Illinois Democrats Change Rules To Cement Incumbent Power In Actual Attack On Democracy
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If there’s any doubt left that Democrats are the actual threat to the republic, take a look at what Illinois’ “Democracy” just did.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a deep-pocketed leftist with a supermajority of Democrats in the Illinois Legislature, quickly signed an election bill last week that quashes the practice of slating, in which local party organizations name legislative candidates to general election ballots where the party was unable to recruit a primary candidate. Before Pritzker affixed his John Hancock to the bill, partys could appoint candidates to run up to 75 days after the primary.
Pritzker and his power-hungry Democrats could have waited to change the law until after the current election cycle. Instead, they decided to do it midstream, a slimy move that bolsters Democrats’ hold on power in the Land of Lincoln.
Senate GOP leader John Curran, according to the Chicago Tribune, blasted Democrats for “chang[ing] the rules halfway through an election cycle to stack the deck for their favored incumbent candidates.” The bill, he said, exemplified “how you steal an election.”
As the Tribune reported:
Republicans accused Democrats of using the appointment ban in an effort to help protect some incumbents in November, most notably one of the few downstate House Democrats, state Rep. Katie Stuart of Edwardsville.
Following House passage of the bill on Wednesday, Stuart’s slated Republican challenger in the fall, Jay Keeven, quickly gathered required petition signatures and filed with the State Board of Elections to appear on the November ballot.
A Republican from Northbrook, Daniel Behr, filed with the State Board of Elections to run as a challenger to Democratic state Rep. Tracy Katz Muhl at 8:41 a.m. on Friday. But that was six minutes after Pritzker’s signing of the measure preventing his candidacy was filed and recorded with the Illinois secretary of state’s office.
A Smorgasbord of Hypocrisy
Pritzker defended the bill, insisting it ensures “that we don’t have backroom deals to put people on the ballot and run as a result of some small group of people in a smoke-filled room making the choice.”
The hypocrisy in that statement overflows more than the Golden Corral buffet that Pritzker apparently can’t quit. Even more alluring than the dessert tray: the lure of perpetual consolidated power.
Pritzker’s governing buddy to the north, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, has long whined that Republicans who dominate the state legislature remain in power thanks to what a fellow Wisconsin Democrat called “rigged” district maps. His leftist friends have filed lawsuit after lawsuit to, as they would have you believe, protect democracy from power-crazed Republicans.
Now Evers and his fellow Democrats have a left-led Wisconsin Supreme Court which has, as the tie-breaking leftist on the court promised on the campaign trail, thrown out the old maps. Now by drawing new maps, Wisconsin Democrats are attempting to do what Illinois Democrats have done: guarantee their party’s power.
It’s what they do.
Pritzker’s latest prick to the “democracy” balloon is predictable for a deep blue state where a county judge attempted to remove former President Donald Trump, the GOP’s candidate for president, from Illinois’ primary ballot. And they would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for that meddling U.S. Constitution.
Supermajority Democrats pushed through at lightning speed an amendment to an unrelated bill that ultimately delivered the kind of democracy that Illinois leftists prefer. Minority Republicans could only muster a “present” vote before walking out without a debate, Capitol News Illinois reported.
“We don’t understand the sense of urgency right now, unless the goal – the end goal – is to stifle the democratic process through the changes on slating candidates,” House Minority Leader Tony McCombie said during a stairwell news conference, according to the publication.
Of course that’s the goal. The projection-prone left, which is running on hatred for Donald Trump and the fearmongering claim that Trump and his supporters are destroying democracy, is in fact feverishly working to destroy American representative democracy. Illinois’ quick change to the slating rules is just one of myriad examples.
This is what the left’s “democracy” looks like.
Even the leftist-associated Election Law Blog published an observation from Derek Muller over the weekend, noting that the “rug has been yanked out from under” candidates who were preparing to be appointed to challenge incumbents.
Muller had an interesting observation about the accomplice media aiding and abetting the Democratic Party’s phony “democracy under attack” narrative. He waited a couple of days, he said, to see how media outlets would cover the story. Crickets.
After all, we are in an era where there is an explosion in journalists who identify as covering the “democracy beat” or looking for a “democracy angle” in stories. I wondered how the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Associated Press, or CNN might cover these stories. After all, they are quite attuned to what local county officials in Nevada or Arizona are doing with respect to counting ballots, or every twist and turn of an election bill in Georgia. How about this? As far as I can tell, there hasn’t been any coverage in these or many other major media outlets of America’s sixth-largest state changing the rules of an election in the middle of the campaign to deprive hundreds of thousands of voters of the opportunity to choose a candidate of their preference, and as a number of candidates who behaved in a way relying on existing laws have lost their opportunity to seek office. But there is still time for coverage, of course, particularly as I imagine litigation is coming.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.