The New York Times released an editorial on Saturday, and boy was it a particularly nonsensical one. "Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now," the headline from the editorial board claimed.
As the piece begins:
One year after from the smoke and broken glass, the mock gallows and the very real bloodshed of that awful day, it is tempting to look back and imagine that we can, in fact, simply look back. To imagine that what happened on Jan. 6, 2021 — a deadly riot at the seat of American government, incited by a defeated president amid a last-ditch effort to thwart the transfer of power to his successor — was horrifying but that it is in the past and that we as a nation have moved on.
This is an understandable impulse. After four years of chaos, cruelty and incompetence, culminating in a pandemic and the once-unthinkable trauma of Jan. 6, most Americans were desperate for some peace and quiet.
On the surface, we have achieved that. Our political life seems more or less normal these days, as the president pardons turkeys and Congress quarrels over spending bills. But peel back a layer, and things are far from normal. Jan. 6 is not in the past; it is every day.
It's worth mentioning that the one person who died directly because of actions from the riot was Ashli Babbitt. Further, U.S. Senate failed to convict former President Donald Trump in his impeachment trial, which was conducted after he had already left office.
Why is it that January 6 "is every day?" It comes down to voter integrity laws.
Further down the piece reads:
This is where looking forward comes in. Over the past year, Republican lawmakers in 41 states have been trying to advance the goals of the Jan. 6 rioters — not by breaking laws but by making them. Hundreds of bills have been proposed and nearly three dozen laws have been passed that empower state legislatures to sabotage their own elections and overturn the will of their voters, according to a running tally by a nonpartisan consortium of pro-democracy organizations.
...
Thus the Capitol riot continues in statehouses across the country, in a bloodless, legalized form that no police officer can arrest and that no prosecutor can try in court.
Voter integrity efforts at the state level, in almost every state by the NYT's own admission above, have taken place to ensure that the mistrust as a result of the 2020 election doesn't happen again.
Last month, Steve Cortes highlighted for The National Pulse the concerns of enthusiastic voters. As he wrote on December 14:
If anything, recent polling data and the latest 2022 campaign dynamics suggest that the real energy of the Republican Party lies among highly-informed, keenly-motivated citizens who maintain that the November 3rd, 2020 vote was badly marred by irregularities and constitutional violations that anointed Joe Biden as an illegitimate president.
Even CNN acknowledges this reality, as expressed by their senior number cruncher Harry Enten in an article titled “Voters Who Think Trump Won Are the Most Enthusiastic to Vote in 2022.”
The polling from the leftist cable network reveals an astounding finding: of Americans who are enthusiastic to vote in 2022, citizens are split almost exactly in half on the question of whether or not Biden legitimately won the White House. Their survey shows that energized voters convey only a slight 52-47 percent belief that Biden was legally elected. Even the overall margin, not adjusted for voter enthusiasm, shows almost 40 percent of all voters reporting that Biden win was invalid.
It's also disingenuous for the editorial board to make the claim that "no prosecutor can try in court" when the Department of Justice, which has shown to be quite political and zealous in its lawsuits, is suing states like Texas and Georgia.
If you thought that likening Republican lawmakers in state legislatures across the country to the rioters on January 6 was crazy enough, there's more. The editorial board also melodramatically compares the entire Republican Party to authoritarians:
A healthy, functioning political party faces its electoral losses by assessing what went wrong and redoubling its efforts to appeal to more voters the next time. The Republican Party, like authoritarian movements the world over, has shown itself recently to be incapable of doing this. Party leaders’ rhetoric suggests they see it as the only legitimate governing power and thus portrays anyone else’s victory as the result of fraud — hence the foundational falsehood that spurred the Jan. 6 attack, that Joe Biden didn’t win the election.
When it comes to concerns about voting, though, the real concern should be to do with the legislation that Congressional Democrats are attempting to pass, which amounts to a federal takeover of elections. And, when it comes to prosecutors that the editorial board mentions above, Democrats have purposefully made it very difficult to litigate these federal bills in the courts.
The editorial board not only ignores the problems of such bills, but it promotes them, along with another pet cause of Democrats, save moderates like Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) and Joe Manchin (D-WV), which is to nuke the filibuster:
Democrats aren’t helpless, either. They hold unified power in Washington, for the last time in what may be a long time. Yet they have so far failed to confront the urgency of this moment — unwilling or unable to take action to protect elections from subversion and sabotage. Blame Senator Joe Manchin or Senator Kyrsten Sinema, but the only thing that matters in the end is whether you get it done. For that reason, Mr. Biden and other leading Democrats should make use of what remaining power they have to end the filibuster for voting rights legislation, even if nothing else.
It may only be January 1, but The New York Times is already off to a particularly bad start.
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