https://issuesinsights.com/2022/08/0...-starting-gun/
Guest Contributor
A Declaration Of Dissolution: Wisconsin Supreme Court Fires The Starting Gun
Bob Maistros
August 1, 2022
25 comments
“If elections are conducted outside of the law, the people have not conferred their consent on the government. Such elections are unlawful, and their results are illegitimate.” — Justice Rebecca Grassl Bradley, writing for the Wisconsin Supreme Court majority in Teigen v. Wisconsin Elections Commission
A court of law has
finally confirmed it: The 2020 election was “illegitimate.” And all the demands for sufficient evidence of voter fraud to reverse the outcome were a red herring.
The truly dispositive factor, as
stated by a Republican Wisconsin state legislator in a March hearing and affirmed in the opinion: “If a vote is cast in an illegal process, it’s an illegal vote!”
The reasons for legislatively enacted absentee ballot protections are clear. Justice Bradley quotes the Wisconsin Legislature’s rationale: “(P)revent the potential for fraud or abuse … overzealous solicitation of absent electors who may prefer not to participate in an election … undue influence on an absent elector … or other similar abuses.”
And that’s exactly what unlawfully relaxed provisions occasioned in Wisconsin:
- Nearly 3,600 trips by 138 “mules” to drop boxes to traffic 137,551 votes. (Trump lost the state by about 20,000.)
- Illegal assistance with absentee ballots by nursing home staff to residents, some with dementia.
- “Zuckerbucks” exploiting these changes to “purchase Joe Biden an additional 65,222 votes,without which Donald Trump would have won the state by 44,540 votes.”
But again, per Wisconsin’s Supremes, Donald Trump didn’t have to prove the existence or extent of fraud, only deviation from legislative schemes. Because –
nota bene! – the votes’ unlawful nature
is the proof.
The same “pollution” of the “integrity of the results,” as the Court expressed it, occurred in:
Michigan: Unlawfully imposed
rules for validating absentee signatures and a
refusal to comply with an enactment allowing access to drop-box video surveillance.
Georgia: The Stacey Abrams settlement that, as a U.S. Supreme Court
amicus curiae brief
demonstrated, ran afoul of schemes regulating – what else? – drop boxes and signature identification.
Pennsylvania: A state Supreme Court decree involving absentee deadlines that, per U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel
Alito, “squarely alter(ed) an important statutory provision enacted by the Pennsylvania Legislature.”
As Texas and 17 other states argued in a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court, these jurisdictions’ “significant and unconstitutional irregularities … cumulatively preclude(d) knowing who legitimately won the 2020 election.”
Yet observers left and right shrug off the Badger State ruling’s significance.
Slate sniffs, “Without a shred of evidence” (to repeat,
irrelevant) “the court has thrown its weight behind a dangerous conspiracy theory” (unlawful votes are no “conspiracy”) “that helped to fuel the Jan. 6 insurrection.” (
That again.)
And sort of rightward, the
Wall Street Journal trots out the usual dismissive arguments:
“Mr. Trump … lagged the state’s GOP congressmen by 63,547. Split tickets by Republicans more than explain why Mr. Trump fell short.”
Really? Trump had
95% approval among Republicans in October 2020. Yet GOP congressmen ran ahead of him?
“Drop boxes were an unlawful delivery method, but if real Wisconsinites put real ballots into them … that isn’t ‘fraud.’”
Again, fraud isn’t dispositive – illegal votes are. Outside anti-fraud provisions, how can anyone
know who deposited the ballots?
“Bill Barr told a podcast recently that Mr. Trump was duly warned to get solid lawyers working to defend business-as-usual voting processes. … ‘He ignored that advice. He did not have a legal team prepared to go and fight around the country. So a lot of these, bending of the playing field, were his own fault.’”
Trump’s attorneys combatted unlawful provisions state by state, before and after Nov. 3. Were slapped down repeatedly on the inappropriate “lack of evidence” standard. And even humiliated and threatened with sanctions for representing him.
Plus, try out this argument:
“The woman was dressed provocatively and didn’t take self-defense lessons. So that sexual assault was her own fault.”
The Journal did get one thing right: “
Judges are unlikely to throw out legitimate votes after the fact.”
Or even illegitimate ones. Alito also wrote that the Pennsylvania case had “national importance. … There is a strong likelihood that the State Supreme Court decision violates the federal Constitution.”
Yet when a majority rejected the Lone Star State’s petition for lack of “a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections,” even Alito allowed that he “would grant no other relief.”
Of course, that ruling was outrageous. As Justice Bradley wrote, “
(A)ll lawful voters … are injured when the institution charged with administering Wisconsin elections does not follow the law, leaving the results in question.” (Emphasis added.)
Petitioning states had an interest in preventing their “lawful voters’” disenfranchisement when battleground jurisdictions’ constitutional infractions led to an “illegitimate” national outcome.
These citizens “have not conferred their consent” for Bidenite misrule and ensuing harm – ruinous inflation, border chaos, institutionalized gender confusion and cancel culture, and global humiliation.
The British crown’s lack of “consent of the governed” led Thomas Jefferson to pen the immortal passage: “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.”
It has become necessary. Even the Reddest Waves this November cannot now undo the damage the Zuckerbergs, Jan. 6 zealots and the rest of the “well-funded
cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies” have wrought to our system and processes. Or prevent another electoral heist in 2024.
Which returns us to the
demand articulated here nearly 600 days ago: since they got no help from courts, “Deep red states should simply declare the union dissolved” – Jefferson’s term – “by nefarious actions to disenfranchise Americans.”
Justice Bradley has now officially fired the starting gun. Let the Great American Opt-Out commence.
