Jumping back into the political fray three days before a contentious political battle in a joint session of Congress Jan. 6 to certify the Electoral College victory for 76-year-old President-elect Joe Biden, 50-year-old former House Speaker Paul Ryan slammed Republicans for trying to fight the election results. Ryan called the any GOP challenge “anti-democratic and anti-conservative,” not something that sits well with backers of 74-year-old President Donald Trump that claim widespread election fraud in the Nov. 3 election. Ryan ignore the universal mail-n ballots that change the dynamics of the 2020 election, making it next-to-impossible to verify the results. Trump and his legal team had no success trying to prove election fraud in federal courts, something, as Ryan knows, no fault of Trump’s legal team. Proving that large numbers of mail-in ballots were invalid in battleground states was near impossible.
Trump’s case of widespread election fraud was always going to be difficult to prove, a point made by Constitutional law professor John Eastman in his brief on behalf of the State of Texas to the U.S. Supreme Court. While the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, Eastman made the emphatic point that universal mail-in ballots made proving election fraud impossible. For the president’s followers in the House and Senate, they have every right to object to the manner in which the 2020 election was conducted. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Nov. 10 that mail-in ballots could prevent Republicans from winning another election. “If we don’t do something about voting by mail, we are going to lose the ability to elect a Republican in this country,” Graham said. Ryan chimes in on GOP plans to object to the Electoral College vote Jan. 6, stating emphatically they got no satisfaction in federal courts.
Ryan makes the same point a Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Ut.), Trump’s biggest GOP critic in the Senate, insisting that it’s against the American Way to challenge an election. Romney has served as the Democrats best friend for years against Trump, often appearing on liberal talks shows to get his licks in on the president. No, Ryan throws in his two cents about the expected Jan. 6 fight in the joint session of Congress. “Efforts to reject the votes of the Electoral College and sow doubt about Joe Biden’s victory strike at the foundation of our republic,” Ryan said, making the same point as Romney. Ryan’s argument assumes a normal election where vast majorities of voters went to the polls and not mailed universal ballots. Ryan has no clue what happened, only making a simplistic statement of what happened on Nov. 3. Trump and his legal team proved that election officials violated their own rules.
Ryan wants to make it look like challenging the results are “anti-democratic and anti conservative,” which can’t be further from the truth. What’s anti-democratic about objecting to the manner in which battleground state conducted their elections, making up new rules as they go for collecting-and-counting ballots. “It is difficult to conceive of a more anti-democratic and anti-conservative act that a federal intervention to overturn the results of state-certified elections and disenfranchise millions of Americans . . “ Ryan wrote. But Ryan’s not taking into account the irregular manner in which ballots were collected-and-counted in the Nov. 3 election. Late on Election Night, Trump was winning the election in all battleground states. Somehow the voting stopped, then, the next morning, Biden was winning the election. Once election patterns are established, they don’t dramatically change unless something odd happened.
No one knows, especially Ryran, what happened in the wee-hours of Nov. 4, when election officials in battlegrounds states said they would stop counting while Trump was clearly winning the election. “The fact that this effort will fail does not mean it will not do significant damage to American democracy,” Ryan insists, not saying a word of how universal mail-in ballots made it impossible to validate the election results. Ryan and Romney are the perfect ones for Democrats to cite, using Republicans to indict their own Party before Congress meets Jan. 6 in joint session. How does letting members of the House and Senate speak on Nov. 6 undermine U.S. democracy or conservatism? Ryan wants, like most Democrats, to paper over what happened in the 2020 vote with universal mail-in ballots making it difficult for election officials to know which ballots to count and which to reject.
Ryan and Romney make the same arguments as Democrats, insisting that Trump lost in the federal courts. “The Trump campaign had ample opportunity to challenge election results, and those efforts failed from a lack of evidence. The legal process was exhausted, and the results were decisively confirmed,” Ryan wrote. But as Eastman said in his brief for Texas to the Supreme Court, universal mail-in ballots change the legitimate way to collect-and-count ballots, something Ryan dismisses. “The Department of Justice, too, found no basis for overturning the results . . .” Ryan wrote, referring to former Atty. Gen. William Barr who said Dec, 1 he sees nothing that would change the results. Whether or not House and Senate Republicans lose their bid to object to the 2020 election results does nothing to harm U.S. democracy. It gives the House and Senate a chance to voce their opinions.
