For the last two years, Democrats who previously raised questions about election results ― and in some cases actually formally objected to the certification of electoral votes in presidential elections ― have told us that doing such things threatens our democracy and undermines our sacred institutions.
Oddly enough, many of those same Democrats just voted to install an election denier as their Minority Leader in the U.S. House of Representatives when the new session of Congress convenes in January 2023.
Last month, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced she would not be seeking a leadership position after nearly two decades of being in the top spot. Behind the scenes, she was said to be lobbying hard for her replacement to be Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), who is viewed in elite Beltway circles as a bridge builder of sorts though his record clearly shows a consistent pattern of voting with Pelosi 100% of the time and with radical self-described Democratic Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) 96% of the time, according to analyses by ProPublica.
By the Democrats’ own definition, Jeffries is an election denier. He repeatedly cast doubt on the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s presidency between 2017 and 2021.
“The more we learn about the 2016 election the more ILLEGITIMATE it becomes,” Jeffries wrote in a 2018 tweet. “America deserves to know whether we have a FAKE president in the oval office.”
In 2017, Jeffries said during an interview that “there is a cloud of illegitimacy around the election of Donald Trump” because “the fake news industry interfered with his election.”
“Is the North Carolina congressional seat the only one stolen by rogue Republican operatives?” Jeffries tweeted in 2018 regarding the disputed 9th Congressional District race between Republican Mark Harris and Democrat Dan McCready, insinuating without evidence the election fraud found there was part of a broader conspiracy, perhaps nationwide. “We may need a comprehensive criminal investigation to figure that out.”
“Republicans hijacked the Judiciary by stealing two Supreme Court seats,” Jeffries wrote of the conservative majority on the Supreme Court in 2021. “And now they want us to respect illegitimate decisions from these [conservative Justices]? Get lost.”
Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) made sure to point all of the hypocrisy out very publicly last week after House Democrats elected Jeffries.
“Many of the same individuals and institutions on the political left who spent the years 2017 through 2020 yelling about the importance of norms and institutions have themselves not hesitated to undermine our institutions when they’re unhappy with a given outcome,” McConnell reminded people. “For example, the newly-elected incoming leader of the House Democrats is a past election denier who baselessly said the 2016 election was ‘illegitimate’ and suggested that we had a ‘fake’ president. He has also mounted reckless attacks on our independent judiciary and said that Justices he didn’t like have, ‘zero legitimacy.’”
“Unfortunately, when it comes to attacking our independent judiciary, the Democrats’ new leader isn’t an outlier, he’s a representative sample,” McConnell went on to correctly point out.
That Democrats have conveniently done an about-face on election denialism and undermining institutions shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone, though, seeing as failed 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has been saying for six years now that she was the real winner and that Trump was “illegitimate.”
After the 2016 election, Clinton went so far as to “instruct her team to lean into the Russia collusion hoax she bought and paid for,” Federalist editor-in-chief Mollie Hemingway noted. “She tried to force electors to hear her disinfo operation prior to their vote.”
Stacey Abrams, a Democrat media darling, has to this day never conceded she lost the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race, saying it was “stolen” from her and the people of the state.
Because you see, election denialism is totally okay, as long as Democrats are the ones doing it.
North Carolina native Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym Sister Toldjah and is a media analyst and regular contributor to RedState and Legal Insurrection.