Shapiro Has a Major Opportunity In Stopping the Pennsylvania Steal

I’ll admit to a large extent that this column is a direct piggyback on one the estimable David Catron penned Monday here at The American Spectator when he discussed the need for a comprehensive reform of America’s electoral system. This is indubitably true, and Catron’s prime example is doubly so.

Namely, the brazen attempt to steal the Pennsylvania senate seat from David McCormick that the Keystone State’s Democrats have been busily mounting on behalf of the played-out swamp rat Bob Casey, whose political career has otherwise died of voter boredom.

Thus the piggybacking…

How did these Democrats justify ignoring the law and the courts? Bucks County Commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia delivered this stunning assertion: “I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country, and people violate laws anytime they want. So, for me, if I violate this law, it’s because I want a court to pay attention to it.” A properly structured federal election statute would require this woman to be removed from office, pay a substantial fine, and face potential jail time. Ellis-Marseglia is deliberately allowing illegal votes to be counted. This obviously violates her oath of office and effectively disfranchises thousands of legal voters whose ballots she will have rendered meaningless.

Only federal legislation with stiff penalties for noncompliance will stop such people from dismantling democratic norms. Most corrupt officials aren’t as garrulous as Ellis-Marseglia, but they are by no means “rare.” The Heritage Foundation maintains a database listing 1,560 adjudicated cases of election chicanery, more than 1,300 of which produced felony convictions. Many involved election officials engaged in large scale fraud. Republicans can’t afford to be complacent in the wake of 2024. Among the best reform proposals comes from a source that will surprise conservatives. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has urged Congress to pass legislation based on criteria outlined in a statement from his office:

Citizenship verification: Georgia has developed a seamless way to verify citizenship by working closely with the Department of Driver Services. Federal legislation should expand the tools available to states to verify U.S. citizenship of all voters and require this to be done for voters in federal elections.

Photo ID: Citing Georgia’s success with photo ID requirements for all forms of voting, Raffensperger called for a similar standard in federal elections. He pointed to high voter turnout and widespread public support for such measures as evidence of their effectiveness.

Ban Ballot Harvesting Nationwide: To safeguard against vote buying and inducement, Raffensperger proposed a nationwide ban on ballot harvesting, reinforcing the direct relationship between voters and the ballot box.

Quick and Accurate Reporting of Results: All ballots should have to arrive by Election Day except for military and overseas voters, and results should be tabulated and reported quickly and accurately. Those results should then be audited to bolster confidence in election outcomes.

Clean Voter Lists: Modernize the National Voter Registration Act to allow states to clean lists closer to elections as long as high-quality, accurate data is used.

Those elements are an eminently reasonable basis for an election reform plan, and including them in a first-day-of-the-new-Congress bill attached to some must-pass legislation, like a budget continuing resolution or a reconciliation, is a no-brainer for House Speaker Mike Johnson.

I would include the SAVE Act and directing the Census to count citizens for the purpose of Congressional apportionment, as well as to amend/gut the Voting Rights Act so that it no longer mandates affirmative action for black Democrat politicians. When Tim Scott can get elected to the Senate and Byron Donalds, John James, and Burgess Owens can get elected to the House (not to mention others like Mia Love, J.C. Watts, and Will Hurd), and not to mention other statewide officials like Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears, state Attorney Gen. Daniel Cameron, and Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, the rationale for a set number of majority-minority districts in a given state based on its black, Latino or otherwise ethnic population no longer exists.

Put those things together and pass them, on a purely partisan basis if necessary — it’s pretty good politics for the GOP if no Democrats are willing to vote for clean voter rolls, banning non-citizens from voting and voter ID — and you’ll go a long way toward making it very difficult to effect the kind of shenanigans that are going on in Pennsylvania.

And in Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin, where it looks a lot like more successful efforts to steal Senate seats were completed.

But the Casey steal is the biggest reach of all. When you’re openly defying the law and trying to count the votes of the non-registered, you’re very much like the political version of a meth-head soiling himself on a San Francisco street corner, and someone really needs to intervene and get you some help whether you want it or not.

Congress should certainly do this. But in the intervening time before the new members are seated and the 47th president can take office to sign the legislation, a good samaritan should descend on that street corner and offer some tough love.

That good samaritan needs to be Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s governor.

I’ve never believed this stuff some have said about how Shapiro isn’t a full-on Obama Democrat, or how he’s not the usual garden-variety leftist. I think he is that. But I also think Shapiro is at least pragmatic in how he manages his own political career, and that makes him less likely to blindly follow along with his party’s dumber initiatives.

As I’ve written, I don’t wholly discount the possibility that the reason Gov. Tim Walz was the ill-fated vice presidential nominee of the moron Kamala Harris rather than Shapiro was that it was Shapiro’s call rather than Harris’s.

I think Shapiro may well have turned her down, realizing that serving as the number 2 on a doomed presidential ticket makes you Walter Mondale at best and John Edwards at worst, and that, even had she won, it would be 2032 before he could run as the Democrats’ nominee (and after two terms of a Harris presidency, would you even want to be in charge of the wreckage that would have been America, much less carry that stink as the veep).

Maybe I’m giving him too much credit. But bear with me here.

Historical precedent shows that when a political party is dispatched to the wilderness, it will stay there until it’s able to rebrand itself. Take, for example, the GOP under Herbert Hoover’s disastrous leadership. It lost the 1932 election in a massive wipeout to Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Republicans couldn’t recover a foothold in national politics until after World War II when they managed — briefly — to recapture Congress and then to elect Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. Eisenhower was a very different Republican than Hoover.

And the Democrats, having lost twice to Eisenhower running as, essentially, an extension of FDR’s New Dealism (by the time Eisenhower came along the New Deal was the reality both parties were embracing, or at least resigned to), rebranded with the muscular and charismatic liberal idealism of John F. Kennedy. That dispatched a Republican Party that was out of ideas by 1960; the GOP wouldn’t recover until Richard Nixon was able to ride the corruption of JFK’s idealism and its devolution into Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam failure and domestic chaos into a “silent majority” election in 1968.

Nixon’s betrayal of conservatives and unseemly corruption opened the door for a Democrat rebrand under Jimmy Carter, a southern “centrist” whose administration offered little in the way of substantial positive change. That, in turn, opened the door to a GOP rebrand under Ronald Reagan which…I don’t need to describe this to this readership. You already know how successful that was.

Then came yet another rebrand of the Democrats under Bill Clinton. And a funny sort of “rebrand” of the GOP under George W. Bush whose exception might prove the rule, as he offered nothing much different than his father other than that he wasn’t as openly sexually corrupt as Clinton or as nuts as Al Gore.

The Democrat rebrand that followed Bush was quite stark. In Barack Obama, there was a shift away from pointy-headed northeastern liberalism, which had been on offer from Carter through John Kerry albeit in various packages, and toward Marxist/Alinskyite community-organized Chicago scuzzball politics.

And that rebrand trumped Bush Republicanism. Until Donald Trump came along and rebranded the GOP and won at least two out of three elections against the follow-on Obamunists.

I’m running you through all this history to show the unmistakable pattern that dictates that once your party’s identity has been repudiated by the public, you have to come up with a new identity or you’re going to keep losing.

It’s hardly a stretch to see Josh Shapiro as one of the people who’d like to be in charge of that new identity. Shapiro has a lane to presidential victory in 2028, which is to make the public believe he isn’t an Obama Democrat, but rather a Rust Belt version of a Bill Clinton New Democrat, perhaps cleaner and more professional and managerial, less hostile to business interests, and more respectful of the rule of law.

I’m not saying Shapiro actually is these things. I’m saying he might brand himself as them, and in doing so perhaps make himself capable of winning four years from now.

But the attempted steal in Pennsylvania is something of a crucible for him. Because as this goes on, the message it’s sending is that the Democrats are corrupt and power-addicted like the worst of the Third World kleptocrats, which is exactly what the voters rejected on Nov. 5. The toxicity of this can’t really be understated, and that dirt will cover everyone involved.

Especially now that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which is a Democrat-dominated body, has attempted to step in to stop the illegal counting.

This is over. It’s actually too late for any real effort at preserving electoral integrity where Shapiro is concerned. But you know that the efforts on Casey’s behalf will drag on until somebody repudiates them.

Shapiro is the governor of that state. He’s going to get covered with it, too, and when that happens it’s entirely possible that he’ll catch a Republican opponent in 2026 who will make a massive issue out of the governor’s refusal to stop the Casey steal. Does Shapiro really want to have Diane Ellis-Marseglia hung around his neck like an albatross?

Believe me, she makes a pretty convincing albatross. Have you seen her picture?

Or there’s another option, which is to say, essentially, “I’m a loyal Democrat and I want all the legal ballots counted, but fair is fair and there is simply a length to which I will not go,” and to come out against the attempted steal and demand that Casey concede.

Doing that would set off a little earthquake in the party. It would repudiate the Obamunist wing at a time when the public has already done so. It would make Josh Shapiro interesting, and it would also position him to be the leader willing to make hard choices and stand on principle, that his party is casting about for. (READ MORE: It’s the End of the Obama Era in America. Good Riddance.)

You may be reading this and thinking, “Fat chance. Democrats never admit defeat,” and you wouldn’t be wrong. But this isn’t about Democrats. It’s about Josh Shapiro. It’s about his own political future, and it’s about who gets to remake that party.

Bob Casey is done for anyway. This pathetic dead-ender effort isn’t going anywhere. Either Shapiro stands up and delivers the coup de grâce to it, or he’s just another Chicago-style Obamunist due for no better fate than John Kerry, Bob Dole, or Mitt Romney when 2028 comes around. Either way, Dave McCormick, and not Casey, will be seated as a senator from Pennsylvania in January.

Your call, Josh.

UPDATE: Oh, Lord, it’s like he’s listening.

BREAKING: Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro denounces illegal vote-counting to benefit Bob Casey in Senate race

"Any insinuation that our laws can be ignored or do not matter is irresponsible and does damage to faith in our electoral process. The rule of law matters in this… pic.twitter.com/cJmt31nTwB

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) November 19, 2024

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