Colorado’s Democrats announced that they get to determine who the Republican presidential candidates can and can’t be. California is trying to follow suit.
California may be the next state to ban former President Trump from its primary ballot over 14th Amendment concerns. Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis (D) requested Wednesday the state look into “every legal option” to do just that.
“Based on the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling … I urge you to explore every legal option to remove former President Donald Trump from California’s 2024 presidential primary ballot,” Kounalakis wrote to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber (D).
“This decision is about honoring the rule of law in our country and protecting the fundamental pillars of democracy,” she continued.
Nothing says democracy like the ruling class preventing members of the opposition from voting for their candidates of choice.
State Republicans are starting to discuss the possibility of following suit.
Some Republican officials outraged by the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to boot Donald Trump off the state’s primary ballot have suggested doing the same to President Biden in their states.
“Seeing what happened in Colorado makes me think — except we believe in democracy in Texas — maybe we should take Joe Biden off the ballot in Texas for allowing 8 million people to cross the border since he’s been president, disrupting our state far more than anything anyone else has done in recent history,” Lone Star State Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham Tuesday night.
While condemning the Colorado decision, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis pondered aloud what the limiting principle would be for that policy.
“Could we just say that Biden can’t be on the ballot because he let in 8 million illegals into the country, and violated the Constitution?” he asked Wednesday at a campaign event in Iowa.
Push this further and you could end up with presidential race in which the presidential candidate from the opposing party doesn’t even appear on the ballots of the most Democrat and Republican states.
It’s a crazy scenario that is no longer entirely impossible. In some ways it wouldn’t even make that much of a difference.
The last Republican presidential candidate to win Colorado was Bush in ’04. Demographics and organization make it fairly unlikely that a Republican will win it again. Double ditto for California. So in terms of practical outcomes, this doesn’t much matter.
Republicans are not actually competitive in Colorado or California in 2024. But the symbolism and the precedent are both vitally important.
The most popular speech I ever gave was some years back at the South Carolina Tea Party convention in which I laid out the cold or slow civil war we were in.
How do civil wars happen?
Two or more sides disagree on who runs the country. And they can’t settle the question through elections because they don’t even agree that elections are how you decide who’s in charge. That’s the basic issue here. Who decides who runs the country? When you hate each other but accept the election results, you have a country. When you stop accepting election results, you have a countdown to a civil war.
The Mueller investigation is about removing President Trump from office and overturning the results of an election. We all know that. But it’s not the first time they’ve done this. The first time a Republican president was elected this century, they said he didn’t really win. The Supreme Court gave him the election. There’s a pattern here.
What do sure odds of the Democrats rejecting the next Republican president really mean? It means they don’t accept the results of any election that they don’t win. It means they don’t believe that transfers of power in this country are determined by elections. That’s a civil war.
The idea that the two parties transfer power through elections is on the verge of collapse. And there’s no sign that the pressure on that system is about to abate.
And the rest is just a matter of details.
Democrats decide to prevent Republicans from even appearing on ballots. It’s not just Trump. Look at Oregon.
While the proposal to ban Republicans from running for office had $2.5 million behind it, the opposition had none. A fifth of the votes in favor came out of Multnomah County: the home of Portland. Put in charge of determining what Measure 113 actually meant were Democratic officials appointed by Democrat governors who were serving as Secretary of State and State Attorney General: who of course decided that it meant what their party wanted it to mean.
The proposed purge of much of the Republican State Senate delegation is a demonstration of what democracy looks like when it’s uncoupled from constitutional protections, free and fair elections, multiparty representation and even handed laws.
Democrats keep talking about “democracy”, but they mean social democracy, not actual elections. If we’re not a republic or a democracy, what are we?
Project it forward and blocs of red and blue states bar the opposing party leaving a grouping of swing states that are still in contention to be fought over by wealth and talent from the other states. That starts looking a lot like Bleeding Kansas.
There is a slow-motion civil war underway. It’s still cold for now, but it’s heating up all the time.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/is-the-colorado-decision-how-a-civil-war-begins/