HR 1 and Why Election Integrity Matters…

 If you’ve ever read Lord of the Flies, The Rise and the Fall of the Third Reich or 1984, you understand the threat to life and limb that unrestrained power can be.  Lord Acton distilled the danger down to a simple phrase:  “Absolute power corrupts absolutely”.

Our Founding Fathers knew that, which is why they crafted for us the greatest document ever written by men.  The Constitution they gave us had built into it a variety of checks and balances on government or any branch of government accumulating too much power.  They gave us the Connecticut Compromise, which balanced representation between large and small states, with two Senators elected from each state and Congressmen being elected based on population.  They gave us the Legislature which passes laws and the Executive which implements them.  And most of all, they gave us the Massachusetts Compromise, which created the ultimate check on government power, the Bill of Rights, an explicit articulation of individual rights that could not be infringed upon by government.  Finally, in what was likely the most groundbreaking element of any constitution ever written, the Founding Fathers explicitly limited the powers of the government with the 9^th and 10^th Amendments, the former stating that the enumeration of certain rights did not preclude the existence of others not addressed, while the latter stated that the federal government had only those powers given and any not given to it were reserved for states or the people.

Extraordinary students of history and men, Madison, Adams, Franklin, et. al. understood the nature of man and built a Constitution specifically crafted to counter that nature. It wasn’t a perfect document – and had a tool for addressing imperfections built into it – but it largely worked well for 233 years and allowed the United States to develop into the strongest and most powerful nation in the history of mankind.

Specifically their Constitution worked because it was – by design – insulated from the passions of men.  The staggered six year terms of the Senate was to balance out the biennial elections in the House – and Senators were appointed by states while Congressmen were elected by the people.  Presidents were elected every four years and Justices were appointed for life.  And the government was explicitly limited to what they could do.

Incredibly, while they knew nothing about cars or televisions or mobile phones or the Internet, the mechanisms they put in place largely survived as the march of time progressed. But for all of their familiarity with the dark sides of man’s nature, even the Founding Fathers, possibly the greatest assembly of men to ever come together in history, couldn’t foresee the darkness that lay ahead with the Democrat party of the 21^st century. 

Today America sits and watches as Democrats essentially send the Constitution through the shredder.  Emboldened by a pusillanimous Supreme Court, Democrats today – with HR 1 – seek to undermine the very foundation upon which that Constitution is based:  voting integrity by the governed.  They seek to codify arrangements that are by their very nature intended to eviscerate the notion of vote integrity.  Voter ID:  Eliminated.  Mail in voting:  Mandated.  Maintenance of accurate voter rolls:  Outlawed.  Same day registration:  Required.  Ballot harvesting:  Allowed.  These and much more are to be codified by HR 1, with the goal of giving Democrats end to end control over voting in the United States.  Once in control of voting they will control every branch and every element of the federal government in perpetuity.  And given that they back a regulatory state that never met a freedom it didn’t want to regulate, they will control every aspect of the lives of formerly free Americans. 

And that will be the end of America as we know it.  Entrepreneurial innovation?  Gone unless the mission furthers the green or “justice” themes of Democrats.  Educational freedom? Access to and success within will be predicated on a willingness to muzzle any thoughts or words that fall outside of whatever is currently deemed as acceptable.  Virtually everything, from sports to medicine to science to literature to media to the Internet to your very job, will become nothing more than vehicles for establishing one’s acquiescence to the left’s diktats, whether as regulated by Democrats or enforced by their fellow travelers seemingly everywhere from academia, the media and increasingly, big business.  

For more than two centuries Americans suffered through periods of government overreach, incompetence, malice and outright failure because they understood that they had the ultimate hand in dictating how government is run and that they would have the opportunity to make a change for the better via the voting booth.  Voting and elections were chaotic, exasperating and sometimes frustrating, but we largely accepted them because they were seen as a legitimate reflection of the public’s voice.

With HR 1 the Democrats are disemboweling election integrity, sullying the sanctity of the voting booth and most importantly, undermining Americans’ confidence that they control their own government and by extension, their own destinies.  The Constitution works only because people have confidence in its workings and their role in it.  Sadly, Democrats may find out too late that a citizenry who no longer have confidence that their government answers to them may decide to defy that government and seek to establish their own order.  It would be apropos – albeit sad for the world – if the very schemes Democrats put in place to try and guarantee their grip on power over a citizenry they disdain were the very schemes that caused that same citizenry to overthrow the system Democrats perverted to control them in the first place and replaced it with something one might see on an unnamed island in the South Pacific… My guess is the party worried about mean tweets, racist pancake syrup and offensive children’s books won’t thrive under the new system.