When asked to identify the most powerful force in the universe, Albert Einstein reportedly declared it to be “compound interest.” While I hesitate to disagree with a bona fide genius, the answer to the question thus posed is not compound interest, it is the status quo.
The power wielded over political and legal matters by the status quo will become obvious in the days ahead as the country works its way through the pending and anticipated challenges to the November 3 election results.
Now that the Biden-Harris ticket has been “officially” declared the winner by the mainstream media, social media and the political establishment, it becomes the “status quo.” This fact alone provides those who support the former vice president’s bid to assume the highest office in the land a significant advantage over those who favor President Trump remaining in the office.
Efforts to dislodge the “declared winner” face Herculean challenges.
It often has been said that just as insurance companies exist to deny insureds’ claims for coverage, appellate courts, including the United States Supreme Court, serve primarily as mechanisms to not decide cases brought by lower courts. This explains why most decisions reached by trial courts that are appealed are either rejected for decision by the appellate courts or, if accepted, affirmed.
The situation in the legislative arena is similarly daunting for those attempting to overturn or even simply amend existing law. Changes proposed to existing laws — even minor ones — rarely succeed. More than the partisan nature of the politics surrounding the substantive issues is the fact that a majority of Democrats and Republicans share a deep hesitancy to change any existing law – in other words, to upset the “status quo.”
Similarly, when it comes to election challenges based on voter fraud, the status quo almost always prevails. While there have been instances in which federal and state courts have accepted such cases for review, and even a few in which they have overturned the results, these are the rare exception, regardless of whether the challenges were made by Republicans or Democrats. The Election Fraud Database maintained by the Heritage Foundation explains many of the election results that have in recent years been overturned or in which evidence of vote buying was documented.
Former Justice Department lawyer and Federal Elections Commission member Hans von Spakovsky, who heads the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Institute, also has noted that no less an authority than the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 2008 decision upholding Indiana’s voter ID law, confirmed that voter fraud remains a very real and continuing threat to the integrity of our democratic system; a problem magnified by massive mail-in voting such as permitted by states across the country in this most recent election.
Thus, despite state-of-the-art technology available to states and local governments across the country designed to significantly reduce chances for voter fraud to occur, evidence of election shenanigans continues to surface. Just last week, for example, a so-called “computer glitch” was revealed in the software used by counties throughout Michigan to tabulate votes.
While GOP lawyers have drawn attention to the Michigan vote-counting problem – one that potentially could infect other states using the same software — it did not for a moment cause either the Biden campaign or its mainstream media and social media allies to pause their drumbeat for the former vice president to be referred to as “President-Elect.” Twitter reportedly did its part by “censoring” Tweets calling attention to the Michigan “glitches” and those unearthed in other states.
As soon as the Biden-Harris ticket was anointed the “declared winner” on Saturday, it became the status quo; for the left, a result no longer open to debate or even to be questioned.
Moving ahead, it will be extremely difficult for Republican challenges to find judges willing to risk public opprobrium by allowing such a decision to be formally challenged in court, even to the limited degree of receiving evidence to evaluate. After all, for Democrats and their cohorts, the value of “evidence” pales when weighed against their opinions, beliefs and priorities collectively shared with the mainstream media and the lords of social media.
Bob Barr represented Georgia’s 7th District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He was the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia from 1986 to 1990 and an official with the CIA in the 1970s.
