With Democrats in a bind as midterms approach, the worst of them have turned to sleazy tin-pot-dictator measures to disqualify popular Republicans from the ballot itself, knowing they can't win otherwise.

They've already put Georgia's popular Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene in the dock (See Andrea Widburg's thoughts on that here).  Now it turns out they were also active in Arizona, seeking to prevent Reps. Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar, as well as Republican state rep. Mark Finchem, who is running for secretary of state, in charge of counting elections, from putting their names on the ballot. 

In their case, though, a state judge called bee ess and shut the whole kabuki down.

According to Newsweek:

A judge in Arizona rejected an effort to prevent GOP Representatives Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar from 2022 midterm election ballots on Friday, asserting that the "plaintiffs have no private right of action" to disqualify the Republicans over their actions related to the January 6, 2021, attack against the U.S. Capitol.

A lawsuit was filed against Biggs, Gosar and GOP state Representative Mark Finchem, contending that the three Arizona Republicans should not be allowed to appear on the ballot — alleging they are not permitted to hold office due to their participation in an "insurrection." Many Democrats and some Republicans have called the attack by former President Donald Trump's supporters against the U.S. Capitol an "insurrection."

He didn't want to waste time on this crap.  And his legal reasoning, that "plaintiffs have no private right of action" to disqualify others from running, was as clear as day.  After all, if they did have such a right, anyone could shut down other candidates over whatever spurious concern bothered them or whatever unproven crime they could cook up, and then no one could run at all.  That would be some fine democracy for us, wouldn't it? 

Seeking to disqualify candidates is hardly new.  Barack Obama got his political start using this technique, invalidating signatures of rivals in 1996 to knock them off the ballot, leaving himself as the only viable candidate as he won his first statehouse seat in Illinois.  What is new, however, is that instead of signatures, leftist operatives are employing vague charges of "insurrection" and "January 6" in a new and desperate effort to halt the coming red wave, which is exactly what Venezuela's tropical Marxist dictators, Hugo Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro, once did.  They too howled about "insurrection" and "unrest" to knock their rivals off the ballots.  It worked great for them — and the result is "Venezuela," where no one has any meaningful vote at all.  I wrote about that here.

Now, correlation is not causation, but sometimes correlations are pretty significant when one can't see all the sharks under the surface.  The Jan. 6 riot was all about protests over election fraud in the 2020 election.  State after state has taken measures to clean up elections in the wake of that fiasco, and all of those measures have been met with protests by Democrats, who are the accused fraudsters.  When we think about dictators going to any means necessary to ensure their permanent power, including knocking rivals off the ballot on junk "insurrection" grounds, it's worth noting that sure enough, Venezuela is also wracked by election fraud.  We started seeing it in 2004 with the recall referendum on Hugo Chávez, but it's snowballed since.  It's gotten so bad that the U.S. refuses to recognize Maduro as the legitimate Venezuelan president.  It's gotten so awful that even the Smartmatic voting machine company pulled out of the country because elections had grown so dirty.  It's gotten so bad that even the normal international election observers who watch such things, from the Carter Center and the European Union, won't go there.

Disqualified candidates and fraudulent elections have an amazing tendency to turn up together. 

So now we have this judicial voice of sanity, who prudently said he was not commenting on the merits of the leftists' charges against Biggs and Gosar, but narrowly laying down the law that private citizens have no business telling candidates who can and cannot run, because that's the voters' job.  Don't like the candidate, don't vote for him.  But don't shut down other people's choices just because you don't like him. 

That's what this is ultimately about: whether or not a voter can choose whom he wants to vote for.  The voters love Biggs and Gosar.  Democrats who are trying to shut them down are ultimately trying to shut down their voters, which is very much within the Chavista playbook.  One hopes the crisp legal reasoning of this Arizona judge rings out to the other trial on this that is going on in Georgia.

Image: Pixnio, CC0.