Tainted Electors in Post-Legal America

 Tainted Electors in Post-Legal America

The American left has been working overtime to obfuscate the real issues at the heart of whether or not the 2020 presidential election is being stolen.  For instance, when Chris Krebs, the former head of the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), announced in a statement on November 12 that the 2020 election was "the most secure election in American history" and President Trump fired him, the Left went berserk and cited the firing as just more evidence that Trump is an illegitimate tyrant or something.

On December 13, however, the Department of Homeland Security released Emergency Directive 21-01, a version of CISA's "Mitigate SolarWinds Orion Code Compromise."  CISA is charged with protecting the nation's electronic infrastructure from foreign hackers, and it seems to be fairly incompetent at it.  Inasmuch as the SolarWinds hacks had been happening for many months, perhaps when he fired Krebs, the president knew things the leftist media didn't.

In any event, the furor over Krebs's firing takes one to Wikipedia to gather some basic info on the guy.  It appears that Mr. Krebs is not an information technology professional, an electrical engineer, a computer programmer, or any kind of techie whose opinion on cyber-security matters might carry some weight.  You see, Chris Krebs is a lawyer.  So his previous job at CISA could only be as a manager, and when he says the election was the safest ever, it means nothing.  He's merely repeating what he's been told by his staff.  And the opinions of his staff also wouldn't carry much weight, given the SolarWinds "compromise."  (To lead CISA more effectively than Krebs, maybe the feds should have gone to the local BestBuy and hired someone from the Geek Squad.)

Given the above, it was heartening to listen to Steve Hilton's opening monologue, "Lack of government action has made people more skeptical about the 2020 election," on the December 20 edition of his FNC show The Next Revolution, wherein he briefly touched on Krebs:

Chris Krebs, the cyber guy, keeps saying it was the safest election ever.  But that's like the security guard at the hospital telling you how great the brain surgeon is.  The constitutionality of electoral changes, the validity of ballot-harvesting, the merits of signature-matching, none of that's got anything to do with Chris Krebs.  His job was running the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in DHS. And oh, on his watch we had the biggest ever cyber-security attack and the worst ever assault on our infrastructure security.  So frankly I don't think we need to hear from Chris Krebs on the election or anything else.

(Hilton's fiery monologues are always edifying and a pleasure, so do watch this one in its entirety; it's only 6 minutes and 37 seconds.)

Cyber-security isn't what's at issue in the 2020 election.  Such claims are just more leftist obfuscation, similar to charges that the 2016 election was "hacked."  The Russians meddled in the 2016 elections, but the feds have assured us that no vote counts were changed.  The real issue in the 2020 elections is what seven battleground states did...in broad daylight.

There's an old observation that goes something like this: the problem is not what's illegal; it's what's legal.  In other words, it is that which is allowed that plagues us.  Just as vexing and corrosive as the issue of election fraud is that of whether or not the elections conducted in the battleground states were even legal.  Indeed, legality may be the overarching central issue in the 2020 elections, not fraud, not cyber-security.  So the MSM's droning on about the nonexistence of "widespread voter fraud" and the firing of Chris Krebs is just more of their obfuscations.

America's big problem of late is not just with the trashing of constitutional norms; it also involves the left's lack of appreciation for the very idea of law itself.  America seems to be entering a "post-legal" twilight, where laws on the books are not enforced and where governors and mayors create capricious new "laws" out of whole cloth that are clear violations of inconvenient pre-existing laws.

Sometimes post-legal "laws" can have the imprimatur of the legal, as when a law has been enacted by lawmakers.  So a new law that is contrary to already existing law is allowed until it receives judicial review and is struck down.  But what if the courts don't grant certiorari and decline to review?

Where we see abundant evidence that America has entered a post-legal era is in the battleground states of the 2020 federal elections.  Laws and even constitutions were ignored and superseded.  The prime example is Pennsylvania.  Act 77, the law that legalized mail-in voting in Pennsylvania, violated the state's own constitution.  And then PA's own Supreme Court violated the U.S. Constitution by usurping the power of the state's Legislature.  If that's all true, then the election in the Keystone State was illegal.  So how can Congress accept the votes of Pennsylvania's electors on January 6?

Anyone who denies that significant election fraud occurred in November is either dishonest or a fool (here and here).  But the issue before Congress on January 6 should not focus on fraud; it should mainly be about the legality of the elections in the battleground states.  Some have argued that it falls to the vice president to rule January 6 on the legality of the elections in the battleground states.

It would take a tremendous amount of courage for one man to "decide" the 2020 presidential election.  But after their abysmal performance, that seems better than letting the courts decide.  The prospect of the V.P. asserting his plenary power to reject the tainted electors of the battleground states has even got the attention of the old media.  Mike Pence is a profoundly decent man, and he's been a terrific V.P.  He should consider that if he accepts the tainted electors and hands the election to Biden, his political career will be over.  On the other hand, if he rejects the tainted electors, he'll be seen as the savior of the republic.  After all, haven't we all been saying this is the most consequential election of our lives?

This writer highly recommends Ted Noel's powerful December 26 article "It's for Mike Pence to Judge whether a Presidential Election Was Held at All" (if you've already read it, read it again).  Mr. Noel's idea is for Pence to merely reject the electors in question, and it is the cleanest, quickest remedy.  If Pence did as Noel suggests, it would send a stinging rebuke to the seven battleground states for their intolerable lawlessness.  It might even provide the impetus for Congress to at long last legislate some real reform for federal elections.

If some fear that Noel's solution might trigger social unrest, then another remedy might be to have new elections in the affected states.  However, Pence should not agree to such unprecedented elections unless they were strictly supervised.  Sadly, the affected states are too corrupt and weak to be allowed to conduct such elections on their own.  Another remedy might be to establish a commission to decide the election, as was done in 1876, which would also take much of the onus off Pence.  But regardless of the remedy, the vice president should not accept the tainted electors and thereby ratify illegality.