Casey Abandons Both Democracy and Decency After Throwing His Father's Legacy to the Wind

I twice voted for Bob Casy for Governor of Pennsylvania and was not disappointed. He was a fine Governor, in fact, in almost all respects. I supported him because he was reliably pro-life and proved that when he challenged his own party on the issue. He also kept his own Department of Environmental Protection and the multi-state Delaware River Basin Commission under control, not letting them run wild as his successor Tom Ridge did.

When Bob Casey passed away, his son and namesake gave a rather good eulogy of the man that initially suggested he would walk in his father's shoes. The latter's work as Auditor General supported that view, but it was not to be. Bob Casey, Jr., after getting elected to the U.S. Senate, opted to become a cipher, living off the family name and doing whatever Democrat leaders told him. He implicitly abandoned his father's pro-life legacy long ago, and, then, during his most recent campaign, explicitly did so.

Now, he's abandoning democracy, too. Kyle Sammin at Broad + Liberty captures it all:

The Washington Post has been telling us for eight years now that Democracy Dies in Darkness. Anyone who watched the proceedings in Bucks County this week knows that’s not true. It dies in broad daylight.

As we all know by now, Republican Dave McCormick came out on top in the Senate race against three-term incumbent Democrat Bob Casey, Jr. As the final votes were being counted, the race tightened, but McCormick still led by tens of thousands of votes statewide, with not nearly enough provisional and absentee ballots still outstanding for Casey to honestly believe he had a chance to pull ahead in the tally.

But even if he couldn’t honestly believe it, he and Democratic elections lawyer Marc Elias sure seem to dishonestly believe it. Casey made a big deal about counting every vote, even after the Associated Press and others acknowledged that he had lost. And that’s not a crazy thing to insist on — in fact, under state law, these ballots were always going to be counted. At no point were county officials going to stop doing their duty to tally every valid ballot.

At the same time, though, we were given to understand that the officials across the commonwealth’s 67 counties would all follow the law as they did so. 

Pennsylvania law requires that mail-in voters hand-write the date on the outer envelope of their ballots. This has been the case since the law was passed in 2019. No one denies that the text of the law still says that. And just to make it crystal clear, the state Supreme Court ruled in September that for this election, that law must be followed. 

That rejection, opponents contend, was on procedural grounds — the plaintiffs didn’t sue all the right state officials in their attempt to overturn the law on handwritten dates. That’s true. But it doesn’t diminish the ruling, nor does it detract from the idea that the court wanted clarity about this issue as we headed into what everyone knew would be a close and hotly contested election.

This is a court, remember, that has a 5-2 Democratic majority. Their ruling could not be chalked up to partisan politics, only to a sincere desire to make sure the law was enforced uniformly and fairly across the commonwealth.

But not everyone believed them. So some plaintiffs again took the case to Commonwealth Court, which held 3-2 in late October that throwing out undated ballots would risk violating the voters’ rights.

To which the state Supreme Court immediately replied, “did we stutter?”

In a brief, unsigned, and unanimous opinion, the high court vacated the lower court ruling on November 1. A concurring opinion from Justice Kevin Dougherty (himself a Philadelphia Democrat) expanded on the thinking of at least some of the exasperated justices. 

“‘This Court will neither impose nor countenance substantial alterations to existing laws and procedures during the pendency of an ongoing election.’ We said those carefully chosen words only weeks ago,” Dougherty wrote. “Yet they apparently were not heard in the Commonwealth Court, the very court where the bulk of election litigation unfolds. Today’s order, which I join, rights the ship. And it sends a loud message to all courts in this Commonwealth: in declaring we would not countenance substantial alterations to existing laws and procedures during the pendency of an ongoing election, we said what we meant and meant what we said.”

That certainly should have been the end of it.

But what did the Casey campaign do? Ask counties to count undated ballots. Where did they do it? Not everywhere, just in the counties where they thought they would find more votes for their man. Exactly the situation the high court wanted to avoid and, in fact, ruled that counties must avoid.

In some ways, you can’t blame McCormick then or Casey now for asking. The legal system is adversarial and lawyers must zealously represent their clients’ interests. It should have been an impossible argument to win, since the state Supreme Court said no to this idea just two weeks ago, but they’re allowed to try, and allowed to lose. 

What you shouldn’t expect is for the county commissioners to agree to something that they know is illegal. And yet! Here we are. Commissioners of Bucks, Centre, Montgomery, and Philadelphia Counties — all Democrats — voted to accept those illegal ballots, acting in open defiance of the clear and unambiguous ruling of the court. 

They should all lose their jobs.

It’s not going to work. Even if they cheat, the votes are not there for Casey to prevail. But scraping the bottom of the barrel for invalid votes does get the race close enough to allow a recount. Which will also fail.

The newspaper of record covers this story mostly by saying Dave McCormick is a hypocrite for asking for invalid ballots to be excluded. He wanted them counted in the 2022 primary, when the law was less clear on the point. But McCormick also declined to make the state pay for a recount in that race even though it was much, much closer than this one — he lost to Mehmet Oz by 953 votes; Casey trails by 23,499 at last count, even after including the invalid votes.

These commissioners think they’re doing something noble and brave, standing up for something. But they forget which side of the table they’re on. When a citizen refuses to obey an unjust law, it is called civil disobedience. When the government breaks the law, it is tyranny.

That misunderstanding of their place in our political system extends even farther than that: an ordinary citizen who engages in civil disobedience expects to be punished, hoping only that by drawing attention to the problem, he will get those in power to change the law. But these people are in power and they don’t expect to be punished. They’re not resigning in protest, they’re not reporting to jail for the election fraud they’re committing. They expect, instead, to be lauded and even reelected, if you please. 

This is how Democrats are saving democracy? 

Bucks County Democrat Commissioners Trying to Count Illegal Votes for Bob Casey, Jr.

They all broke the law, but Bucks County Commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia (D) was the most outspoken about her refusal to be governed by our constitutional system. 

“Precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country,” she said. “And people violate laws anytime they want. For me, if I violate this law, it’s because I want a court to pay attention to it.” 

Well, at least no one can say she didn’t know what she was doing. She said it out loud, under the flickering fluorescents of the county administration building.

It’s a disgrace to this state and its laws that someone entrusted with the powers of government would use them to rig an election. It won’t work. The courts won’t stand for it and neither will the people. But, in her own way, Ellis-Marseglia and her cronies have reminded us why we have the rule of law, why we have the separation of powers, why we have free elections, and why we have a free press to report on it all. 

It’s to protect us from people like her.

Bucks County Commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia is throwing every principle of democracy to the wind on behalf of Bob Casey. Jr. and his svengali, Marc Elias. He's refusal to concede means he supports her and her views. He has abandoned both democracy and decency.

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