Rigging The Game In Pennsylvania - The Establishment Moves To Crush The Power Of The Patriot Movement
If you are a member of the GOP establishment and you are paying attention, Liz Cheney’s defeat in Wyoming ought to be a big wake-up call. She was not just defeated. She was vaporized. Her status as a member of a political “dynasty” counted for nothing.
The base of the Republican Party is solidly behind an America First Agenda, and Donald Trump is the standard bearer for that party. He may or may not run for President in 2024. It doesn’t matter. Whoever is the nominee for the GOP in 2024 will be someone who stands for the full MAGA agenda. There will be no turning back. This is the new reality.
Unfortunately, though, in many places, the establishment continues to hang on and look for ways to avoid facing reality. In some cases, it just indulges a willful ignorance. At a recent meeting of a GOP county central committee meeting in Pennsylvania, the chair of the committee professed ignorance of the film “2000 Mules” and indicated she had never heard of it.
All around her the base of the party is crowding fire halls and churches to watch the film and rage about electoral theft. In the chairperson’s world election theft is a non-issue. Forget 2024. For her, we are still in the 1980s, and Reagan is still in office.
During a recent meeting with a senior GOP legislator in Pennsylvania, a delegation from the Pennsylvania Patriot Coalition pushing for a return to in-person voting was subjected to a long monologue by the legislator in which he equated Patriot concerns about election theft with Democratic whining after Trump won in 2016. In his words, they were both “bullshit.”
On a more macro level, though, the establishment is not content to just ignore the concerns of the base. It wants to change the rules of the game. If you can’t convince the members of the party to side with you, just import new members.
Participation in primary elections in Pennsylvania is limited to party members. If you want to vote in the Democratic or Republican primaries you need to be a member of one of those two parties. Perhaps not for long, though. The state legislature is conducting hearings right now on a bill, which would allow independents to vote in party primaries.
That bill is sponsored by Delaware County Rep. Chris Quinn, a Republican.
Quinn is apparently unconcerned that the Pennsylvania legislature has done nothing to fix any of the issues that manifested themselves during the 2020 election. He seems just fine with the state getting ready to run the 2022 election exactly the way it did two years ago. Quinn has no time for addressing the concerns of the base of his own party. He is hyper-focused on ‘bipartisanship and inclusion’.
“Independents and unaffiliated voters are the fastest growing segment of the electorate,” noted Quinn. “As taxpayers, they fund our elections, but our law excludes them from one-half of the electoral process. That’s fundamentally unfair.”
Quinn may try to couch his legislation in terms of fairness. That is window dressing. What he is really about and what the rest of the establishment wants to do is to find a way to change the composition of the electorate so as to negate the growing power of the America First movement.
“Many of us in the Legislature represent districts that are reliably red or blue, Republican or Democrat. That means many of us are effectively elected in the primary. Considering the narrow participation in many primaries, a sizable bloc of legislators only have to worry about the most vocal and extreme elements of their party…. This hinders dialogue, making it difficult to find common ground and build consensus. It also boosts polarization and division which inhibits crafting solutions to the larger challenges facing our Commonwealth…. Our system of government and the policymaking process is improved with greater participation. Open primaries will increase participation and force us to look for common ground on the challenges we face,”
The State Government Committee is chaired by Seth Grove a Republican lawmaker. Grove is on record as saying that the only people he thinks cheated in the 2020 election were Republicans. In the Senate Bob Mensch, a Republican has signed on as a sponsor of the Senate version of the open primary bill.
All of this is happening against the backdrop of the formation of a coalition of over a hundred Patriot groups in Pennsylvania whose central demand is that the state return to in-person voting, end its experiment with mail-in voting and drop boxes and restore integrity to the electoral process. The base is bellowing its outrage at a broken electoral system and demanding to be heard. In response, the establishment is not so much ignoring that demand as it is working to render powerless those voicing it.
Bringing independents into the GOP primary will fundamentally change the process. It will dramatically dilute the power of the Patriot movement, and it will provide establishment GOP lawmakers the ability to ignore Patriot groups and their members and continue to chart a course that lacks substantial support from the members of the party itself.
The career politicians in Harrisburg sense they are losing. They know time is not on their side. They are losing. And, so they are doing the only thing they know how to do.
They are rigging the game.
If you think about it, the people will be given the option to vote for a candidate that will be beat by the opposition. This will lower the integrity, intelligence, and lower ability to make governmental decisions of the winner in any primary. Just look around the country.
Besides, what happened to the people's vote. We live in a commonwealth.