Have the Democrats Fully Abandoned the Ideals of Democracy?

A couple of days ago, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) publicly slammed Amazon for using laws that senators such as herself pass. She went a step further than usual, suggesting that criticism of her is reason enough to break up large companies.

I didn’t write the loopholes you exploit, @amazon – your armies of lawyers and lobbyists did. But you bet I’ll fight to make you pay your fair share. And fight your union-busting. And fight to break up Big Tech so you’re not powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets. https://t.co/3vCAI93MST

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) March 26, 2021

There’s much to dislike in this tweet. Warren is implying that she’s only responding to the “heckle” because Amazon is big and powerful. So much for being the party of the little guy…

If you or I “heckle” — criticize — Sen. Warren, we will not gain her attention.

Notice Warren’s train of thought. Warren suggests she will “fight to break up Big Tech so you’re not powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets.”

Literally anyone can “heckle” senators for any reason or no reason, with “snotty” tweets or tweets that aren’t the least bit snotty. That’s how this country is supposed to be. Warren is our employee, not our master.

In this case, Amazon’s tweet isn’t even particularly “snotty.” It’s factual pushback. Warren and her colleagues write the laws Amazon and everyone else abides by. If Warren doesn’t like those laws, she can work with her colleagues to change them. But it’s so much easier just to tweet. Amazon, due to its immense value and the power that comes with that, can and does have an outsized say in how those laws are written. But that’s not Warren’s whole argument. She mentions that, but her argument is that Amazon should be broken up so it can’t talk back to her.

That’s not how any of this is supposed to work. Warren is blatantly and proudly authoritarian.

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Amazon is merely speaking truth to power. Democrats encourage that when they’re out of power. When they’re in power? See above. Warren wants to make sure Amazon — and you and me and anyone else who challenges them — can’t do that anymore. She hasn’t seen fit to delete that tweet. It does reflect her current thinking, and probably that of her fans as well. You can see in the replies some variations on the theme that criticizing Warren’s tweet amounts to defending corporations, not the principle of free speech.

Sometimes, corporations are right and politicians are wrong.

There are now at least two, and probably more, serious efforts from the Democrats to silence forever any dissent against them and their policies in this country. The first is the drive to eliminate the Senate filibuster.

The filibuster is a longstanding, though occasionally modified, tradition in the Senate by which the minority can still have a say in policy. It’s intended as a check for slowing down ideas before they become the law of the land. It’s what makes the Senate the Senate, the so-called “world’s greatest deliberative body.” It’s a hand-brake on those in power. It forces the majority to work with and attempt to persuade the minority that its policies benefit the whole country, not just a narrow or partisan slice of it.

But many Democrats and apparently the entire mainstream media want to do away with it, or “reform” it so that it loses all meaning.

This might be easier to understand if the Democrats had 59 seats, a massive majority in the House, and had also won at the state level. But none of that is true. The Senate is split 50-50, the Democrats’ House majority narrowed in 2020, and they lost ground at the state level again. Neither party has a clear majority mandate in this divided country. Republicans will control more redistricting processes at the state level than Democrats, which will affect the House races in 2022, which has the Democrats acting fast to make sure elections are for all intents and purposes irrelevant.

The Democrats are taking this moment to apply immense pressure on two moderate Democrat senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, to vote to do away with the filibuster. They’re engaged not in a campaign of persuasion that this is a good idea for the country, but in a campaign of racism and smears. They’re dishonestly describing the filibuster as a relic of the Jim Crow era. Jim Crow laws were Democratic Party policy for nearly a century, not just in the South but in the Woodrow Wilson White House and carried forward by their hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, facts for which that party is never made to answer. Cancel culture is somehow missing a very large and inviting target.

The filibuster as a term dates back to the 1700s. It made its earliest appearance in the American political context around 1837. Jim Crow — a racist Democrat policy — appeared in the 1870s in reaction to Republican efforts to reconstruct the Confederate states into the union and desegregate the nation.

The filibuster predates Jim Crow by decades. Democrats in power know this; they’re never called out on it. Media never bring it up. Our schools are too busy teaching that America is irredeemably racist to note the Democrats’ historic roles in dividing the country and fostering racism.

Calling everything racist now is the Democrats’ trademark move. Here’s Sen. Warren calling fossil fuels “racist.” Here’s Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg calling infrastructure “racist.” That’s not persuasion, it’s demagoguery.

As recently as 2005, then-Sen. Joe Biden argued that the filibuster was necessary and should stand.

“It is not only a bad idea, it upsets the constitutional design and it disservices the country,” the speech reads. “No longer would the Senate be that ‘different kind of legislative body’ that the Founders intended. No longer would the Senate be the ‘saucer’ to cool the passions of the immediate majority.”

While Biden said that “it is my personal belief that the Senate should be more judicious in the use of the filibuster,” he added that “it should come as no surprise that in periods where the electorate is split very evenly, as it is now, the filibustering of nominations was used extensively.” Biden went on to cite numerous historical examples to illustrate the point.

He added that “the Senate ought not act rashly by changing its rules to satisfy a strong-willed majority acting in the heat of the moment.”

“Proponents of the ‘nuclear option’ argue that their proposal is simply the latest iteration of a growing trend towards majoritarianism in the Senate. God save us from that fate, if it is true,” he stated. “. . . Put simply, the ‘nuclear option’ changes the rules midstream. Once the Senate starts changing the rules outside of its own rules, which is what the nuclear option does, there is nothing to stop a temporary majority from doing so whenever a particular rule would pose an obstacle.”

“Adopting the ‘nuclear option’ would change this fundamental understanding and unbroken practice of what the Senate is all about,” Biden continued. “Senators would start thinking about changing other rules when they became “inconvenient.” Instead of two-thirds of the vote to change a rule, you’d now have precedent that it only takes a bare majority. Altering Senate rules to help in one political fight or another could become standard operating procedure, which, in my view, would be disastrous.”

During his press conference Thursday, Biden lied about the filibuster and suggested it’s time to do away with it. This would transform the Senate and remove any brakes on any majority’s power. A thin majority as the Democrats have now could pass anything it wants, forcing Americans to defend our fundamental rights in courts, which the Democrats intend to pack with leftists. Check and checkmate.

What happened since Biden spoke in favor of the filibuster 2005? Republicans were in charge at the time, and Democrats were using the filibuster to keep Republican nominees off the federal bench. One of those, Miguel Estrada, was a victim of Democrats’ blatant racism — they openly fought to keep him off the bench because he is Latino, and they feared the political ramifications of the nation seeing Republicans elevate conservative Latinos to power. Estrada’s nomination went into limbo and he eventually withdrew. Democrat racists won.

The second anti-democratic measure the Democrats are pushing is HR1, the so-called “For the People Act.” Democrats have to do away with the filibuster to get this bill passed through the Senate. HR1 is not a “voting rights” bill as the Democrats are saying. This bill has already passed the House where Pelosi rules. It would nationalize election law, which is blatantly unconstitutional, codifying for all time all the measures they took to fundamentally alter election laws under the guise of COVID in 2020. Several judges have since ruled that those last-minute changes were illegal because they did not go through state legislatures as the law requires. HR1 would make those federal law and take states out of governing elections within their borders. This is, among other things, a severe watering down of state authority, and an end-run around states’ ability to check Washington. Christian Adams has written that HR1 “nullifies the Founders’ constitutional bargain.”

States were given power to run their own elections for a reason. Decentralization of control over elections promotes individual liberty. No central authority can interfere and impose bad ideas and malevolent actions over states.

Power, the Founders believed, should be kept close to people.

The advocates of H.R. 1 don’t want power close to the people. They want it in Washington, D.C.

The advocates of H.R. 1 seek to undo the constitutional arrangement of 1787 where states have power over their elections. Nullifying the constitutional power of states over their own elections would be destabilizing. Some of the most precarious moments in our history came when actors sought to undo the constitutional arrangement.

We’re at one of those moments now, with a 50-50 country trending populist while the Democrats are trending hard statist, and the media and many institutions are working overtime to undermine Americans’ faith in our country through such odious means as the 1619 Project.

The Democrats have abandoned persuasion. They’re not interested in discussing issues and coming to some kind of consensus on anything.

If they get these two items done, they’ll move swiftly to change the very nature of our republic. They’ll pack the courts with leftist judges, they’ll pack the Supreme Court with leftist justices, they’ll move hard against the First and Second amendments to crush dissent and the right to self-defense. That’s not a supposition. It’s the agenda they’re openly stating. Warren’s tweet at Amazon is a warning of how they think and what they will do when they know there are no remaining brakes on their power.

This is a reaction to the lessons they learned from the Obamacare experience in 2010 when Americans rose up in town halls, formed TEA parties, took Congress back, and broke Democrat power at the state level in response to Democrat heavy-handedness and partisanship. They’re also angered that President Trump was able to remake the judiciary, which thwarts Democrats’ ambitions to fundamentally and permanently disrupt the republic. They have Sen. Harry Reid’s tinkering with the filibuster to thank for that, by the way.

Today’s Democrats care most not about making Americans’ lives better or even persuading us that their policies are beneficial or superior to any alternatives. They care most about making sure Americans can never ever effectively resist them again.