I thought fear mongering about stealing elections or election fraud was forbidden by the left.
They go on and on about ‘election deniers’ and how that’s destroying democracy or something.
But here is Hillary Clinton doing EXACTLY that, where she’s arguing that Republicans are going to try and ‘steal the next presidential election’, saying they already have a plan in place:
HILLARY CLINTON: “Right wing extremists already have a plan to literally steal the next presidential election.”
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) October 25, 2022
Hillary claims “The right-wing controlled Supreme Court may be poised to rule on giving state legislatures….the power to overturn presidential elections.”
She doesn’t say how this is supposed to happen. But what she’s referring to is a case that the Supreme Court will hear this coming session being brought by the Speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives. He’s challenging the decision by the courts to block the General Assembly’s new congressional maps (based on 2020 census) and force upon the state a congressional map created by the courts.
The core issue is the rights of the legislature to create congressional maps and, by extension, to regulate federal elections. It’s the latter that has people like Hillary Clinton worried:
The doctrine at the heart of the case is known as the “independent state legislature” theory – the idea that, under the Constitution, only the legislature has the power to regulate federal elections, without interference from state courts. Proponents of the theory point to the Constitution’s elections clause, which gives state legislatures the power to set the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives.”
Then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist was an early proponent of the theory. In a concurring opinion in Bush v. Gore, the 2000 case that halted the recount in Florida in the presidential election, Rehnquist (in an opinion joined by Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas) outlined his view that the state court’s recount conflicted with the deadlines set by the state legislature for the election.
The issue returned to the Supreme Court in 2020, when the justices turned down a request by Pennsylvania Republicans to fast-track their challenge to a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling that required state election officials to count mail-in ballots received within three days of Election Day. In an opinion that accompanied the court’s order, Justice Samuel Alito (joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch) suggested that the state supreme court’s decision to extend the deadline for counting ballots likely violated the Constitution.
You can read more about this case at SCOTUSblog.
But what Hillary Clinton is arguing will happen isn’t true. She’s claiming the Supreme Court will give state legislators the power to ‘overturn presidential elections’, which is fear mongering at its worst considering the core issue is the independent authority of the state legislatures to regulate federal elections. State legislatures already have this authority via the Constitution and they certainly have the authority when it comes to the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives.”
But hey, I guess it’s okay for someone like Hillary Clinton to deny past elections and warn of right-wing plots to “literally steal the next presidential election”. You know, because she’s a Democrat and she’s got the media on her side.
When Republicans warned of potential election fraud over the issue of mail-in-ballots in the run up to 2020, they were mocked and ostracized by the media and Democrats claiming that no such fraud has ever existed and such concerns were misplaced.
But now that Hillary Clinton is proclaiming these absurd warnings about the 2024 elections, it will be seen as a legitimate threat to democracy by Democrats and the garbage media.
