February 24, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) – We’re about a month into America’s new normal, so it’s time to take stock: Joe Biden is now President of the United States. His party controls both chambers of Congress. It’s the nightmare scenario conservatives have feared for years, and now it’s upon us. So what happens next?
To recap: the danger is not merely that Democrats have already started reversing a lot of pro-life, pro-freedom, policies via executive orders, or even that they may enact hideous laws such as Roe v. Wade codification or the Equality Act. No, the real danger is that they now have the opportunity to pursue several policies – mass amnesty, court-packing, and DC/Puerto Rico statehood chief among them – that would rig all future national elections in their favor, effectively transforming America into a one-party regime where defending life, liberty, and conscience is virtually impossible.
The question, then, turns now to whether Democrats will be able to use this opportunity to maximum effect, and what can be done to prevent them from doing so.
The first silver lining is that, with a 50-50 Senate in which Democrats will need Vice President Kamala Harris to break all ties, Biden’s allies don’t have the votes to simply ram through whatever they want. Most legislation will still be subject to the 60-vote filibuster threshold. For the time being, at least, it’s reassuring that Democrat Sens. Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema have said they won’t go along with their party’s most extreme desires. But there’s no telling whether party leadership will be able to exert enough pressure on them in the two years between now and the next midterm elections to get them to fall in line.
So conservatives’ first order of business is relatively simple: aggressive lobbying campaigns to keep in line any liberal Republican even thinking about crossing over to vote with Democrats, along with what vanishingly few “moderate” Democrats remain.
The other silver lining is the relative narrowness of Democrats’ two-year window of opportunity to do their worst. While a lot of bad can happen in that time, legislating with such thin margins is not easy – recall that the only major legislation Barack Obama got, ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank, required a 56-42 Senate and a 257-178 House on his side (in addition to the current 50-50 Senate, the current 222-211 House is “the narrowest margin of Democratic control since the 1940s,” the Los Angeles Times notes).
The second order of business, then, is pressuring Senate Republicans to do everything in their power to delay and obstruct Democrats at every opportunity (along with getting GOP-controlled states to follow Texas’s lead and tie up as much of Biden’s agenda in court as they can), to essentially buy America time until the Senate can be retaken in two years.
Which brings us to the biggest question of all: whether Republicans have what it takes to win in 2022, or whether the combination of self-inflicted wounds and unchecked election fraud will permanently relegate them to minority-party status.
At a time when so many conservative voters feel more let down by the Republican Party than ever, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell did exactly the wrong thing by promoting the Swamp lie that Trump “provoked” the January 6 riot, rather than reassuring the base that the GOP stands with them – which will only further convince jaded voters that the GOP isn’t worth turning out for.
There is a silver lining to that, however: Republicans who backed impeachment have given conservative primary challengers a powerful issue to use against them. It’s up to conservative institutions to do all they can to help recruit and support these challengers, both for the quality of our congressional representation and to restore the base’s faith in that representation.
Republicans who haven’t sided with the swamp need to heed Mollie Hemingway’s advice: “GOP voters aren't looking for senators who are merely against convicting the former president. That's easy. On the merits, on the Constitutional grounds, etc. They are looking for much more – people who will fight HARD against the left-wing mobs and their falsehoods.”
Finally, none of the above will matter if we don’t take away Democrats’ ability to steal elections. Across the country, but especially in the half-dozen states where serious questions remain as to the legitimacy of Biden’s victory, Republican lawmakers and conservative activists need to make clean elections their top priority. What we need includes, but is by no means limited to:
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Investigation and prosecution of all credible, outstanding allegations of fraud
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Abolition of voting by mail without a clear need to do so (such as military service); require voters to provide clear proof of such a need
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An end to the mailing of absentee ballots to any voter that has not specifically requested one
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Overhaul of the signature-verification standards for remaining absentee ballots
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Mandatory photo identification for in-person voting
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An end to same-day voter registration for in-person voting
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A ban on the counting of ballots that lack a postmark confirming they were mailed prior to the legal deadline
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Stronger protections for partisan poll watchers’ equal access to observe voting and counting
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Frequent reviews to purge nonresidents, noncitizens, ineligible criminal convicts, and the deceased from voter rolls
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Full audits of voting machines, vote collecting, and counting procedures in all of the tainted jurisdictions
This needs to be the top priority of every conservative issue group with a state lobbying program, regardless of whether election integrity falls within a group’s traditional scope. Whatever one’s issue may be – abortion, gun rights, immigration, school choice, or anything else – safeguarding the ability to elect like-minded officeholders is an absolutely essential prerequisite to pursuing any cause.
That’s why I would go so far as to urge organizations active in the relevant states to suspend their normal issue programs for the sake of forming a massive coalition to devote their influence exclusively to cleaning up election laws. Pro-life laws can’t be enacted anyway if we don’t first secure the ability to elect enough pro-life lawmakers to pass them.
This is, hands-down, the biggest political challenge of our lives. It will require all of us to not just work harder but think more creatively and risk more confrontation – both inside and outside the movement – than ever before. Are we up to it?
