"Everything about this bill is rotten to the core.  This is a bill as if written in hell by the devil himself."  So says Republican Senator Mike Lee about the Democrats' H.R.1 election reform legislation that promises to make permanent the 2020 election's unprecedented use of mass mail-in balloting — implemented with few voter authentication checks and done in the name of a health emergency — that miraculously placed President Popsicle (because he's cold on the inside and 90% artificial) into the White House.  

Watching Lee fret about the Democrats' planned takeover of elections is a bit like watching a child reading "The Scorpion and the Frog" for the first time.  

"Bad things are going to happen," Lee said during his interview.  

Well, of course bad things are going to happen.  Bad things have already happened.  A lot of bad things. 

When Popsicle achieved the impossible by winning fifteen million more votes than Obama did in 2012 while simultaneously losing most bellwether counties and traditional battleground states, was Senator Lee too preoccupied with chasing phantom "white supremacists" in his party and condemning patriotic grandparents as "domestic terrorists" to look around at all the numerical anomalies surrounding the election and wonder, "Does something about this whole thing smell kinda fishy?"  

Republican voters could smell the fish guts of the last election from Georgia to Arizona.  They had no problem understanding that mass mail-in balloting had introduced so much untraceable fraud and uncertainty into the election process that nothing about it could be trusted.  Polls in November showed that half the country (including 30% of Democrats!) believed that the fix was in to give Popsicle the win.  

That time, not now, was the moment in history for elected Republicans in D.C. to find some resolute principle, set themselves atop it, and stand upright as if with fixed vertebrae.  The war for "election integrity" can't be won by forfeiting its first and most important battle.  The hour to act came and went four months ago.  Instead, Uniparty Republicans mostly followed Lee's fellow Utahan, Senator Romney, in disregarding the election catastrophe before their eyes and scoffing at their own Republican voters who felt robbed naked in broad daylight after watching vote-counters on television discover enough additional Popsicle ballots well past official state deadlines to push the frozen one to victory four days after the election.  

Senate Republicans ignored the stench of fraud.  They insisted on an orderly transition of the presidency because conserving that tradition was evidently more important than conserving ballots for forensic audits.  And then they had the temerity to kick President Trump around like a mangy animal during a second farce impeachment proceeding just because he had the audacity to say out loud what most Republican voters already knew for themselves: that the election was illegitimate.  

Ever the propagandists intent on controlling the narrative, Democrats now insist that questioning the 2020 outcome is part of the "Big Lie" that the election was stolen, a point of view they actually insist on criminalizing should H.R.1 become law.  (Once all the ICE detention facilities are emptied, it only makes sense to fill them back up with unruly Deplorables, I suppose.)  It is an awfully strange "Big Lie," though, if the Democrats' first order of business in the House is to make sure the exact same unlawful rule changes that handed Popsicle victory become set in stone from here on out.  That sounds more like an admission of the "Ugly Truth" that, but for the 2020 election having been radically transformed into a contest of which party could harvest the most ballots, President Trump would still be in the White House today.  

H.R.1 essentially codifies the 2020 contest's mid-election rule changes by instituting provisions for (1) mandatory voter registration nationwide, (2) the restoration of voting rights for convicted felons, (3) the elimination of photo identification requirements, (4) the expansion of mail-in balloting and the use of unsupervised drop boxes that eliminate traditional chain of custody security for individual votes, (5) the counting of votes received in the mail well after Election Day, and (6) legal immunity for illegal aliens caught voting (as well as a host of other changes meant to keep Democrats in power in perpetuity).

As detestable a power-grab as H.R.1 is, it's preposterous that any Republican who has been vouching for the 2020 election and pretending it was conducted on the up-and-up could now turn around with a straight face and act as if the election changes contained within H.R.1 are beyond the pale.  H.R.1 is like an autopsy report for how Democrats killed the last election and installed President Brain Freeze in the White House.  The legislation is nothing more than Democrats' insistence on making legal what they've already accomplished.  

So for Senator Lee now to find H.R.1 a "wildly unconstitutional" usurpation of state sovereignty that will allow revolutionary socialists to "remain in power for many decades to come" sounds a lot like our incredulous frog, stunned and sinking to its death, exclaiming, "My goodness, I just can't believe that venomous scorpion would steal the next election after stealing the last one.  How devastating."

Of course scorpion socialists were going to hold onto and protect their newfound election toy of practically anonymous mail-in voting and turn it into a system for making sure Republicans never win again.  It worked so well in 2020 that they managed to take a presidential candidate with historically low enthusiasm among his base and propel him to an 81-million-vote victory!  If Popsicle can become the most popularly elected president in history without ever knowing where he is or what he's doing at any given time, just think what kind of socialists actually in charge of their faculties can be installed once the "2020 pandemic emergency" model becomes permanent law.  

150 million votes for Kamala in 2024.  

200 million votes for AOC in 2028.  

400 million votes for Xi Jinping in 2032!  Ah, yes, the "Chinese Century," brought to us by mail-in ballots...manufactured in China.  (For the last sentence, I report directly to Camp Gulag.)

It's as President Lincoln warned: "America will never be destroyed from the outside.  If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."  

When the Great Emancipator warned of America's collapse, he wasn't worried about external attacks from Russia and China.  He was worried about a corrupt criminal justice system that targets Americans for political persecution.  He was worried about a Congress dishonorable enough to conspire with intelligence agencies to take down a sitting president with frame-up jobs, smear campaigns, and public innuendo.  He was worried about political operatives capable of permanently undermining Americans' faith in elections.  He was worried about a Supreme Court too cowed into submission by unscrupulous actors or too compromised itself to protect the Constitution and uphold the rule of law.  He was worried about people of good conscience looking the other way as great evils occur.  He was worried about politicians looking out for their partners in crime while the people they represent suffer.  He was worried about what would happen next after a tainted election like the one we saw in 2020.

If Senator Lee didn't realize how dire the situation was until seeing H.R.1 in all its glory, then he has a lot of catching up to do.  For the rest of us, the war against radical socialism has been an all-hands-on-deck affair raging for years.  Better late than never, I guess.  

So, Senator, welcome to the party!

Hat tip to Hilda.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.