We've been highlighting the ultra-close election in Iowa's Second Congressional District over the last few weeks, including this post outlining Democrats' outrageous potential plan to try to steal a race their candidate has lost. If you're new to this controversy -- the mainstream national press has barely given it a glance -- here are the basics: Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks has defeated Democrat Rita Hart in the district, notching a GOP gain. The votes were tallied, a recount ensued, and Miller-Meeks prevailed by six votes. Pursuant to the law and the counted and recounted outcome, the state of Iowa officially certified the result. Rather than bringing a legally-compelling case to the courts to challenge the formal outcome by citing actionable problems or irregularities, the Hart campaign is instead appealing the election to...the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives:
Democrat Rita Hart is claiming the recount in Iowa’s 2nd congressional district race was inconsistent and thousands of legal votes were not counted. Last month, the Secretary of State certified the results after a district-wide recount found Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks won by only six votes. Hart’s campaign plans to appeal the results in the U-S House of Representatives. The campaign could have appealed the certified results to the Iowa Judicial System. But they say this process would not have allowed enough time to count the thousands of votes they claim should have been counted...Once it’s filed, the House administrative committee in Washington DC will review the case. Miller-Meeks says that takes the power out of Iowans’ hands and gives it to a Democrat-controlled House. “Every legal vote was counted,” Miller-Meeks said. “What Rita Hart wants to do is to not follow the rules of Iowa law. She wants a partisan political process in Washington D.C. to override Iowa law.”
As we've told you, the partisan Democrat who would likely oversee this challenge before the House administrative committee is a man who was talking about impeaching President Trump in front of a cheering crowd of leftists before Trump was even inaugurated:
Two days before President Trump was even sworn in, Democrats were calling for his impeachment.
— Kevin McCarthy (@GOPLeader) December 17, 2019
This was their plan all along. pic.twitter.com/Skx2ql7nIt
Hart insultingly claims that filing her election challenges in court would have been too time-consuming, which is preposterous on its face. The Trump legal team has been filing motions and fighting in courts all over the country for weeks on end. They've been overwhelmingly unsuccessful because they have a very weak case, but the point is that they're battling on multiple fronts up until the very last moment. In New York's 22nd Congressional District, there are legal skirmishes underway (the GOP nominee leads by 12 votes, and officials keep "discovering" uncounted ballots), with a judge ordering a review process that will likely stretch on for weeks. The notion that Rita Hart couldn't be bothered to go through the legal process is absurd on its face. She didn't even try. She wants to "win" at all costs, so she's made the choice to bypass the proper legal channels, opting to toss this to her fellow Democrats in the House and hoping they'll pull a rerun of a disgraceful stolen Indiana Congressional election in 1984. The ploy is shamelessly about achieving a desired outcome -- "to get the result we need," as she puts it:
Wild video clip here.@RitaHartIA says she’s having @SpeakerPelosi decide the election result instead of Iowa courts because “there was only one way they could get the result they needed”
— Calvin Moore (@CalvinMoore_) December 10, 2020
This is as antithetical to democracy as it gets #Ia02
pic.twitter.com/GC8bLMf7Tt
Many in the media are heaping criticism on Republican officeholders and conservative figures endorsing a legally frivolous lawsuit and related schemes designed to disenfranchise millions of voters in order to reverse the outcome of a legitimate presidential election. The suit will almost certainly go down in flames, but the number of people willing to attach their names to this profoundly undemocratic effort -- which would set all sorts of poisonous precedents -- is disturbing, quite frankly. I suspect many of the lawsuit's ostensible "supporters" have signed on because they know it will fail, yet see an easy opportunity to telegraph a "fighting" spirit to their base. It's beyond cynical. Rita Hart's scheme to steal her election has a far greater chance of succeeding. As noted above, House Democrats have pulled this off before.
Will Democratic leadership be pressed on this disgraceful attempt to overturn a legitimate election result through partisan means? They're allowing it to move forward, after all. And might the national media decide this is a story worth covering (some on the Left have spoken out, but it's barely registered a blip)? Or will we once again learn that there are different outrage thresholds for different political parties? I'll leave you with the Wall Street Journal's editorial opposing the aforementioned Texas lawsuit (National Review has a strong one too), followed by the latest example of how utterly broken the media is (reinforced by this thread):
WSJ editorializes against the Texas election lawsuit. https://t.co/TCSPA6OA1R
— Ramesh Ponnuru (@RameshPonnuru) December 11, 2020
The Hunter Biden story was ‘conspiracy’ theory shouted down and stifled by the media establishment. Until it wasn’t.https://t.co/vsMzH0UXcO
— David Harsanyi (@davidharsanyi) December 10, 2020
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