Victor Davis Hanson
11. Destroying the Senate Filibuster. The Senate filibuster, despite minor changes, has more or less been in effect for some 180 years. The idea was to slow down rush-to-judgment wild swings in the national mood and prevent near instantaneous resultant law-making—all in the manner that the Founders envisioned the key differences between a restraining Senate and a more rambunctious House.
Senator Obama liked and used the filibuster in a failed attempt to stop the nomination of Justice Alito when the Democrats were in the minority—only to blast it as an ex-President as a Jim Crow-like relic when the Democrats were in the majority. And it was the Democrats in 2013 who first ended the filibuster for non-Supreme Court judicial nominations in order to push through their appointees without the need for cloture.
The Republicans won the majority soon afterward, and to cries of anguish from Democrats, reciprocated, by ending the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations as well.
Learning nothing, forgetting nothing that what comes around, goes around, the Left with a Democratic-controlled Senate now promises in a Harris presidency and Congress to end the filibuster altogether—in fear that they will likely not hold the Senate for very long thereafter.
Like their efforts to pack the Court, destroy the Electoral College, and admit new states, the Left knows that it must change the system or change its agenda to retain power. And it surely will not retreat to JFK–Clinton old-style Democrat moderation, given they feel their open borders have changed the demography and with it the Left itself.
12. Changing the Way We Vote. Still seething after the 2016 Trump unexpected win, the Left made sure it would never happen again.
So, in spring 2020, using Covid as a pretext, Democrat legal teams, funded lavishly by leftwing billionaires, began suing in the state courts, often cherry-picking liberal judges, to change the very way we vote.
The result was that our traditional Election Day was rendered inert. In many states, scarcely 30% of voters turned up at the Election Day polls, while some 70% (the majority of them Democrats) voted through mail-in or early ballots.
In California, in 1960 about 2-3% had voted by “absentee ballots” (the name no longer really exists and has been replaced by “mail-in” and “early” voting). Yet in the last election, nearly 89% of Californians voted through “mail-in” balloting. In Pennsylvania, mail-in ballots increased tenfold in 2024 from 2020.
During the 2020 election in Michigan, mail-in ballots alone soared to 60% of all ballots from four years prior. The rejection rates of this huge influx of mail-in and early ballots dropped to 0.5% from a pre-2020 rate of 4.6%.
In key swing state Georgia, despite the 2020 mail-in ballot influx, the ballot rejection rate counter-intuitively plunged from a pre-2020 rate of 6.4% to .02% in 2020. That is, when the number of non-Election Day ballots exploded, the number of rejected ballots in these states abruptly crashed from 2016 to 2020, or 30 times less.
Again, reflect that nationwide, the number of non-Election Day ballots nearly doubled (and higher in swing states) from 2016 to 2020, while the rejection rate of ballots plunged by a magnitude of anywhere from 10 to 30 times. And note that Democrats were overwhelmingly more likely to vote by non-Election Day means.
Note further that Democrats are far more likely and loudly to object that doubling the number of mail-in and early ballots, as the rejection rates crashed, is no evidence for concern that millions are voting in a manner that just four years earlier would have been illegal in the sense their ballots would have been invalidated.
In sum, we have witnessed in 2020 the greatest revolution in the manner of voting for our presidents since the onset of computerized tabulations. And almost no one notes the radical changes, much less why they were made—and for whom.
Now that Covid has passed, and the quarantine excuse for the shift to non-Election Day ballots ended, why have we not returned to pre-Covid ballot norms?
I think we know the answers.
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