Newsweek editor Tom Rogers penned an editorial providing his suggestion to protect our elections from … whatever.
Keep in mind that Rogers is among the east coast elitist media mavens who criticizes Republican legislation to safeguard our elections. He claims that we do not suffer from any vote fraud or irregularities. Regardless, he is proposing how HE would protect elections from what he says does not happen. At least when Republicans want to protect the franchise, they do not claim that vote fraud does not exist.
Rogers has an idea … a very dumb idea. Maybe even a dangerous idea if President Biden were to take him seriously. I say Biden, because Rogers wants the President to take action on his own – you know, like he did in Afghanistan.
He wants Biden to form a “commission” – a permanent body of distinguished Americans to oversee our elective process. First of all, MOST commissions are bad ideas. They basically serve as opportunities to appoint political supporters. Some actually pay rather handsomely.
Rogers wants to keep his commission independent of politics. Uh huh! A presidential commission is devoid of politics. That would be like having the Pope create a commission that had nothing to do with religion.
But Rogers does not want Biden to actually appoint the members of the commission – except maybe the co-chairmen. In the interest of keeping the Rogers Commission on Elections out of politics, he would want Biden to appoint former Presidents George Bush and Jimmy Carter to head it up.
Personally, I would not appoint either of those gentlemen. Of course, I would not even have the commission. But Jimmy Carter? They guy is 97 years old. I admire his seeming vitality and wish him well – but he IS 97 years old. This is a guy who said 80 is too old to be President. Then it is arguable that 97 seven is too old to be … almost anything that requires more than an hour of activity each day.
Rogers did say the members would come from the pantheon of people with impeccable integrity and sterling reputations. While Rogers did not propose any other names for his Commission, I had the impression that he was thinking of a lot of elitist east coast establishmentarians like … uh … him.
While he did not get into a lot of detail of what his Commission would do, he gave vague references to combating any effort to corrupt the electoral process – which he has said in the past is not corrupt.
Of course, the Rogers Commission would run smack dab into the Constitutional rights of the states to run their own elections. His would be yet another effort to federalize the electoral process – and put it in the hands of establishment bureaucrats. Yikes! THAT is scary. This goes along with some of the election legislation that Democrats are trying to push through Congress. We just cannot trust the locals to manage their own elections – no matter what the Constitution says.
And what is really scary is what Rogers would have the Commission do if they were unhappy with how the states were handling the elections on their turfs. If the states were to exercise their legal and constitutional right to run local elections – and if they did not comport with the opinion of the Commission – Rogers said the Commission could organize and promote protest across the country – what he called “massive protests.”
Isn’t that ass backwards. To the extend commissions perform any useful service, shouldn’t they be investigating massive protests to see what went wrong and how they can be avoided? Is this any different than President Trump encouraging people to protest the 2020 presidential election?
What bothers me most about Rogers’ idiotic idea is that it just might appeal to Biden and all those left-leaning Progressives. Let us hope that Biden was napping when Rogers was spewing out this nonsense on CNN.
So, there ‘tis