Election Pre-Denier: Hillary Clinton Warns of the United States Constitution

Hillary Clinton’s warnings of a right-wing cabal maneuvering to steal the 2024 election has conspiracy theorists dreading Supreme Court arguments in Moore v. Harper, set for December. As she and some fellow Democrats hype “threats to democracy,” they are caviling about our Constitution and — according to a recent intelligence assessment — helping to inspire violence.To rational observers, Moore is a routine case: Republicans in the North Carolina legislature drew a new congressional map and the state’s highest court declared it invalid. The state legislative representatives argue, based on text of the federal constitution, that Article II Section 1 of the parchment gives them sole power in the matter.The Supreme Court exists to arbitrate such disputes, but paranoid partisans on the left have imagined a ruling in favor of the theory a death knell for democracy. “Right-wing extremists already have a plan to literally steal the next presidential election and they’re not making a secret of it,” Mrs. Clinton said in an interview with the group Indivisible, attacking “the right-wing-controlled Supreme Court.”Stoking these fears in the absence of all evidence is especially troublesome in today’s political climate. A bulletin by the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, Capitol Police, and National Counterterrorism Center reported by CBS News on Friday warned, “Perceptions of election fraud will likely result in heightened threats of violence.”Back in 2016, noting the corrosive effect of such rhetoric, President Obama dismissed concerns about fairness at the ballot box. “I have never seen in my lifetime or in modern political history,” he said of President Trump, “any presidential candidate trying to discredit the elections and the election process before votes have even taken place.”Yet that’s what we’re all seeing from Mrs. Clinton, who is alleging that justices “may be poised to rule on giving state legislatures — yes, you heard me correctly: state legislatures — the power to overturn presidential elections. Just think. If that happens, the 2024 presidential election could be decided not by the popular vote or even by the anachronistic Electoral College, but by state legislatures, many of them Republican-controlled.”Note the three qualifiers — “may be,” “if,” and “could be.” Mrs. Clinton didn’t see the Electoral College as an anachronism in 2016 when she welcomed efforts to flip faithless electors in her direction, despite the expressed will of voters. Just as she sought to pressure them now, she seeks to influence the independent judiciary today.Both acts violate the democratic principles that Mrs. Clinton imagines herself as defending from the basket of deplorables, as she called so many of us. The former senator now sees state legislators — at least the Republican ones — as alien, occupying forces, as if they aren’t also elected by the people and given a role in our presidential elections by the Constitution to which Mrs. Clinton is sworn.The New York Times describes the components of Moore that Mrs. Clinton seized upon as “a fringe argument,” yet she’s claiming that Republicans are campaigning on it. “Some legal scholars argue,” the Times writes by way of support, “that it could also open up the possibility that a legislature could subvert the will of the people in a presidential election.”That’s two more uses of the qualifier “could,” and even these are only imagined by “some legal scholars,” so christened by a paper that hasn’t endorsed a Republican for president since 1956. A lot of disaster scenarios can be conjured with weasel words like these. As the old French proverb says, “With ‘if,’ we could put Paris in a bottle.”Thousands of constitutional checks and balances would have to fail, and as many state legislators join the effort, for Mrs. Clinton’s fever dream to become manifest. Yet what one might call the joy of demagoguery is that the demagogue is unconstrained by reality. Even in the event of a high court ruling against the North Carolina legislature in Moore, expect her to warn that the conspiracy is still lurking in the shadows.In 2016, Mr. Obama advised the GOP candidate for president “to stop whining and go try to make his case to get votes.” It’s advice Mrs. Clinton would be wise to follow if she mounts a bid for the White House in 2024, leaving constitutional questions to the Supreme Court, and the plotting of political thrillers to novelists who spin much more plausible yarns than this.

Election Pre-Denier: Hillary Clinton Warns of the United States Constitution

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