What were the Dem leadership and their minions thinking when they engaged in this massive coverup of Sloe Joe’s feebleness and disfunction?

Good question. along with the related one of “why did they think they could get away with it?” Short version of the answer: they thought it was their only option.

If we go back in time to the 2020 campaign, it was obvious that a second Donald Trump term would be a truly nightmare scenario for the Democrats. They felt they absolutely had to win. The only thing they lacked was a healthy, vigorous candidate who could do it. Bernie Sanders become – to their horror – the frontrunner but he was too old, too obviously leftist, too ethnically Jewish. He simply wouldn’t do because they felt he would lose the election. Kamala Harris was great on paper in terms of identity politics but seemed to have zero electoral appeal even to Democrats, much less Republicans and/or Independents. The others in the running were hardly doing much better.

The Democrats’ only hope became Joe Biden, whom they knew they could label a moderate compared to Sanders. Whatever cognitive problems he had – and he clearly had them even in 2020, although not as severe as they later became – the Democrats wagered they could cover up and/or minimize them in the highly unusual COVID campaign season. The others were pressured to drop out, Biden became the nominee, and then there was a full court press to rig the election through the cooperation of the MSM and the intelligence community, which (among other things) managed to suppress and discredit the Hunter Biden laptop story when it surfaced near the election. Biden’s cognitive problems offered an opportunity for control by others who were to the left of Biden himself, which they considered a feature rather than a bug.

Remember after the election, how the right was betting that Biden wouldn’t last? That he’d retire by June, a lot of people said, and would be replaced. I didn’t think so, for one simple reason: Kamala Harris was not ready for prime time, and as a black woman she could not be bypassed for a substitute. I believe that Biden’s handlers were surprised at how incompetent she seemed, much more than they were surprised at any of Biden’s deficits. So they were stuck with him, and stuck with her, and they never really figured a way out of that dilemma for the entire four years of the Biden administration.

As far as the 2024 campaign went, my guess is that they didn’t really try to talk Biden out of running at first, even though his cognitive issues had increased, because they still didn’t have a winning replacement. They hoped to take Trump out by lawfare anyway, and that would solve the problem. They tried to do that; oh how they tried! But the lawfare didn’t work and the Biden/Trump debate loomed. Did Biden do worse in that debate than they expected, or exactly as bad as they expected? I don’t know, but that’s the point at which they suddenly were forced to acknowledge – because it simply could not be denied any longer – that Biden couldn’t run for president in 2024 and had to be replaced.

Things were in a state of flux for a little while, and it was during that time that Trump was wounded in an assassination attempt. What didn’t kill him made him stronger as a candidate. About a week later Biden withdrew from the race, and Harris became his nearly immediate replacement. The Democrats didn’t see any other way to deal with the mess, and they still had to pretend that Biden had dropped out for other reasons because to admit he was too cognitively challenged would be to admit that they’d covered it up for a long time. Therefore the message the campaign put out was that Biden was stepping aside to make room for youth. And Harris was also left with few options but to go around pretending Biden was cognitively intact, as well, because as his VP she had to have known and been part of any coverup.

From start to finish the entire thing was determined by the fact that Democrats had no good candidates to run as alternatives. They hoped that the MSM’s cooperation would help their sleight of hand fool the public one more time and Harris would become president. Fortunately, it didn’t work.

Now they have some ‘splaining to do, and the agreed-on narrative du jour is that they – the press and the Democrats, that is – were fooled by a bunch of canny political aides to Biden. And additionally, that Biden was too selfish and foolhardy to drop out in a timely fashion and give Kamala a chance to blossom and shine – although anyone who actually watched Harris in interviews would have been aware that time was not her friend. The tack they’re taking is ludicrous, but I’m hard-pressed to think of a better one. The truth makes them look like knaves and fools; the lie makes them look like knaves and fools. So knaves and fools it is.

The post Joe Biden: what were they thinking? appeared first on The New Neo.

I don’t especially like it. It’s not that the two-party system – with a primary for each party and generally a single nominee for each party – is perfect. Certainly not. But I prefer it to a system where the final candidates sometimes end up being from the same party, and/or where second-choices can determine elections.

Take the example of the re-election of Lisa Murkowski to the Senate in 2022:

This was the first U.S. Senate election in Alaska to be held under a new election process provided for in Ballot Measure 2. All candidates ran in a nonpartisan blanket top-four primary on August 16, 2022, and the top four candidates advanced to the general election, where voters utilized ranked-choice voting.

Murkowski had been a vocal critic of Donald Trump during his presidency and opposed several of his initiatives. Murkowski was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial in 2021, and was the only one up for re-election in 2022. On March 16, 2021, the Alaska Republican Party voted to censure Murkowski and announced that it would recruit a Republican challenger in the 2022 election cycle. Kelly Tshibaka, a former commissioner of the Alaska Department of Administration, was endorsed by Trump and the Alaska Republican Party. Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell and the National Republican Senatorial Committee supported Murkowski.

In addition to Murkowski and Tshibaka, Democrat Pat Chesbro and Republican Buzz Kelley also advanced to the general election. On September 13, Kelley suspended his campaign and endorsed Tshibaka but remained on the ballot. Murkowski received a plurality of first-place votes; however, because no candidate received a majority of the votes in the first round, an instant runoff was triggered. Murkowski won reelection in the third and final round, winning most of the second-choice votes from Chesbro’s voters.

Perhaps Murkowski would have won anyway, even under the rules of a traditional election. But her majority vote came from Democrats who preferred her to the other Republican (see the chart at the link; rounds 2 and 3).

Another Alaska election that same year was the House race in 2022 in which Democrat Mary Peltola was elected in a Republican district. In the open primary dictated by the rules (rather than primaries to select a candidate from each party), sole Democrat Peltola had gotten about 36% of the vote and the two GOP candidates combined to get about 56% of the vote.

However, the two GOP candidates (Begich and Palin) stayed in the race and spent much of their money and time attacking each other. If one had been eliminated in single-party primaries, that would not have happened (unless one ran as an Independent). In the final vote, Peltola won in this manner:

Peltola won the election with 54.94% of the vote in the third round of ballot-counting, after two other candidates, Begich III and Bye, were eliminated and their supporters’ votes were reallocated to the remaining candidates, according to the Alaska Division of Elections. Peltola had won nearly 49% of the vote in the first round, putting her close to victory from the beginning. Even though only about 10% of the eliminated Republican candidates’ supporters ranked Peltola as their next choice, rather than Palin, it was enough to secure her win.

In this case, as far as we can tell it wasn’t Peltola’s being chosen as second choice by Democrats that put her over the top (she was the only Democrat in the race), it was being chosen as second-choice by a small number of voters who had supported the losing GOP candidate Begich and who placed her rather than the controversial Palin as their second choice. The fact that a ton of money had poured into the state to support Peltola didn’t hurt, either.

In 2024, however, Begich ousted Peltola. The Republicans were wiser that time, despite ranked-choice voting still being in operation in Alaska:

Peltola finished first in this summer’s top-four, nonpartisan primary, followed by Begich and Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom (R). But Dahlstrom, backed by President-elect Trump, then bowed out of the race as the party sought to avoid fissures that were seen as paving the path for Peltola in the midterms.

House Republicans’ campaign arm had targeted the Alaska seat as an “offensive pickup” opportunity and named Dahlstrom to its “Young Guns” list, but its chair praised Dahlstrom for her exit. Begich then picked up Trump’s endorsement.

So although this was a ranked-choice race with an open primary, the GOP made sure that the general was like a conventional race rather than a ranked choice one; it featured a single candidate from each party. The results were that Begich won – this time despite Peltola’s candidacy being supported by about seven times more money than his (probably mostly from out-of-state), and despite the fact that she was endorsed by Murkowski and also had gotten more votes in the initial primary than the two GOP candidates combined.

Or, take the 2022 election of Oakland’s mayor Sheng Thao who won – barely – because of 2nd-place votes, giving her the victory over the person who actually got the most 1st-place votes. Thao ended up being recalled after a year in office, by the way.

I mention that ranked-choice often sows confusion; this article explains some of what I mean:

With a ranked-choice ballot, however, if there are five candidates running for each of those offices, then a voter is supposed to “vote” 30 times, ranking all five candidates for each of the six offices.

This requires a longer, more complicated ballot with more instructions, more pages and more ways to make mistakes. The process takes longer, which means more ballots are left incomplete. Many voters simply don’t have an opinion about who is their third, fourth or fifth choice in many elections. Yet leaving rankings blank creates the possibility of a ballot being excluded from the final results.

Counting ranked-choice ballots must be centralized and can only proceed after all ballots are returned and adjudicated. Initially, only first-preference votes are counted. If a candidate has a majority, he or she wins (and the whole ranked-choice process becomes irrelevant). If not, then the least popular candidate is eliminated, ballots with that candidate first are “adjusted” to move up the second preference to be counted as a first preference, and there is a new round of counting. Any of those ballots that have no second preference are eliminated.

This means that some ballots are counted for the same candidate in every round, while voters who prefer the least popular candidates may be counted for several different candidates as their choices are eliminated. If a voter’s preference is eliminated with no more rankings, then that voter’s ballot is considered “exhausted” and is not included in any further counting or in the final results.

Lastly, I believe it’s telling that it’s mainly the left pushing for ranked-choice voting:

Progressive groups and their donors spent more than $100 million last year pushing ranked-choice voting …

The post On ranked-choice voting appeared first on The New Neo.

I didn’t watch all of it; just a couple of minutes. But here’s an analysis from Elizabeth Stauffer at Legal Insurrection:

If Harris’s reply sounds familiar to you, it’s because we heard parts of it – almost verbatim – three days earlier, as she tried to dodge a similar question during the debate with former President Donald Trump. In contrast to her surprisingly strong and coherent performance on Tuesday night, her responses throughout this interview were laced with the “word salads” we’ve grown so accustomed to hearing from Harris.

Describing her answer in a post on X, The National Review’s Noah Rothman wrote, “It takes some species of talent to filibuster for 90 straight seconds while saying nothing [at] all of value.”

Here’s the interview:

Harris’ answers during the debate with Trump sounded canned, but that’s not so unusual because candidates always prepare for a set of topics they expect to encounter. But it is odd that she sounded more disjointed and rambling in this recent short sit-down interview from a friendly source pitching softballs. And if you think – as some people assert (“without evidence”) – that she got the questions for Tuesday evening in advance, why would you think she wouldn’t have gotten these questions in advance as well?

Personally, I think she just has a number of statements in her head that she’s practiced and used over and over, and sometimes she’s more coherent in stating them and sometimes less so. They are usually some combination of platitudes, lies, and meaningless stories. Nothing this woman says sounds sincere or authentic to me.

The post Kamala Harris gives a 10-minute interview appeared first on The New Neo.

A resurfaced American Civil Liberties Union questionnaire from when Kamala Harris was running for president in 2019 has revealed that she supports gender transition surgeries for detained migrants and that she wants to slash funding from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The document, which was first reported on by CNN, also asks then-Sen. Harris for her views on topics such as the U.S. prison system, D.C. statehood, abortion access and the decriminalization of drugs.

She also was for legalization of all drugs. On DC statehood, she wrote this:

Q:Will you commit to supporting D.C. statehood? If so, please describe your plan to achieve D.C. statehood.

Yes X No ?

Explanation (500 words): I have co-sponsored the Washington, DC Admission Act which would admit DC to the union, and will fight to pass it into law as president.

So she didn’t just vote for it, she was a co-sponsor. As far as I can tell she’s never taken it back, either.

Any regular reader of this blog knows that I’m no stranger to the idea that people can change politically. But I would have a bit more faith that Kamala Harris was one of them if she’d been giving speeches right along about her new positions; she most definitely hasn’t done so. And all she’s said about her supposed change of mind and heart is basically this sort of generic pap:

“The Vice President’s positions have been shaped by three years of effective governance as part of the Biden-Harris Administration,” a Harris campaign adviser told Fox News this week when asked about her responses.

If Biden’s governance has been so very effective, then why is she running away from it? Her “explanation” doesn’t even make sense on the face of it. The only thing that’s really changed about Kamala Harris is that she’s the Democrats’ nominee for president, and she’s desperately trying to escape her former self.

The post Dueling Kamalas appeared first on The New Neo.

For example, there’s Michigan:

In the 2022 mid-term elections in Michigan, voters handed control of the Michigan Legislature to the Democrats, giving them a majority in both the Michigan House of Representatives and the Michigan Senate — something that hasn’t happened for forty years. Since then, they’ve been working hand in glove with our notorious Democrat governor, Gretchen Whitmer, including passing a slew of bills that significantly transform election procedures in the State of Michigan and make it easier to commit election fraud, while at the same time making it harder to uncover it.

That’s the ticket. As Turkey’s Endogan once said, “Democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off.”

More on Michigan:

The new legislation hands over verification of absentee ballots from an elected bipartisan board of inspectors to city or township clerks. They also significantly expand the powers of election clerks and the Secretary of State. For example, the Secretary of State can now dictate election procedures without going through the formal rule-making process. This greatly increases the potential for fraud and significantly reduces the safeguards against it.

Senate Bill 367 allows clerks in municipalities with at least 5,000 people to process and count absentee ballots eight days before Election Day. The eight-day, pre-election day window will make it very difficult for poll watchers to observe the handling and counting of mail-in votes. (What could possibly go wrong there?) Municipalities will work closely with the SoS, to whom the bill assigns the task of unilaterally “supervising the implementation and conduct of early voting for state and federal elections.” (God forbid that the SoS has entrenched political biases.)

According to Representative Ruth Johnson (R) Holly, MI, these bills remove every instance of the word ‘fraud’ in the previous law and replace them with the word, ‘error.’ Criminality of intent is thus effectively insulated from prosecution and the ability to address election fraud is stripped away. In fact, under Senate Bills 603 and 604, alleged fraud can no longer be used to request a recount.

This not only seems to be doing away with the idea of fraud triggering a recount (which in the case of actual fraud wouldn’t do much good anyway, because if fraudulent votes have been cast they will just be counted again), it also seems to be doing away with bipartisan control over the voting process. But I assume that’s the point and the goal. The Democrats are trying to make it impossible for Republicans to ever get control and use the same mechanisms against them. And so what if the voters come to no longer trust the process. As long as the left can remain in control, the left doesn’t need their trust or their acquiescence.

The post Michigan: sounds like the voting fix may be in appeared first on The New Neo.

Progressive Jews are ethnic Jews. Most know little to nothing about Judaism and are often actively hostile to both religion and Israel. They are typical of progressives everywhere, who tend to be urban and well-educated. Jews fit that profile. The vast majority of Jews in the US live in New York or Los Angeles, and vote more or less like other groups in those places – except for black people, who vote in far greater percentages for the left.

Also, although the Jews of Israel have their share of leftists, as a whole in recent years they’ve voted for the right, although the parliamentary system sometimes has allowed coalitions that put leftists in power.

But back to the US and its Jewish voters. The following was written after the 2022 midterms:

The Republican party increased its share of the national Jewish vote to a new high not seen in a generation, according to results of a midterm election exit poll conducted Tuesday by Fox News.

According to the data, 33% of Jewish voters polled voted Republican in the 2022 midterm election, up from 30% in 2020 and 24% in 2016. …

Markstein said Tuesday’s election saw “a record-smashing level of support in Florida, at 45% of the Jewish vote.”

In New York’s hotly contested gubernatorial race, Republican candidate Rep. Lee Zeldin won between 85-95% in Hasidic Brooklyn neighborhoods in Borough Park and Williamsburg where voter turnout averaged 50%, according to New York city polls, despite being ultimately defeated by Democratic incumbent challenger Gov. Kathy Hochul.

“Jews” are not unitary. They vote very differently from each other, depending on many things, but especially on how religious they are, with religious Jews voting on the right. Also important is where they live. They vote Democrat in higher percentages in blue states, much like just about everyone else in blue states and especially blue urban areas.

Jews are also a tiny tiny percentage of the voting public, and usually their vote doesn’t matter at all because they are concentrated in blue states where even without them, Democrats would be winning. Jewish donors are a different story – they are more influential, and lately quite a few of them have been pulling back from supporting Democrats.

NOTE: For a typical example of what I’m talking about, see many of the comments here.

The post Caring about how Jews vote? appeared first on The New Neo.

An excerpt:

But even as she warns Trump about his “inflammatory” language, Chutkan has routinely issued politically charged rulings and made incendiary statements of her own while presiding over some 30 cases involving Trump supporters charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, melee at the U.S. Capitol. …

These include her public assertions that the 2020 election was beyond reproach, that the Jan. 6 protests were orchestrated by Trump, and that the former president is guilty of crimes. She has described Jan. 6 as a “mob attack” on “the very foundation of our democracy” and branded the issue at the heart of the case she is hearing – Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen – a conspiracy theory.

Although judges often make comments from the bench, Chutkan’s strident language raises questions about her impartiality in handling the case against the presumptive GOP nominee for president in 2024.

I suppose you could say it “raises questions.” But I think it actually answers them. This is an exceptionally biased judge, and she has been given a lot of power to interfere with the 2024 election.

And there’s very little chance of changing that, because there is still a presumption in favor of judges’ impartiality:

GOP Rep. Matthew Gaetz of Florida recently filed a resolution to condemn and censure Chutkan for exhibiting “open bias and partisanship in the conduct of her official duties as a judge.”

But if the aim among Trump loyalists is to get a new judge assigned to the case, it’s a steep legal hurdle. Stephen Gillers, a professor of law at New York University, said that typically a judge can be recused for bias or the appearance of bias “only when the purported bias comes from a source outside the judge’s work as a judge.” He continued, “Almost never will a judge be recused for opinions she forms as a judge – in hearing cases and motions. Judges are expected to form opinions based on these?’intrajudicial’ sources. It’s what judges do.

Judge Churkin was appointed by Obama in 2013. No surprise there. He knew exactly what he was doing in making sure DC would be a fertile venue for bringing political federal cases against the enemies of the left.

NOTE: Much much more at the link.

The post The political bias of Judge Chutkin, who is presiding in the DC trial against Trump appeared first on The New Neo.

In a trio of rulings Friday, the N.C. Supreme Court restored the state’s voter ID law, took state courts out of partisan gerrymandering disputes, and ended voting for felons who have not completed their sentences.

Each ruling split the court, 5-2. Republican justices supported the majority decisions. Democrats dissented.

The rulings will affect North Carolina’s upcoming elections, including the next set of congressional and legislative election maps.
In a trio of opinions totaling 436 pages, the N.C. Supreme Court has restored North Carolina’s voter ID law, ruled that state courts cannot consider partisan gerrymandering claims, and ended voting for felons who have not completed their sentences.

What happened to cause the reversal? An election. The previous court had a 4-3 Democrat majority. There was an election in November, and two of the Democrat justices were replaced by Republican ones, giving the court its present 5-2 Republican split.

It’s another reminder that justice is not blind, especially in cases such as these which directly concern politics and elections. Interestingly, the present court casts this as a retreat from politics by the court, because the previous decisions were judicial overreach in which the court negated actions by the legislature:

“There is no legal recourse available for vindication of political interests, but this Court is yet again confronted with ‘a partisan legislative disagreement that has spilled out . . . into the courts.’ This Court once again stands as a bulwark against that spillover, so that even in the most divisive cases, we reassure the public that our state’s courts follow the law, not the political winds of the day,” wrote Justice Phil Berger Jr. for the majority.

The voter ID law had been passed by the NC legislature and rejected by the previous NC Supreme Court. The legislature also is in charge of redistricting, but the previous court had thrown out the maps drawn by the Republican-dominated legislature. This new court adds that “state courts will no longer hear lawsuits challenging election maps because of claims of excessive partisanship.” The power rests in the legislative branch. The court stated:

The constitution does not require or permit a standard [for redistricting fairness] known only to four justices. Finally, creating partisan redistricting standards is rife with policy decisions. Policy decisions belong to the legislative branch, not the judiciary.

This would not be happening now but for the recent election in North Carolina that put Republicans in charge of the court. I’d like to know how it was that there was a Democrat majority in that court in that state to begin with, and then how the voters became convinced that the party balance of the court needed changing during the 2022 campaign. Was it about personalities, or general policy? Can the GOP in other states learn from the experience?

If you want to know how many states elect judges and how many don’t, it’s complicated because there are a great many different systems for it. Here’s a list and chart.

Bonchie points out that this ruling is likely to affect the next election:

What that means is that the map that was ultimately adopted for the 2022 election was drawn in such a way as to guarantee a near-neutral split between Republican and Democrat seats. That allowed Democrats to win several seats they would have otherwise lost…

The GOP has a very slim majority in the House of Representatives right now. All it would have taken were a few bad candidates or scandals to arise during the next election to hand the gavel over to Hakeem Jeffries. Having a high probability of an extra four seats in North Carolina is just the breathing room Republicans need to ensure they hold onto power, no matter what happens with the presidential election in 2024.

The post North Carolina’s SCOTUS reverses previous rulings on redistricting and restores some voting safeguards appeared first on The New Neo.

How could the voting machine debacle in Maricopa County have been prevented? I really don’t see how it could have been predicted that so many machines in Maricopa would either go bonkers on Election Day or would be fiddled with to make them go bonkers on Election Day. But one of those two things happened and once it happened there was no redress because the courts wouldn’t order one, short of a smoking cannon or series of cannons that were never going to materialize.

More generally, however, let’s take a look at this article about Arizona voting security efforts from a while back. It was published the week before the 2022 election:

More than a million ballots for the Nov. 8 election already have been cast in Arizona, which was an early adopter of voting by mail. State lawmakers created the system in 1991 with bipartisan support. Three decades later, that’s how the vast majority of Arizonans cast ballots.

Note that the law establishing a vote-by-mail system was established in Arizona thirty years ago with bipartisan support. I doubt that the people voting for it back then foresaw the problems it would entail; those were very different days. Now the system is deeply entrenched there. But many of the problems alleged in 2022 in Maricopa County don’t seem to have involved that process.

On more recent voting system legal challenges in Arizona [emphasis mine]:

Fast-growing Arizona shifted from a reliably red state to choosing Democratic President Joe Biden by a narrow margin in 2020. That sparked months of lawsuits and a review of Phoenix area ballots by state Senate GOP leaders and allies of former President Donald Trump…

Arizona’s election system has survived multiple legal challenges, although some appeals continue. Lake and Finchem sued to end the use of ballot-counting machines, but a federal judge tossed the case. They appealed the ruling. And the Republican Party of Arizona lost its lawsuit claiming the long practice of early voting violated the state’s Constitution. That case now sits with the state Court of Appeals.

Remember, that was written the week before the election. Moreover:

Lawmakers have changed some of the state’s election laws in recent years, and voters on Nov. 8 will decide on a ballot measure that would tighten voter ID requirements. Here’s a look at those changes and how voting works in Arizona.

There’s much much more at the link and well worth reading. I also had described some of the Arizona efforts and what happened to them in this post and in this one as well. Suffice to say it often comes down to the courts, and they often thwart the efforts of the right to change things.

The bottom line is that voter fraud can only be prevented in a county or a state or a country in which the vast majority of people are committed to doing so, and that includes the courts. Otherwise, it will occur because the rewards are high and the chances of being meaningfully punished are exceedingly low. And it doesn’t even matter whether it does occur or whether it only strongly appears to occur; the damage to public trust is done either way.

There also was a referendum on the ballot in 2022 in Arizona that would have tightened up voter ID laws. It was rejected by a margin that is similar although not identical to the margin by which Kari Lake lost.

Also, there’s more about that ruling in October 2022, when Lake and Finchem sued to stop voting machine tabulation. Their suit was thrown out, with this statement from the judge:

In Friday’s order, Judge John J. Tuchi tossed the lawsuit in full, ruling that the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring the lawsuit and that their claims are “vague,” “speculative” and ultimately amount to “conjectural allegations.” Additionally, the judge declared that the dismissal of the plaintiffs’ suit is further warranted under the 11th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which restricts individuals from bringing lawsuits against states in federal court. The judge stated that, in this case, the “plaintiffs do not plausibly allege a violation of federal law…[and their] complaint asks the federal court to oversee the administrative details of a local election. We find no constitutional basis for doing so.” Finally, the judge referenced the Purcell principle and explained that, even if the court had jurisdiction over the plaintiffs’ suit, given the imminence of the November midterm elections the plaintiffs’ “request [for] a complete overhaul of Arizona’s election procedures” is implausible. In his order, the judge wholly discredited the plaintiffs’ fallacious claims against electronic voting machines, citing numerous audits — which were undertaken following the 2020 election to assess Maricopa County’s tabulation equipment — that proved no evidence of fraud or compromised election security due to the use of the machines.

So they weren’t allowed to stop it ahead of time and they couldn’t do it afterwards. They couldn’t prove it to the court’s satisfaction back in 2020 and therefore they couldn’t allege it prior to the 2022 election. That’s lawfare for you, and one of many examples of the way in which it makes legal challenges to voting practices very difficult – unless, of course, the rule being challenged is considered by the court to have a negative effect on some minority racial group.

And here is a very important article, Rachel Alexander’s explanation of the war on attorneys who represent people on the right and who take these voting challenge cases. It takes a lot of courage to do so, and a group called “The 65 Project” is very upfront about it their program to intimidate these attorneys and prevent them from doing the job (the quote is from the Project’s website):

Following Biden’s victory, an army of Big Lie Lawyers filed 65 lawsuits based on bogus assertions to overturn the election and give Trump a second term. While the nation’s legal institutions stood up to this attempted “coup-via-courtroom,” Trump and his “Big Lie Lawyers” have “learned lessons” from 2020 and are already working to seize control of state and local election processes and to prepare for alicious election litigation efforts.

The 65 Project is a bipartisan effort to protect democracy from these once-and-future abuses by holding accountable Big Lie Lawyers who bring fraudulent and malicious lawsuits to overturn legitimate election results, and by working with bar associations to deter future abuses by establishing clear standards for conduct that punish lies about the conduct or results of elections.

“Bipartisan” – perhaps because of allied NeverTrumpers? – gives them sanctimonious cover. What they are doing is completely against all principles of the legal profession, but they feel protected.

And speaking of protecting – fortifying – future elections, lower down on their page we have this:

Protecting future elections

As the January 6th Committee’s work has confirmed, lawyers played a central role in then-President Trump’s attempt to stay in power despite losing the 2020 presidential election. Many of these lawyers, and their conduct, are subject to ethics rules. But just as Trump and his allies sought to exploit vagueness in the Electoral Count Act, so too have some lawyers evaded accountability because of gaps in the legal profession’s ethical rules. And just as Congress is rushing to fill those statutory holes, state supreme courts also must address certain weaknesses in the rules of professional conduct.

We are working closely with law professors and professional responsibility practitioners to develop model rules, and we will push state bar associations to adopt them.

Who are the fascists here? Power is everything.

The post The Kari Lake election fraud verdict: Part III appeared first on The New Neo.

Then again, the next line is and the fool shall be servant to the wise of heart, so that’s more hopeful.

At any rate, the fighting continues for Speaker of the House of Representatives. To clarify my own position, I don’t care if it’s McCarthy or someone else and I’d actually prefer someone else. I just don’t want the whole thing to end up benefiting the left, and it also would be nice to have a “someone else” on the right who can be elected to the job and perform it well in the ideological, organizational, and the fundraising sense (the latter also being quite important, as this comment by “eworth” explains; I recommend reading it). It’s all very well and good to think of Person A or Person B or C or D whom you’d prefer. But does that person have the necessary qualifications, including having enough support to win?

I believe that McCarthy has the support of some of the more conservative members of the house (such as Jordan) because they don’t see a better alternative. Meanwhile, the voting continues. I make no predictions except I doubt this will be resolved today; we may be in for the long haul.

The post The conflict in the House continues appeared first on The New Neo.