As Election Day Approaches, Uncertainty Abounds

4 years ago

By CHRISTOPHER MANION

“I want to change my vote!” — An exasperated Joe Biden during a roll-call vote on the Senate Floor, June 26, 1986.

During the final presidential debate last week, Donald Trump lobbed a bombshell at Joe Biden and his family. “They’re like a vacuum cleaner. They’re sucking up money every place he goes,” he said. The charge: Biden’s extended family has been using his name and position to make millions, and giving Joe a cut of the proceeds.

This past Monday, a former business associate of Jim Biden, Joe’s brother, and Hunter Biden, Joe’s son, stepped forward to supply ample documentation of the family’s international [money for influence] operation. While the legacy media frantically buried the story, it reached millions of voters, many of whom had already cast their ballots. Some of them found the well-documented reports so damaging that they wanted to change their vote.

In fact, several states have procedures allowing voters to rescind ballots cast early, and vote again. Google searches for “change my vote” soared.

And so the tumult begins.

But it won’t end there. The New York Post, which broke the Hunter Biden story, reports that a week before Election Day, 58.5 million voters had already voted. Millions more will vote Tuesday, November 3. But the real “Election of the President” will take place on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December, when members of the Electoral College gather in each state to make the “electoral vote” official. This year that date falls on December 14 — more than five weeks after “Election Day.” A lot can happen in those forty days.

Joe Biden refuses to address the allegations that he profited personally from the millions that his brother and son received from enterprises in several time zones. Those include copious millions from a Chinese company closely connected to the Communist Party there. So far a compliant media have refused to ask the former vice-president about the embarrassing, if not damning, reports that include pictures, emails texts, documents, and firsthand eyewitness testimony. That “lid” (Bidenspeak for going back to Joe’s basement) might well last through Election Day. But will Biden and his media and Deep State enablers manage to keep a lid on the scandal all the way to December 14?

Enter The Constitution

In 1952, the Supreme Court ruled that states could empower political parties to require formal pledges from Presidential Electors. According to FairVote.org, 21 states still do not require their members of the Electoral College to vote for their party’s designated candidate. Since the Electoral College began voting in February 1789, at least 156 “Faithless Electors” have cast their vote for someone other than the candidate they were elected to vote for.

In September, Politico, a Democrat news site, reported that “Speaker Nancy Pelosi has begun mobilizing Democrats for the possibility that neither Joe Biden nor President Donald Trump will win an outright Electoral College victory, a once-in-a-century phenomenon that would send the fate of the presidency to the House of Representatives to decide.” In that case, each of the fifty state delegations in the House would have one vote, and the majority vote of the state would elect the next president.

Of course, the Congress doesn’t officially count the electoral votes until January 6, three days after the new House and Senate convene. Nancy Pelosi is taking the long view: Politico’s report has her telling Democrats that “we must achieve that majority of delegations or keep the Republicans from doing so.”

The last occasion which required the Congress to resolve a presidential election arose in 1876. New York Gov. Samuel Tilden, the Democrat nominee, garnered a majority of the popular vote but was one vote short of a majority in the Electoral College. Returns in three states were disputed, and a rogue elector, on whom my high school history class focused for a week 57 years ago, threw the election to Congress. There, a bipartisan compromise was reached, and Rutherford B. Hayes was declared the victor.

So what happens if more revelations emerge that prove Joe Biden to be even more corrupt than the usual D.C. grifter? Will any disgusted Biden Electors change their mind by December 14? And what about Democrat governors of states that Trump wins? Federal law requires that “After the general election, the Governor of each State prepares no less than seven original Certificates of Ascertainment along with two certified copies.” What if one or more such governors refuse to prepare those certificates, or refuse to deliver them to the Joint Session of Congress to be counted on January 6 — all with the express intention of denying a victorious Trump the necessary votes?

There is a myriad of possibilities, and little precedent for addressing them. But of one thing we can be sure: This time around, there will not be a bipartisan compromise.

Loose Ends

A lot has happened in the past week. Last Sunday, October 25 Pope Francis named 13 new cardinals. By including the current archbishop in Washington among them, the Pope continues his unfortunate habit of promoting weak men with troubled records. This renders them less effective as shepherds and more manipulable as cronies.

Unfortunately, Washington’s archbishop was a partner of his predecessor, the now missing Mr. McCarrick, in rigging the “Bishops’ Protection Charter” in 2002 that prevented the resignation or removal of over 100 U.S. prelates due to their roles in the abuse-and-coverup scandals. The appointment does nothing to address the collapse in the American hierarchy or the demand of the laity that the McCarrick Report be published in full and unredacted form.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, cheered by CNN as the Windy City’s first black lesbian mayor, hailed the new cardinal’s appointment, calling him “a son of Chicago [who] doesn’t shy away from tough issues, fighting for racial justice and LGBTQ+ inclusion in the Catholic faith. This is an important step for the faith community,” she wrote, “and I look forward to the change he will bring.”

Speaking of Mayor Lightfoot, her response to the China virus follows the path of other tyrannical Democrat officials across the country. After putting families on virtual house arrest for months, she complains that “People are GETTING COMFORTABLE IN THEIR HOMES and are having social gatherings. Those are [a] huge source of the spread…the case investigations, the contact tracing is pointing to home social settings as the PRIMARY AREA OF RISK NOW.” [Emphasis in the original.]

The lockdown mentality is not the tip of tyranny, it is tyranny itself. And they will not stop until we stop them.

On Monday, October 26, the Senate voted to give its advice and consent to the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. The Left went berserk again.

Mrs. Barrett succeeds Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose observation in 2009, while casually eugenic, has a ring of truth “Frankly, I had thought that at the time that Roe was decided, there was a concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”

On that, Ginsburg was right. The population control craze that followed the 1968 publication of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb was manifestly bipartisan. Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush, Nelson Rockefeller, and other leading Republicans were all on board. Many still are.

Meanwhile, several radical factions have threatened to foment violence following the election. This might well extend beyond the cities that have been torn by riots, looting, and the like since May. If past is prologue, homeowners and business owners will not be able to rely on law enforcement, normal supply lines for consumer and other goods, or even safety when leaving home. Prayerful and prudent preparations are in order.