Josh Hammer: Liberal Elites Against Democracy

I remember learning about democracy back in grammar school. We learned about it in the context of the American Revolution: Britain’s King George III may have ruled as a capricious monarch, but the intrepid colonists fought for the then-novel concept of democratic self-government.

A cursory glance at Merriam-Webster is instructive. That venerable dictionary defines “democracy” as “government by the people” or, more elaborately, as “a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.”

Simple enough. But someone ought to remind our nation’s liberal elites and the foot soldier activists of today’s Democratic Party.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a unanimous rebuke of the recent Colorado chicanery that rendered former President Donald Trump ineligible for the state’s GOP presidential primary ballot. That all nine justices agreed with Trump’s core legal argument — state actors cannot strike from the ballot alleged “insurrectionists” absent specific implementing legislation from Congress — is nothing short of remarkable.

For months, liberal pundits and anti-Trump legal “experts” assured us that the 14th Amendment “insurrection clause” argument for Trump’s ballot disqualification was ironclad. Who can forget how, after the Colorado Supreme Court legitimized Trump’s removal in December, one-time conservative judicial stalwart turned Trump Derangement Syndrome patient zero J. Michael Luttig opined that the court’s logic was “masterful,” “brilliant” and “unassailable.” Left-wing cable news outlets platformed countless other guests who ceaselessly pushed the same argument.

In the end, the argument garnered zero votes at the Supreme Court. Even Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson didn’t debase themselves by going along with such a half-baked, anti-democratic ruse. So much for “unassailable” logic!

One of the great ironies of our present age is that democracy’s would-be eponymous outfit, the Democratic Party, has become an enemy of democracy itself. The fact that party activists across numerous states pursued the extraordinary tactic of literally banning their leading opponent from the ballot is emblematic. But the anti-Trump criminal prosecutions and other unsavory lawfare tactics Democrats are also now weaponizing give the game away: Democrats hate democracy and harbor immense disdain for normal Americans’ beliefs.

Put simply, they don’t want to leave the country’s fate in our hands.

Hence, the current bizarre spectacle of Democrats ostentatiously bragging about the need to save “our democracy” while simultaneously pursuing some of the most anti-democratic stratagems in modern American history. Anything, it seems, to prevent the American people themselves from deciding the 2024 election. To the warped Democratic mind, nothing is more “democratic” than preventing the actual demos from having its say. The horror!

An on-air MSNBC panel during the left-wing network’s Super Tuesday coverage was paradigmatic. Analyzing exit polling from Virginia, hosts Rachel Maddow and Jen Psaki could not believe voters ranked immigration as their top issue. “Well, Virginia does have a border with West Virginia,” Maddow quipped, as the others guffawed along with her.

Liberal elites to Americans suffering the myriad consequences of a wide-open southern border: Drop dead.

That’s literally “drop dead,” actually, in the case of Laken Riley, the former nursing student tragically murdered two weeks ago by an illegal alien in Athens, Georgia. (Say her name, liberal media.) That’s literally “drop dead,” as well, for the majority of the 110,000-plus Americans who died of drug overdoses in 2022 — 70% of which were caused by fentanyl and other synthetic opioids trafficked across the border.

The reality is that during Joe Biden’s presidency, which has overseen the most illegal immigration and the most beleaguered southern border in American history, every town is a “border town.” The MSNBC clowns might delude themselves to the contrary, as they retire at night to their gated communities, driven by their chauffeurs. But that reality is still reality.

Those Americans who want their border secure, their communities safe and their wages spared suppression by illegal alien labor are the “rubes” whom liberal elites are so passionate about denying from the democratic process that they will invert democracy itself to do so. Destroy democracy in order to save it — don’t you see?

The good news is that most Americans will not tolerate it. Biden’s polling is in the gutter and the Democrats’ sprawling anti-Trump lawfare apparatus is on life support.

Laugh all the way to a crushing loss in November, ladies. Let’s see who’s laughing then.

To find out more about Josh Hammer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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