Two pieces, with links to the full columns embedded in the headlines.
Speaker Pelosi would be wrong to steal an Iowa seat (Dec. 21): House Speaker Nancy Pelosi should do one more thing for political peace before Congress recesses for Christmas. Namely, she should pledge not to steal a House seat for a Democratic candidate from Iowa…. So far, she has not accepted Iowa’s certification of the victory of Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks over Democrat Rita Hart in that state’s 2nd Congressional District. Indeed, she insists that the election result there is “an issue for the House Administration Committee.”
Constitutionally, Pelosi possesses the raw power to throw out the voter’s decision. But ethically speaking, she has no acceptable cause for doing so.
Yes, the election in Iowa was agonizingly close. With some 394,000 ballots cast, Miller-Meeks won by just six votes….
[Update since this was written: Pelosi split the baby. She “provisionally seated” the Republican victor, but said she would still allow an investigation that could result in the Democrat being permanently seated after all.]
Republicans should blame Trump for the Georgia losses (Jan. 6): It took Donald Trump to turn Georgia into a Democratic state. It took Trump to turn suburban voters away from Republicans. It took Trump to energize the leftist coalition against Republicans in a way the Left has never been energized before. It took Trump to discourage Republican-leaning citizens actively from voting, by pushing the idea (in effect) that voting was useless because everything was rigged against them anyway. It took Trump to show that he is the biggest loser, and to drag down with him the party he hijacked in 2015-2016.
It took Trump the grifter to raise money for a fruitless, counterconstitutional challenge to his own election loss, when that money could better have been used by Georgia Republicans David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler. It took Trump to suck up all the oxygen from Perdue and Loeffler….
