The Left’s Assault on the Sanctity of Each American’s Vote

That assault is embodied in the Progressive-Democratic Party’s HR-1 bill that the House passed on cynical Party lines and sent along to the Senate. The extent of the assault was laid out by Hans von Spakovsky, one-time Federal Election Commission Commissioner ande former counsel to DoJ’s Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, in a Sunday Fox News editorial.

  1. It would eviscerate state voter ID laws that require a voter to authenticate his identity. Indeed, it would force states to allow anyone to vote who simply signs a form saying that they are who they claim they are.
  2. It would make absentee ballots even more insecure than they already are. Not only could states not apply any ID requirement to absentee ballots, they could not enforce any witness signature or notarization requirement.
  3. It would worsen the problem of inaccurate registration rolls. HR 1 severely restricts the ability of states to take the basic steps necessary to maintain the accuracy of their voter rolls, such as comparing their lists with those of other states or using the US Postal Service’s National Change of Address System to find individuals who have moved.
  4. It would take away your ability to decide whether you want to register to vote. Instead, it requires states to automatically register individuals who interact with state agencies.
  5. It would force states to allow online registration, opening up the voter registration system to massive fraud by hackers and cybercriminals.
  6. It imposes onerous new regulatory restrictions on political speech and activity, including online and policy-related speech, by candidates, citizens, civic groups, unions, corporations and nonprofit organizations.
  7. It would authorize the IRS to investigate and consider the political and policy positions of nonprofit organizations when they apply for tax-exempt status. (Sort of like ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) IRS did.)
  8. It would set up a public funding program for candidates running for Congress. This would force taxpayers to subsidize (by a 6 to 1 ratio of taxpayer dollars per individual dollar) the political campaigns of individuals they may vehemently disagree with and wouldn’t vote for in a million years.

And don’t count on Senator Joe Manchin (D, WV) to stand in the way of eliminating the filibuster so the Senate Progressive-Democrats also can pass this on a Party-line vote. We’ve seen the value of his word regarding Republican input.

Panic-Mongering and the Wuhan Virus

Here are some examples of that panic-mongering. They are far from an exhaustive list, but they are illustrative.

New York Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo estimated that, based on the epidemiological curve at the time, “in 45 days [the state] could have up to an input of people who need 110,000 beds that compares to our current capacity of 53,000 beds, 37,000 ICU units, ventilators, which compares to a capacity currently of 3,000 ventilators.”

Yet,

COVID hospitalizations in the state peaked roughly a month later, coming in at just under 19,000…. Total ICU COVID patients peaked shortly thereafter at 5,225, or at just 13% of the governor’s forecast.

And this one:

Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom estimated that, on top of its existing 75,000 hospital beds, the state would require “an additional 50,000 beds in our system.”
“Our new modeling suggests 50,000 is the new target number[.]”

Yet,

California data show that the state’s current peak in hospitalized patients came in early January of this year and totaled just under 23,000….

And this one:

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington predicted on March 31 of last year that Michigan would see peak COVID-19 hospital usage on April 10, topping out at about 14,000 COVID patients in beds.

Yet,

Data from the COVID Tracking Project shows that on that date hospitalized patients in the state totaled just over 3,800. That number plummeted in the weeks that followed, and though it rose again during the fall/winter spike, its peak on December 2 was still just 4,300, significantly less than IHME’s springtime projection.

And this one:

[From] New Jersey, an analysis out of Rutgers University in mid-March 2020…determined that, with about 23,000 hospital beds statewide, the state might face a peak shortfall of over 300,000 beds in a worst-case model positing minimal action to curb the spread of COVID.

Yet,

Hospital usage…peaked in the state on April 16 at 8,224 before falling sharply. During the fall spike, the COVID hospital census there plateaued around 3,600.

It’s hard to believe that such learned persons could be so far wrong—and not move quickly to correct their errors.

Maybe it’s time to look at their motives for making those projections. Maybe that time has come, especially, against the naked power grab that is the Progressive-Democrats’ American Rescue Plan, which they masqueraded as a Wuhan Virus relief bill, even though less than 10% of that nearly $2 trillion bill has anything even remotely related to the virus.