If there’s any doubt remaining about the threat posed to the republic, take a look at what Illinois’ “Democracy” recently did.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a wealthy leftist with a majority of Democrats in the Illinois Legislature, promptly signed a bill last week that eliminates the practice of slating, where local party groups select legislative candidates for general election ballots if they were unable to recruit a primary candidate.
Pritzker and the power-hungry Democrats could have waited to change the law until after the current election cycle. Instead, they decided to do it midstream, a sneaky move that strengthens Democrats’ grip on power in the Land of Lincoln.
Senate GOP leader John Curran, according to the Chicago Tribune, criticized Democrats for adjusting the rules during an election cycle to favor their preferred incumbent candidates. He called the bill a method for 'stealing an election.' according to the Chicago Tribune, blasted Democrats for “chang[ing] the rules halfway through an election cycle to stack the deck for their favored incumbent candidates.” The bill, he said, exemplified “how you steal an election.”
As the Tribune reported:
Republicans accused Democrats of using the appointment ban in an effort to help protect some incumbents in November, most notably one of the few downstate House Democrats, state Rep. Katie Stuart of Edwardsville.
Following House passage of the bill on Wednesday, Stuart’s slated Republican challenger in the fall, Jay Keeven, quickly gathered required petition signatures and filed with the State Board of Elections to appear on the November ballot.
A Republican from Northbrook, Daniel Behr, filed with the State Board of Elections to run as a challenger to Democratic state Rep. Tracy Katz Muhl at 8:41 a.m. on Friday. But that was six minutes after Pritzker’s signing of the measure preventing his candidacy was filed and recorded with the Illinois secretary of state’s office.
A Smorgasbord of Hypocrisy
Pritzker defended the bill, insisting it ensures “that we don’t have backroom deals to put people on the ballot and run as a result of some small group of people in a smoke-filled room making the choice.”
The hypocrisy in that statement overflows more than the Golden Corral buffet that Pritzker apparently can’t quit. Even more alluring than the dessert tray: the lure of perpetual consolidated power.
Pritzker’s governing buddy to the north, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, has long whined that Republicans who dominate the state legislature remain in power thanks to what a fellow Wisconsin Democrat called “rigged” district maps. His leftist friends have filed lawsuit after lawsuit to, as they would have you believe, protect democracy from power-crazed Republicans.
Now Evers and his fellow Democrats have a left-led Wisconsin Supreme Court which has, as the tie-breaking leftist on the court promised on the campaign trail, thrown out the old maps. Now by drawing new maps, Wisconsin Democrats are attempting to do what Illinois Democrats have done: guarantee their party’s power.
It’s what they do.
Pritzker’s latest prick to the “democracy” balloon is predictable for a deep blue state where a county judge attempted to remove former President Donald Trump, the GOP’s candidate for president, from Illinois’ primary ballot. And they would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for that meddling U.S. Constitution.
Supermajority Democrats pushed through at lightning speed an amendment to an unrelated bill that ultimately delivered the kind of democracy that Illinois leftists prefer. Minority Republicans could only muster a “present” vote before walking out without a debate, Capitol News Illinois reported.
“We don’t understand the sense of urgency right now, unless the goal – the end goal – is to stifle the democratic process through the changes on slating candidates,” House Minority Leader Tony McCombie said during a stairwell news conference, according to the publication.
The left, which focuses on hating Donald Trump and claiming that Trump and his supporters are ruining democracy, is actually trying to destroy American representative democracy. Illinois’ rapid change to the slating rules is just one example.
This is the left's version of "democracy."
Even the leftist-associated Election Law Blog published an observation from Derek Muller over the weekend, noting that the “rug has been yanked out from under” candidates who were preparing to be appointed to challenge incumbents.
Muller made an interesting observation about the media helping the Democratic Party’s fake “democracy under attack” story. He waited a couple of days to see how media outlets would cover the story. There was no response.
After all, we are in an era where there is an explosion in journalists who identify as covering the “democracy beat” or looking for a “democracy angle” in stories. I wondered how the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Associated Press, or CNN might cover these stories. After all, they are quite attuned to what local county officials in Nevada or Arizona are doing with respect to counting ballots, or every twist and turn of an election bill in Georgia. How about this? As far as I can tell, there hasn’t been any coverage in these or many other major media outlets of America’s sixth-largest state changing the rules of an election in the middle of the campaign to deprive hundreds of thousands of voters of the opportunity to choose a candidate of their preference, and as a number of candidates who behaved in a way relying on existing laws have lost their opportunity to seek office. But there is still time for coverage, of course, particularly as I imagine litigation is coming.
