trump indicates “the Democrats will use this against all Republicans going forward if this has not stopped now.”
“This sets a very dangerous precedent, where if you can’t reach your political enemies at the ballot box, you just disqualify them under bogus legal theories. These are republic-ending tactics by Democrats,” Davis said.
The same 14th Amendment argument being used against Perry has formed the basis of a flurry of lawsuits seeking to bar Trump from state primary ballots across the nation, leading to a Colorado Supreme Court ruling last month that found Trump did “engage” in insurrection on the day of the riot and thereby disqualified him from the ballot. Maine’s Democratic secretary of state made a similar decision on her own one week later, declaring Trump ineligible for the ballot there.
The separate decisions are on hold, and Trump has appealed both.
“We have become a nation of Madame Defarges — eagerly knitting names of those to be subject to arbitrary justice,” law professor Jonathan Turley noted.
And legacy media have obediently amplified the Democrats’ efforts to remove their GOP foes from ballots while at the same time ignoring Democrat Congress members “who sought to block certification of Republican presidents under the very same law with no factual or legal basis,” Turley noted.
Turley cited the following examples:
• Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Dick Durbin praised the effort then-Sen. Barbara Boxer organized to challenge the certification of President George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election.
• Rep. Bennie Thompson, who headed up the Jan. 6 Select Committee, voted to challenge Bush’s election.
• Rep. Jamie Raskin sought to block certification of the 2016 election result — particularly ironic since he’s a leading voice calling for Trump to be disqualified.
Raskin insisted last week on CNN that the effort to prevent citizens from voting for Trump is the very embodiment of democracy: “If you think about it, of all of the forms of disqualification that we have, the one that disqualifies people for engaging in insurrection is the most democratic because it’s the one where people choose themselves to be disqualified.”
“That is akin to treating every criminal charge as a consensual act of incarceration because the accused chose his path in life,” Turley wrote.
If the Democrats’ efforts to use the courts to remove GOP candidates from ballots succeeds, “there is no reason they can’t be used unilaterally against any candidate (and without any criminal charges, let alone convictions),” Turley added. “It is instantly both self-executing and self-satisfying. It would put the world’s most successful democracy on a slippery slope to political chaos. That is why the Supreme Court needs to take up this issue and put this pernicious theory to bed once and for all.”
Meanwhile, Fox News reported on Thursday that a top prosecutor on Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team discouraged the FBI from pursuing an investigation into the Clinton Foundation in 2016 due to what he viewed as negligible evidence, despite multiple Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) related to hundreds of thousands of dollars in foreign transactions.
Ray Hulser, the former chief of the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section (PIN), who serves on Smith’s team currently prosecuting Trump, was identified as the official who “declined prosecution” of the Clinton Foundation in 2016 in Special Counsel John Durham’s report.
Publishers and Citizen Journalists: Start your Engines
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