Republicans have two choices for how to handle the Resistance’s latest attempt to undo the 2016 election through dramatic means. They can sit there and take it, or they can fight.
The 2000 presidential election day ended without a clear winner between Texas Governor George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore. It all came down to Florida, which was too close to call. State law required close contests to go through a recount, and some counties handled it better than others.
Miami-Dade County was identified by Democrats as a county where Gore could pick up new votes in a recount. Although state law required full recount of the county’s 654,000 ballots, the Democrat-controlled canvassers instead focused on 10,750 ballots that had been rejected for one reason or another or where no clear pick could be identified for president.
Then the canvassers tried to determine “intent” using their own subjective feelings. For instance, if a voter had by and large picked Democrats for other seats, or if a canvasser could claim he saw an indentation where the chad could have been punched out for Gore, they would count that as a Gore vote. They didn’t recount Cuban-American precincts that overwhelmingly went for Bush and where he might pick up new votes.
The situation was bad enough for Republicans, but then the canvassers decided to move the process to a closed room and restricted media access to 25 feet away. Republicans were livid.
Rep. John Sweeney, a Republican congressman from New York, told a staffer to “shut it down” and dozens of Republican activists began causing a ruckus, pounding on the doors and shouting at the canvassers to stop their blatant attempts to push Gore into the lead. (The New York Times was forced to admit that Bush was the winner of the election and would have been named so even if Democrats had won some of their challenges.)
The media were outraged. “Right-Wingers Praise Antics of Bush Thugs,” wrote Joe Conason, calling it a “lawless… white riot” and incitement of a “mob.” President Bush and other leaders were criticized for not speaking against the “disgrace done in their campaign’s name.” What’s worse, Bush and his vice presidential nominee Dick Cheney joked about it at a local hotel. The mob “lent a touch of racial irony” to Republican criticism of Jesse Jackson’s protests in Miami at the same time.
Timothy Noah demanded action against Sweeney, for his role in the “siege of Miami” and “Miami mayhem,” which, he said, was “possibly” against the law. Time’s Tim Padgett wrote of the “Mob Scene in Miami,” calling it a “GOP melee.” He claimed that Americans were horrified to witness the “strong-arm tactics in what was supposed to be a showcase of democracy in action.” He quoted a Democratic chairman saying that the Republicans were using “Brownshirt tactics.”
The media attacks were written, not coincidentally, after the mini-protest was shown to have worked. Within hours, the Democrat-led board admitted that they couldn’t comply with state law by the Sunday deadline and stopped their attempted vote harvesting scheme. Sweeney was later nicknamed “Congressman Kick-Ass” by President George W. Bush.
If all this sounds similar to what some House Republicans did to Rep. Adam Schiff’s star chamber inquisition this week on Capitol Hill, that’s because it is similar. Showing up in mass at the location where Schiff runs his show, they sought access to House records that were denied to them by a Democrat majority intent on keeping the public in the dark, exposing the farce of what the media describe as an impeachment inquiry.
Lay Down or Fight —>
Read the rest from Mollie Hemingway HERE at The Federalist.
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