The Judge of its own Membership

Ann Coulter offers some salutary advice, complete with direct historical precedent, to GOP leaders struggling to deal with Florida elections plagued by rampant voting irregularities.

Republicans control the state legislature and governor’s office in Florida. They control the U.S. Congress and the presidency. If that’s not enough to prevent two statewide Florida elections from being stolen, the GOP is more useless than I’d already imagined.

Republican weakness is the most powerful weapon in the Democrats’ arsenal.

Here’s a primer for Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan on how to deal with all the Senate and House election “recounts” that keep magically flipping seats to the Democrats.

In 1974, Republican Louis Wyman won his race for U.S. Senate in New Hampshire, beating Democrat John Durkin by 355 votes. Durkin demanded a recount — which went back and forth by a handful of votes until the state’s Ballot Law Commission concluded that Wyman had indeed won.

Wyman was certified the winner by the New Hampshire secretary of state and was on his way to Washington, D.C., when … the Senate refused to seat him. New Hampshire’s certification of Wyman as the winner meant nothing, because, you see, Democrats held a majority in the Senate.

The Senate spent months examining disputed ballots. Unable to come up with any method whereby they could declare the Democrat the winner, the Senate forced New Hampshire to hold another election.

Demoralized Republicans stayed home and, this time, the Democrat won.

Hey, Mitch! Don’t Republicans hold a majority in the Senate?

Republicans used to know how to play hardball. The GOP-controlled Congress did in fact refuse to seat Southern representatives and senators from states that opposed the Reconstruction Amendments.

More recently, remember when GOP establishment types were calling on McConnell not to seat Roy Moore if their smear campaign failed? Side note: Trump should nominate Moore to replace Ginsburg.

In 1984, Democrat Frank McCloskey won a razor-thin re-election to the House from Indiana’s 8th Congressional District. The state held two recounts, both of which the Republican won. The Washington Post reported that there were “no allegations of fraud” in the recount, and 90 percent of ballot disqualifications had been agreed to “by election commissions dominated by Democrats.”

Consequently, Indiana’s secretary of state certified Republican Rick McIntyre the winner.

But the Democratic-controlled House simply refused to seat McIntyre. Instead, the House undertook its own “recount.” You’ll never guess who won!

Don’t Republicans have a majority in the House for six more weeks?

Yep, and it’s six more weeks instead of two more years because the feckless halfwits did something that Democrats never do: They told their base “no”.

In 2008, Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota won his re-election bid against challenger Al Franken by 725 votes. But for several weeks after the election, Democratic precincts kept discovering new votes for Franken — including ballots sitting in cars, as well as a write-in vote for “Frankenstein” — which was counted as a vote for Franken. (Duh.)

These late-discovered ballots eventually put Frankenstein ahead by 312 votes, whereupon he was immediately certified the winner by the George Soros-backed secretary of state.

The U.S. Senate was in Democratic hands, so there was no question but that Majority Leader Harry Reid would seat the cheater, Franken. And that, kids, is how the Democrats got the 60th vote for Obamacare.

Four years later, we found out that more than 1,000 felons — ineligible to vote — had cast ballots in the 2008 Minnesota election. (To state the obvious, felons support Democrats by about 10-1.)

In the middle of the Democrats’ open theft of the Indiana seat in 1984, The New York Times pompously reminded readers of the “basic constitutional principle that Congress is the judge of its own membership and that lawmakers can overrule state laws in making that determination.”

You’ve already caved on Arizona, Mitch. How about taking a page from the Democrats’ playbook? You don’t have to go full Daley Machine. Democrats steal elections they actually lost. Republicans just want you to hang on to the seats they won.

Imagine, for a moment, what the political scene would look like if the GOP actually represented its constituents’ will. You might see Governor Scott arresting every Broward County election official and ordering his secretary of state to certify the election day vote tally. Failing that, you’d see Mitch McConnell declaring Dem beneficiaries of obvious voter fraud illegitimate and refusing to seat them.

The consequences of failing to thwart and punish such broad and deep election stealing are severe. If Democrats can get away with voter fraud this brazen, the US political process will have officially descended to third world levels. A sizable number of Americans already dismiss elections as kabuki theater. If electoral shenanigans that would make Joe Kennedy blush are allowed to stand, the last embers of faith in the system will die, the government will lose the Mandate of Heaven, and all bets will be off.

Republicans used the Congressional ban hammer to rebuild the Union after the first Civil War. They may well be looking at round 2 unless they find the backbone to use it again.