A “Well-Funded Cabal of Powerful People” Saved Democracy

Quote of the week

One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results. – Milton Friedman

Democrats are racing to pass H.R. 1 / S. 1, the For the People Act of 2021. This bill equates to a partisan, federal takeover of elections and contains many egregious components including undermining states’ efforts to clean up their voter rolls, prohibiting states’ voter ID requirements, virtually eliminating any restrictions on vote-by-mail, and severely limiting First Amendment rights of free political speech. How familiar are you with this legislation? You need to be. It is a perfect formula for more voter fraud and stolen elections.

COMING SOON: Michael Quinn Sullivan’s Texas Scorecard will launch an easy-to-use tracking page showing the status of the Republican and Democrat parties’ legislative priorities in both chambers of the Texas legislature. Look for it to go live next week.

Buddy mentions this item as it serves as an example of what citizens and citizen advocacy organizations must do to make it easier for voters to know who and what they vote for. As election cycles come up—city, county, school board, state, federal—the task before us is the removal of political deadwood and outright liars and crooks, and replacing them with men and women of courage who, above all will not lie and who will deliver on promises. Some will turn out no better than the frauds they replace, but so long as we keep a free and honest vote, we can replace any clunkers.

Buddy’s Soap Box

(We are getting our new blog a bit more settled in as to format. Readers may now comment directly.)

A patriotic Texas howdy from Buddy!

Our focus this week is on an extraordinary admission, an admission that a self-described “cabal of powerful people” joined forces to secretly subvert the will of the voter; we, the majority, being considered not smart enough to know what is good for us. Yet, even with such an effort, the cabal’s efforts weren’t enough to beat President Trump, who could turn out thousands at every rally, as compared to Biden, who couldn’t fill a Volkswagen bus with his turnouts.

A strong case can be made that the election was in the end snatched from President Donald Trump AND 74 million or more voters in two and possibly three ways:

• By the elites who formed a “cabal” to derail President Trump. They’ve already admitted to this. See TIME Magazine column: The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.
• By voter fraud in key states controlled by the Democrat political machine.
• And possibly by voter machine manipulation.

The elites, election officials, and possibly foreign powers as well, acted overtly and covertly, casually or in direct concert, often arrogantly, and all to ensure their ordained choice won no matter how we voted.

Columns worth reading

Each week under this heading, I’ll include full columns or intros to columns you can read in full elsewhere on the internet. Each of these columns pretty much express my views, else I’d not be sharing them with you.

TIME: ‘Well-Funded Cabal of Powerful People” Saved Democracy

“They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. … Democracy is not self-executing.”

By  Hank Berrien    Feb 5, 2021   DailyWire.com

TIME magazine has published a lengthy article lauding “an extraordinary shadow effort” of a conglomeration of entities working together to ensure that the November election would be “free and fair, credible and uncorrupted.” TIME refers to the effort as “a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.”

Citing “a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” between “left-wing activists and business titans” that assured that “forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy,” TIME adds: “The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.”

“Their work touched every aspect of the election,” TIME’s Molly Ball gushes. “They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time.”

Insisting “Trump and his allies were running their own campaign to spoil the election,” Ball continues, “The President spent months insisting that mail ballots were a Democratic plot and the election would be ‘rigged.’”

Ball writes of Trump’s “henchmen” and accuses the Republican Party of a “legacy of suppressive tactics”: “His henchmen at the state level sought to block their use, while his lawyers brought dozens of spurious suits to make it more difficult to vote–an intensification of the GOP’s legacy of suppressive tactics.”

“It is the story of an unprecedented, creative and determined campaign whose success also reveals how close the nation came to disaster,” reads the TIME piece, quoting a leader of an advocacy group claiming, “Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated. But it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.”

Ball focuses on Mike Podhorzer, senior adviser to the president of the AFL-CIO, “pondering scenarios and talking to experts. It wasn’t hard to find liberals who saw Trump as a dangerous dictator … Podhorzer began working from his laptop at his kitchen table, holding back-to-back Zoom meetings for hours a day with his network of contacts across the progressive universe: the labor movement; the institutional left, like Planned Parenthood and Greenpeace; resistance groups like Indivisible and MoveOn; progressive data geeks and strategists, representatives of donors and foundations, state-level grassroots organizers, racial-justice activists and others.”

“Protecting the election would require an effort of unprecedented scale,” Ball states. “The first task was overhauling America’s balky election infrastructure … –in the middle of a pandemic. For the thousands of local, mostly nonpartisan officials who administer elections, the most urgent need was money. They needed protective equipment like masks, gloves and hand sanitizer. They needed to pay for postcards letting people know they could vote absentee–or, in some states, to mail ballots to every voter. They needed additional staff and scanners to process ballots.”

Ball notes that the Voter Participation Center “sent ballot applications to 15 million people in key states, 4.6 million of whom returned them. In mailings and digital ads, the group urged people not to wait for Election Day.”

TIME states, “In the end, nearly half the electorate cast ballots by mail in 2020, practically a revolution in how people vote. About a quarter voted early in person. Only a quarter of voters cast their ballots the traditional way: in person on Election Day.”

Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, who has been nominated for Associate Attorney General by President Biden, met with the titans of social media. She said, “It took pushing, urging, conversations, brainstorming, all of that to get to a place where we ended up with more rigorous rules and enforcement. It was a struggle, but we got to the point where they understood the problem. Was it enough? Probably not. Was it later than we wanted? Yes. But it was really important, given the level of official disinformation, that they had those rules in place and were tagging things and taking them down.”

After a summary of the post-election efforts by the members involved, the TIME report concludes, “Democracy won in the end. The will of the people prevailed. But it’s crazy, in retrospect, that this is what it took to put on an election in the United States of America.”