CTH has been waiting to write this because we first needed to see how both wings of the Uniparty vulture in DC were positioning. Now, with clear vision, eyes wide open and clarity of focus the issue must be centered.
How are Americans going to respond when Washington D.C, the Fourth Branch of the security and surveillance state, and all the institutions of the United States government, officially declare that Donald John Trump will not be permitted to run for office?
If you have not thought about that question, we had better hurry up and get that conversation front and center.
It’s about to happen, and President Trump knows it.
The specific phrase, “They are so desperate to hide the truth, they’ll make it criminal to speak it,” does not only pertain to the election fraud.
We really need to start thinking carefully and strategically about this.
The institutions of the United States government cannot ever admit:
(1) What they did in the 2016 election with illegal campaign surveillance of political opposition. How they weaponized the administrative state. How the intelligence agencies within the executive branch coordinated with legislative branch intelligence oversight (SSCI) and Gang of Eight members to target, then isolate, marginalize and remove Donald J Trump. How the executive and legislative branches then manipulated the judicial branch to support their activity (FISA Courts).
(2) That Robert Mueller’s appointment was intended exclusively to cover up what took place in 2016; then to assist the effort in outlasting any internal review until Trump could be removed. The entire DC establishment know this to be true. Not a single voice ever discusses it publicly. (Why?)
(3) That COVID-19 was used purposefully to create fear. That created fear was then weaponized by the same people in the same three branches of government for control and exploitation on an international scale. Which includes all of the false mitigation efforts used as part of that control; and, more importantly, the use of a “vaccine” to maintain the architecture needed for the control.
(4) That all of the entities associated with the reference points above have no way to retreat.
With the scale of this in mind – and I do mean we need to think about the scale here – there is no way these same people, domestically and internationally, can run the risk of letting Donald Trump become President of the United States again.
Too much has been revealed. The Alinsky approach will not work, because it hasn’t been able to work. The entire premise of the J6 committee is based on their knowledge they will need to make this announcement. The J6 committee is the 2022 version of the 2017 Muller appointment.
The system will make that announcement. It’s not a matter of ‘if‘, it is an issue of ‘when‘.
After four years of silence, North Korea istesting ballistic missiles again. Those of you who were critical of former President Donald J. Trump’s unorthodox outreach to Kim Jong-un, the tyrannical ruler of North Korea, should be eating crow now (or, grass, as the North Korean regime routinely makes its people eat). Say what you will about Trump’s brash style, but he kept the peace with the purportedly crazy North Korean regime.
Remember in the early months of 2017, Trump and Kim were in aTwitter war that could have devolved into a shooting war. Things were so bad that there were almost daily briefings of senior Pentagon and U.S. intelligence officials trundling up to Congress to hyperventilate about the horrors of the coming war against North Korea. No one, these defense officials claimed, wanted this fight (except for maybe the crazies who ruled North Korea). Or at least that was what we were told.
Other foreign policy “experts” with their fancy Ivy League degrees and lucrative social connections in Washington, D.C. insisted that we could never talk to Kim Jong-un. So, war fever became a fait accompli among the Washington intelligentsia (as it so often is). Yet, in 2018 Trump did that which had helped to make him president in 2016: he bucked the experts and reversed course on the anticipated war that undoubtedly would have resulted in a nuclear weapons exchange. The initial Trump diplomatic gambitworked. While Trump could not get Kim Jong-un to abandon his pursuit of nuclear weapons and ballistic missile technology, he did get the young North Korean ruler tostop the provocative testing of those weapons that was prompting the war talk around the world. In so doing, Trump’s diplomacy deprived the North Korean regime of much-needed data for their growing nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs for at least four years.
Sure, North Korea maintained their investments in these programs and the Trump outreach gave Pyongyang its own reprieve necessary for building more of these terrible weapons. But the all-important experimentation and testing of these critical systems in the real world was halted. Plus, with no missiles popping off into the sunset at random, there was less of a chance for strategic miscalculation.
Trump cooled what was believed to be an increasingly hot situation on the Korean Peninsula. And his outreach, despite havingfailed to progress beyond the initial foray in Singapore in 2018, bought the world a much-needed reprieve from the manic swings of the mad North Korean king.
In turn, Trump’s earnest attempt at peace curried some goodwill from Pyongyang toward the West—something unheard of before (or since) Trump’s presidency.
One year into the Biden Administration, though, and all the success of the previous four years has been thrown away. Biden campaigned on a platform of “return to normal”; the restoration of purportedly “competent” and “stable” leadership in Washington. Unfortunately, the pre-Trump “normal” was endless war along with economic immiseration and domestic social upheaval. If that’s competent or stable governance in Washington, I’ll take Trump’s purported insanity.
Diplomacy, therefore, was a true setback for North Korea’s otherwise terrifying weapons of mass destruction program. It was also an immense opportunity for the West finally to move beyond the Korean War mentality that had defined its policy toward Pyongyang for decades.
China’s Double-Dealing with Kim Jong-un’s Enemies
The Trump diplomatic agenda with North Korea had created fissures with Pyongyang’s long-time ally, China. In fact, it was believed that China had been supporting Kim Jong-un’s older half-brother’s bid to replace Kim Jong-un when the North Korean dictator had his brother murdered by poison at an Indonesian airport.
Shortly after that incident, the Trump outreach began, and it looked as though a realgeopolitical pivot on the part of North Korea was being made to move away from China and toward a more peaceful stance.
Of course, all these moves were merely opening bids by the players involved at the time. Sadly, since the Biden Administration has effectively erased the Trump Administration’s North Korea policy, the world will never know if there could have been any follow on to those early, genius moves by the former president. Yes, Kim Jong-un is an untrustworthy man. But it is clear that he is interested in preserving his regime’s survival—and, at least four years ago, he was open to moving his regime away from China’s orbit to get a better deal from Washington.
Trump’s North Korea diplomacy created the conditions for peace. Stumbling blocks remained but the channels for defusing conflict were finally open. Unlike past attempts, the Trump Administration’s North Korea policy was not built around giving no-strings-attached foreign aid to North Korea, as most American presidents have done. Instead, it was predicated upon adegree of respect for the fact that, better or worse, the Kim regime controlled North Korea and Washington needed to deal amicably with them.
North Korea Runs Back to China’s Arms
Unfortunately, we are experiencing the rebirth of the North Korean threat as Pyongyang not only enhances its ballistic missile capabilities and expands its nuclear weapons arsenal but—as evidenced by recent North Korean missile launches—appears to havea rudimentary hypersonic weapons capability. If that is the case, then, North Korea possesses a comprehensive capability both to threaten their neighbors and potentially to hold the United States hostage with hypersonic glide vehicles.
With Washington’s attention being distracted by events in Ukraine and the possibility of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, few are paying much heed to the startling developments on the Korean Peninsula. What’s more, there is likely little that America can do presently to deter North Korea from enhancing its ability to threaten its neighbors and the United States.
Kim Jong-un believes the Americans are weak and distracted. He clearly does not respect Joe Biden. Armed with an arsenal of new, powerful, and highly destructive weapons—and with his alliances with both Moscow and Beijing restored to their pre-Trump level of cooperation—Kim just might believe now is his time for reuniting the Korean Peninsula under his control. Given how badly the Biden Administration has performed against Russia, China, and Iran, one can assume that they will perform badly against North Korea as well. Except, unlike China or Russia, North Korea is not an ordinary nation controlled by a predictable ruler.
Either through ignorance or by design, Joe Biden is leading this country into a devastating series of wars across the arc of Eurasia—any one of which could erupt into an apocalyptic world war. This is all owing to the fact that Biden has refused to embrace the successful parts of his predecessor’s legacy. Americans everywhere are about to pay dearly for Biden’s arrogance and Kim Jong-un just might be the one maniac to cash in on Biden’s incompetence . . . with nuclear and hypersonic attacks directed at Japan, South Korea, and possibly even the West Coast of the United States.
The day is now not far off when wokeness, racial self-hate, foreign appeasement, and the indulgence of criminal and corrupt organizations like Black Lives Matter will end.
Even as the giant Potemkin village of Democratic Trump-hating self-righteousness crumbles week by week, the last gasp is audible: the grotesquely overstaffed January 6 committee investigating the events at the Capitol on that day last year is full of belligerent former prosecutors who, in interviews with the New York Times and others, acknowledge that they are pursuing their task as if they were after prominent alleged gangsters. The Congress has no power to indict and all it can do is claim to unearth facts that would justify an indictment from Attorney General Merrick Garland. Garland claims to believe that parents concerned about critical race theory and other subjects taught to their children are a principal threat to public order in the United States. Though he is in lock-step with the far-Left policy agenda of the administration, even he might not be prepared to indict a former president on such a weak set of facts as this case presents.
The FBI director, Christopher Wray, reported shortly after January 6, 2021 that there was no evidence connecting those who had trespassed and vandalized the Capitol with the Trump campaign. They’ve detained hundreds of alleged Capitol trespassers without trial for many months, presumably subjecting them to the customary American prosecutor’s interrogations designed to extort useful evidence with threats of indictments or release and immunity from perjury charges, (with reckless disregard for accuracy).
The entire impetus to attack Trump is inspired by the desperate partisanship of a failed Democratic administration and Congress awaiting a severe electoral rebuke in November, and facing an array of apparently well-founded investigations themselves. The Trump-haters have been trying desperately to create the necessary ambiance of righteous unction; reputable commentators like George Will and Peggy Noonan refer to the incident at the Capitol as “1/6” to confer upon it the infamy of 9/11 and to confirm the George Will view that he and his staff were in physical danger on that particular January 6, even though they were miles away from the Capitol. The even more lapidary Thomas Friedman at the New York Times is of the opinion that January 6, 2021 ranks with Pearl Harbor and 9/11, as well, of course, as the imaginary Russian influence on the 2016 presidential election that he endlessly touted.
A moron can see that the last thing Donald Trump wanted on January 6, 2021 was an assault on the Capitol. He asked for increased protection for the Capitol, and Speaker Pelosi and Mayor Muriel Bowser refused. He urged his followers to demonstrate peacefully and 99 percent of them did so. For five years Democratic leaders have been unable to function without a much-publicized and comprehensive criminal investigation riveted on Trump’s back. Much more likely to produce real indictments and justified convictions is the ever broadening, inexorable snail’s march of the Durham investigation into the politicization of the intelligence services of the FBI and the issuance of illegal FISA warrants for surveillance of the Trump campaign in 2016. Durham has revealed that he is expanding his criminal investigation with a subpoena for 500,000 pages of documents from the FBI.
The administration has policy disasters mounting and multiplying at every hand: millions are pouring across the southern border; while Biden struts and ponces about increasing employment, he ignores not just rampaging inflation but the fact of a shrinking workforce following the shutdown of much of the economy, which the Democrats demanded in 2016. Iran has apparently won the issue on nuclear development and, as in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the administration has effectively capitulated—another unambiguous defeat for the United States, following the Afghanistan debacle and the professions of solidarity between Russia and China over Ukraine and Taiwan.
This is the consequence of the Democrats’ hysteria about Russia. If either Ukraine or Taiwan is invaded, it will confirm that both the Kremlin and Beijing have written the United States off as “a pitiful helpless giant,” as President Nixon’s chilling phrase warned, and they will be correct to do so, at least while this gang infests Washington’s public buildings.
The administration’s COVID strategy, built upon the Democrats’ and their media allies’ terrorizing the nation in the last Trump year in order to promote a massive shutdown and economic recession, has been rejected by most Americans and is now being scientifically assaulted as having caused more deaths than it saved. As the lockdown was debunked, Black Lives Matter has been exposed as a scam, as well as a largely terrorist organization. (Warm congratulations to useful corporate idiots like Jamie Dimon who funded them with the shareholders’ money.) The firing of CNN’s Jeff Zucker, not, presumably, because of an unexceptionable relationship he was conducting with another CNN executive, or even his own flak catching for the Cuomos, but because of the catastrophic failure of CNN, which has lost 77 percent of its viewers in the last year and has practically no credibility with any discerning person. Even the New York Times is heading for the lifeboats and publishing unflattering stories about the administration. Yet the Democrats, administration, Congress, and the media, continue to cling to Trump-hate as their only recourse for political self-preservation.
The “defund the police” movement and the election of pro-crime district attorneys in major cities are now fixed around the neck of the Democratic Party like a mighty, rancid albatross. The nonsensical Build Back Better boondoggle and the attempt to achieve the permanent theft of presidential elections championing ballot harvesting and abolishing the verification of votes have failed, although the related attempt to qualify illegal migrants as voters, protect sanctuary cities, and the refusal to enforce constitutional requirements of citizenship for voters remain to be dealt with. The Democrats will be hammered in the congressional elections in nine months and in the meantime the convalescence of Senator Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico deprives the Democrats of their paper-thin majority in that chamber, apparently until April. The comparative absence of President Trump from the public’s attention has, in itself, reduced the teeming atmosphere that his enemies had promoted throughout his presidential term.
This raises the great question of how to complete the settling down of American public life after evicting the incumbents and conducting a comprehensive 180° turn on virtually all policies of the Biden Administration. So great is the rot and failure of the system that Trump attacked in 2016 that not everyone can be punished for their complicity in it. It will be a little like the Liberation of France in 1944 when General de Gaulle, recognizing that a high percentage of the population had been collaborators, executed a few of the more conspicuous traitors and serenely declined to notice the failure and often the treason of the others.
The day is now not far off when wokeness, American self-hate, foreign appeasement, and the indulgence of criminal and corrupt organizations like Black Lives Matter will end. When that happens, only the most egregious should be prosecuted; the self-inflicted wounds involved in pursuing all those responsible for the horrible crash of American public policy would require a decade of recrimination. The escalated use of the criminal justice system to resolve political differences took off with Watergate; it is about to reach its climax and the national interest requires that the temptations of comprehensive vengeance yield to the necessity for a more civilized political atmosphere.
The protests for the freedom of truckers, farmers, and people from all walks of life continue.
Truckers from Canada blocked the Ambassador Bridge connecting Canada and the US.
Truck drivers in Alaska made their own “Alaska Freedom Convoy” on Sunday in support of Canadian truckers.
Now, Hundreds or thousands of protestors drove in convoy to New Zealand’s capital on Tuesday and blocked the parliament to protest against vaccine and mask mandates.
New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern refused to meet the convoy saying she has other priorities.
Vehicles in the convoy included cars, trucks and motorbikes and displayed signs such as “Jabcinda we know you sold your soul to the devil”, “Stop the mandate #Freedom” and “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful.”
A multitude of flags were also spotted alongside the NZ flags brandished by the protestors including the United States’ flag, former President Donald Trump-themed flags, and British flags.
The vehicles remained outside New Zealand’s Parliament – which had just reconvened after their summer break – for hours, and appear to have left the area peacefully later on in the day, with the Wellington police not reporting any arrests.
The key aims of the protest were reported to be to challenge the mask mandate for pupils in schools and also the vaccination requirement for certain public sector jobs such as for nurses, teachers and police officers.
After the anti-mandate protest in Parliament, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has sent a message to vaccinated New Zealanders claiming that these people aren’t representative of the majority of Kiwis and “this too will pass,” Newshub reported.
It can be recalled that a massive freedom convoy was organized outside parliament in Helsinki, Finland demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Sanna Marin’s government, cutting 50% of fuel prices, and an end to all COVID restrictions.
“CONVOY FINLAND 2022″ is expected to resume daily through Wednesday, February 9, 2022, from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. each day.
Mary Fields gives us so many lessons on how to embrace and live in freedom, on being a trailblazer, the power of partnership, and being who you are, no matter what the world thinks. I’m so inspired by her that I may start offering some Stagecoach Mary merch.
In the works….
Mary Fields was born into slavery in Hickman County, Tenn. around 1832. After the Civil War, she was freed, and high-tailed it to Mississippi to work on the Robert E. Lee as a chambermaid. Fields would regale anyone who would listen with stories about the famous race in 1870 between the Lee and the Natchez, where the crew tossed ham and bacon into the boilers in order to build the steam pressure higher.
Fields had a childhood friend who became an Ursuline nun named Sister Amadeus. When Sister Amadeus moved to a convent in Toledo, Ohio, Fields followed her there. Sister Amadeus was then asked to serve St. Peter’s Convent near what was to become Cascade, Montana. Cascade was a small town that developed from the new Montana Central railroad route between Helena and Great Falls.
Mother Amadeus fell extremely ill with pneumonia, and asked her dear friend Mary to come to her. Fields moved to Cascade in 1885, and after nursing Mother Amadeus to health, she worked for the nuns of St. Peter’s Convent. They absolutely loved her, along with the people of the town.
She liked to drink, smoked bad homemade cigars, and was so respected in her adopted hometown of Cascade, Montana, that her birthday was made a school holiday every year.
[…]
At 200 pounds, she was said to be a match for any two men in Montana Territory. She had a standing bet that she could knock a man out with one punch, and she never lost a dime to anyone foolish enough to take her up on that bet. By order of the mayor, she was the only woman of reputable character in Cascade allowed to drink in the local bar, and while she enjoyed the privilege, she never drank to excess. She was often spotted smoking cigars in public, and she liked to argue politics with anyone.
According to a new whistleblower video obtained by The Federalist, 80 percent of Delaware County, Pennsylvania precincts lacked a valid chain of custody for the provisional ballots cast in the November 2020 election.
This video and two others just obtained by The Federalist provide further evidence that, while officials continue to deny that irregularities occurred during the last presidential election, there were widespread violations of the election code in the large Pennsylvania county, followed by efforts to cover up those problems.
Regina Miller, a contract worker assisting Delaware County officials, secretly filmed the videos as she helped election employees gather material in response to a “Right to Know Request” that sought documentation to confirm the election results certified by the county.
In one of the several most-recent videos The Federalist obtained from someone familiar with the situation, two employees are speaking. The first woman states, “This is what a provisional bag looks like.” As she continues to explain the process for safeguarding provisional ballots following the close of polls, she notes, “And what we currently do not have is a valid chain of custody for the provisional ballots.”
The shocked whistleblower repeats the claim as a question: “So are you saying we never had a chain of custody?” The other woman replies that only “20 percent of precincts have locked the blue bag in the past,” a reference to the bag in which provisional ballots are to be stored and safeguarded.
“Personally, I think that this is happening in every county in Pennsylvania,” the Delaware County election official notes. “We’re working on this antiquated law,” she explains, “on top of the new law,” an apparent reference to changes instituted shortly before the 2020 election.
A second video shared with The Federalist on Friday captures a discussion between Delaware County poll worker coordinator Christina Iacono and Tom Gallagher, an attorney for Delaware County, about “V drives.” Those are removable drives that contain the election results obtained from the county’s individual voting machines.
This video begins with the whistleblower saying she was concerned with the way the V drives were returned to the county. Gallagher then detailed what happened, with the hidden camera capturing him saying the county employee “dumped them in a bag, put them in a box,” and “puts it on the top of the hood of her car.”
The election worker then started rattling off problems, according to Gallagher. “She goes . . . we don’t have anything for Chester 11,” and another precinct “is missing.” Gallagher mimics what the employee, identified in the video merely as Loureen, said as she passed the box of V drives and other election material to the county attorney.
“Do you have a piece of paper with that on it?” Gallagher explains he asked her. She didn’t, Gallagher continued, noting she said, “No, that’s why I’m telling it to you.” She also didn’t have an inventory or anything showing what V drive she was providing and what was missing. Gallagher added that he left her a message but didn’t expect any response.
Gallagher’s discussion of the missing V drive provides further context to The Federalist’s earlier reporting on another whistleblower video that captured Delaware County election officials plotting to recreate missing election data from the November 2020 contest.
According to a source familiar with the video, the clip captured James Savage, who served as the voting machine warehouse supervisor during the November 2020 election, discussing a Right to Know Request with another election worker. That request was served on Delaware County after the presidential election and sought documentation confirming the vote totals.
In the video, Savage inquired of another individual off-camera about “recreating data.” The second election official offers his suggested approach, with them recreating results for “these jokers,” and “then create another set for the next set of jokers” — an apparent reference to the citizens seeking the confirmation of the election results under the Right-to-Know request — “but we cut it up and then we create a permanent record,” he explains.
“Here you go, here you go,” the election official says, apparently explaining how they would then provide the recreated data to individuals who filed the Right To Know requests. The individual, who was blocked from view on the camera, then continues, “We scan those cut, copied sheets in.”
Savage continues, “The first part has a lot of work, but it might save us work in the long run, if it’s gonna be a drip, drip, drip.” The duo then discuss the process more, with Savage asking about whether they would go to every machine and put in a clean V drive. The off-camera election worker appears to agree with that approach.
A third just-obtained video now provides evidence suggesting Delaware County officials later executed that plan. That video begins with the whistleblower talking about missing V drives and the fact that “some had to be recreated.”
A man off-camera, identified for The Federalist by a person familiar with the videos as Savage, then notes that “John” “came here with a V drive.” The off-camera man then continues, “I don’t know what the process was ‘cause I wasn’t [there] … I put one of my staff with him to get the machine out and open it up for em’ and then he did everything else.”
“He was able to pull the data from the scanner onto to that V-drive,” the individual identified as Savage explained. The whistleblower then interjected to ask about the “machine tapes” and whether they needed to reprint those to go with the V drives, but no one seemed to know.
However, with the discussion moving on to the missing “machine tapes,” the video unwittingly exposes yet another problem in Delaware County: missing machine tapes that should have existed to verify the voting “return sheets” given the county after the November 2020 election.
According to sources familiar with the video, Delaware County election official James Ziegelhoffer is seen on tape explaining that “most people produced” the tape, referring to a paper printout from the voting machines. Some didn’t, however, Ziegelhoffer added, causing the whistleblower to ask, “What do you do with those return sheets?” a reference to the document individual precincts remitted to the county with a tally of the November 2020 poll results.
Ziegelhoffer explained that “the people that never came” with the tapes, “that was reported to the DA.” After that, Ziegelhoffer seemed to say, he didn’t know what happened.
The Federalist asked Delaware County District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer whether his office launched an investigation into those referrals and if so, the results of the investigation, but received no response.
Private citizens of Delaware County also seemed to have no luck getting satisfactory answers from government officials, leading several residents to file a sprawling lawsuit in mid-November 2021 against former Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, Delaware County, the Delaware County Board of Elections, and more than a dozen individual election officials.
Given the pending litigation, Adrienne Marofsky, the public relations director for Delaware County, previously told The Federalist the county is not responding to press questions. However, Marofsky then added that “the County is confident that the elections in 2020 and 2021 were conducted fairly and fully complied with state and federal laws.”
The county’s claim conflicts with on-camera statements made by Delaware County, Pennsylvania’s Christina Perrone, who told fellow election-related workers during a Zoom meeting after the November 2020 election that this time—referring to the upcoming elections—“we’re going to actually follow the law fully.”
At least one member of the Delaware County Council is likewise continuing to deny problems with the November 2020 election that the videos obtained by The Federalist seem to establish.
Notwithstanding the whistleblower videos capturing election workers apparently discussing the missing V drives, conversing on how to recreate the data, and then explaining that new V drives were created, at a January 19, 2022, county council meeting, one member of the council, identified on the tape as Christine Reuther, declared, “There were no missing drives. It’s been debunked. It’s been before the board of elections. It’s been addressed in court. There’s been testimony about it. There were no missing drives.”
Reuther then explained it was such misinformation being spread in the comments on Facebook that led her to believe that the county should remove the ability for public comment on its Facebook posts.
“We have a circumstance where a lot of research has shown that the way misinformation spreads, or one of the ways that misinformation spreads through social media is the hijacking of trusted websites,” Reuther said. “I can tell you that the county’s comments on its Facebook page were hijacked,” the council member continued, noting that one area in which “misinformation was spread were about elections.” She then stated unequivocally, “There were no missing drives.”
The Federalist asked Reuther whether her position was “that the drives were never missing or that they were ‘not missing’ because they were recreated.” Alternatively, did Reuther believe “those whistleblower videos are altered”? The Federalist inquired. Reuther did not respond to these questions.
While these latest videos provide more evidence of significant issues with the November 2020 election in Delaware County, the totality of the whistleblower tapes has two broader implications: First, the problems captured on video suggest systemic issues with American elections. Second, without whistleblowers filming the behind-the-scenes chaos, the public would remain blissfully ignorant of the apparent banana republic-like state of our electoral process.
Even with the videos, public officials continue to brand the evidence “misinformation.” Americans need to wake up—and soon.
After several days of bad news on the redistricting front, including a bad decision in North Carolina for the GOP-drawn map there, a big win has been delivered to Republicans. The US Supreme Court has ruled 5-4 to halt a lower court order in Alabama that it must redraw its previously passed Congressional map.
That means a 6-1 Republican to Democrat map will now go into effect in 2022, and given the makeup of the Supreme Court, there’s no reason to believe it gets struck down at any point past that.
As one of my RedState colleagues previously speculated, challenging the Alabama map on the grounds of the Voting Rights Act was a total miscalculation for Democrats. They were always an underdog in stopping the GOP map in Alabama, but worse for them, the court has also granted cert to the case, with a full decision likely to come in 2023. That decision is unlikely to be kind to those who want to keep weaponizing the VRA to produce Democrat-stacked maps while not allowing Republicans to gerrymander.
What that means is that not only did Democrats lose in this specific instance, but they could lose a lot more, all across the country in regards to their use of racial quotas for congressional districts once a final decision is delivered.
It doesn’t take a legal genius to see that a court skeptical about the idea of racial quotas (for the Roberts-doubters, I’d point you toward his record on affirmative action and various voting rights grifts as well as his opinions acknowledging that no matter how virtuous the intent, the government can’t make decisions based primarily on race) that has already done away with “pre-clearance” isn’t very far away from saying that unless you can prove that diluting the minority vote was the intent of drawing a district, the state’s version of the map prevails.
The potential irony of this decision is just too much to contemplate. Activist groups suing Alabama over a 30-year-old district map could potentially destroy the racial gerrymandering grift for the entire country.
That’s exactly what appears to be happening, and while Justice John Roberts wussed out as usual in the decision to lift the order, his dissent notes that he believes the only holdup is that the court needs to tear apart past bad precedent before he flips. In other words, he’s likely to join a 6-3 majority next year in delivering a decisive blow to Democrat attempts to rig the gerrymandering process (i.e. where they can draw 22-4 D to R maps in New York but Republican states can’t return the favor).
This was always the danger of going scorched earth on GOP redistricting attempts. The Supreme Court is not favorable to the left’s point of view on the VRA. By not just letting things slide in Alabama, Democrats will now pay a far steeper price than just losing one seat down South. You can expect Republicans in North Carolina to also seek relief from the Supreme Court after the ridiculous decision there last week. It’s open season now, and while Democrats were busy spiking the football on redistricting, the game obviously isn’t over yet.
In short, this decision sets up the coming death blow for many of the unconstitutional provisions of the VRA that have long given Democrats an unfair way to stack the deck. If gerrymandering is legal, and it absolutely is, then it should be available to both sides equally. To the victor goes the spoils.
