Last week, this column made note of something of interest going on in Ohio, namely, the fact that President Joe Biden’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee scheduled their nominating convention to end Aug. 22, two weeks after the existing ballot deadline in the Buckeye State.
That ballot deadline has been in place for more than a decade. Ohio was not the only state whose deadline was scheduled before the end of the Democrats’ convention as chosen by the party and Team Biden. Alabama’s deadline was also earlier than the set date, and the state, a month or so ago, accommodated Team Biden by moving its back. (READ THE PIECE: Ohio Legislature Refuses to Bail Out Biden’s Incompetence. Good for It.)
Ohio has not.
In this space, I noted that Ohio’s legislature is free to choose not to follow suit with Alabama:
There is no obligation on the part of the Ohio legislature to bail out Team Biden for its incompetence here. Certainly, there’s no moral obligation for Ohio to do Biden a solid. Not after East Palestine.
And given the efforts of partisan Democrats in Colorado, Maine, and, less successfully, in other states to pervert the 14th Amendment to deny Trump a place on the ballot there, there certainly isn’t a moral obligation for Republican legislators in a red state to change their laws to accommodate Democrats.
And there’s no legal obligation. The Democrat Party is a private entity that does not make election laws, as much as it might clearly believe otherwise.
What is Russo offering Stephens in return for a special session and a bill putting Biden’s incompetent campaign, together with a full boat of shady electoral practices and machine politics, on the right side of a brand-new ballot deadline? Anything?
It would seem that the GOP, which controls Ohio, ought to be in a position to make a few demands in return for such a consideration. And, yet, if you cycle through the news stories covering this unfolding fiasco, you’ll struggle to find any mention of a deal.
The deal is the important piece here. Sure, having Biden on the ballot in Ohio is — as a matter of electoral integrity — probably better than not (though there are many side arguments to be had on that question, to be certain). But as I noted, Biden is set to be off the ballot in Ohio not due to anything Ohio has done. This was the Democrats’ mistake.
And that means they ought to have to give something up if they want Ohio’s legislature to change the statute and shoehorn Biden onto the ballot.
That’s common sense. It’s fair play. It’s also, as I noted, nowhere to be found in the discussion of Ohio’s ballot controversy.
That state’s governor, Mike DeWine, a squirrel of the first magnitude who cannot stop screwing over the people who put him in office, certainly isn’t attempting to broker a deal. He’s instead calling a special session of the Ohio Legislature, demanding that it change the ballot deadline to let Biden slide.
What else is on the special-session table in Ohio? I don’t see much.
That means this is a freebie from a Republican governor and, assumedly, a GOP-dominated state Legislature to a Democrat Party that is doing … what, exactly, to reach across the aisle?
But DeWine is heroic for making those demands, according to the conservative-stalwart editors of the National Review:
We agree with Governor DeWine — Ohio’s legislature should pass a bill ensuring the president of the United States’ name remains on the ballot this November. We emphasize that this is a matter of the utmost gravity. It is not — and cannot possibly ever be — about cheap and temporary partisan advantage. It is a question about the fundamental legitimacy of American elections.
No, it’s about preserving the integrity of state statutes and enforcing the rule of law. This is the Democrats’ mistake. If they want it fixed, they should be bringing baskets of goodies to the legislative majority as compensation for being bailed out.
Why is National Review so solicitous of Joe Biden? Is it still on the Never-Trump bandwagon as it so infamously was in 2016? Are the woke corporate paymasters of that publication forcing that agenda down the throats of the editors, or have they gone along willingly?:
Ohio — once the most hotly contested swing state in presidential politics — is nobody’s idea of an electoral battleground these days. It is now considered to be so safely in Donald Trump’s column for 2024 that neither party seriously plans to contest its electoral votes in November. (Incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown faces a strong challenge for reelection in the Senate but has consistently held the upper hand against Republican Bernie Moreno in polling.) It is most likely that the inaction is due to Republicans in the Ohio state legislature — both chambers of which they securely control — feeling like they owe zero favors to Joe Biden in an electoral climate where even being accused of doing one for him is potential fodder for a primary challenge somewhere down the road.
Republicans don’t owe Biden favors, and that is the entire point. To do Biden a favor would only be justified if they were given a favor in their own right.
For example, Biden’s overly politicized Department of Justice could call off its scandalous lawfare prosecutions of Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., and South Florida — prosecutions that are aimed almost explicitly at knocking Trump off this fall’s ballot.
When inaction knocks Biden off the ballot — due to his own mistake — and active abuse of power attempts to knock Trump off the ballot, the equitable deal should be Republican action in exchange for Democrat cessation.
Are National Review’s editors so craven that they won’t even make the ask on the part of Ohio’s legislators? Or did it never occur to them that extracting something from Democrats is possible and desirable?:
As Alabama’s legislators well understood, this is no favor but rather a basic (and uncontroversial) act of civic responsibility. Joe Biden’s name must be allowed to remain on the Ohio ballot, for to remove it on a four-day technicality (in the renomination of an incumbent) would open Pandora’s box. First and foremost, it would deny Ohio voters a meaningful vote for president of the United States between the two major parties, one it is impossible to argue with any seriousness that voters of the state do not deserve. To allow pointed inaction to permit the president’s name to “default” off the Ohio ballot is to commit a bluntly cynical transgression of civic norms. It is not even good politics; Sherrod Brown would likely benefit from running on voter anger at such transparent self-interest at their expense.
Biden’s name isn’t on the ballot in Ohio. It can’t “remain” on it. The 2024 election is a different one than 2020’s, and Biden must be nominated by the Democrats to be on the ballot. The Democrats chose to nominate him too late to meet Ohio’s ballot deadline. It isn’t the legislature’s job to nominate Joe Biden in a timely manner; it’s the Democrats’ job.
And they failed to do it.
Why are Republicans duty-bound to correct the failures of Democrats? And since when does constantly bailing them out of their failures encourage them to stop failing?
How do you think Democrats become less and less sane and more and more radical? It’s obviously because they neither fear nor respect the consequences of their own stupidity.
And it’s people like the geniuses at NR white knighting for them that protects the Democrats and the Left from those consequences, rather than seizing the opportunities, and positive disruption, that could be had from letting the chips fall:
Even more appallingly, were Ohio Republicans to deny Biden a spot on November’s ballot out of pointless spite, they would be undermining every single argument they — and Donald Trump — have been making for the past several years about how government is weaponized against Republicans.
Now they’ve devolved into abject stupidity. This is very poorly disguised Never Trumpism, and it should be called out as such:
This is not about doing Democrats or Joe Biden a favor. Ohio’s legislators owe it to the voters of their state and the people of the nation to come together and pass a simple fix to this state election law and give Ohio voters the chance to reject Joe Biden fair and square. And Ohio voters should neither forgive nor forget if legislators contrive specious reasons to deny the people of their state an actual voice in the November election.
So now they’re calling for the heads of Republican legislators in Ohio who won’t knuckle under and bail out the Biden campaign?
This is shameful. It’s a new low for a publication that claims to be “conservative” and yet refuses to sanction any actual effort to give conservatives political advantage.
Again, the point here isn’t that Ohio’s legislators shouldn’t change the ballot deadline. It’s that there ought to be considerations extracted in exchange for doing so.
If you want to be known as the gold standard of conservative thought, you have a responsibility to think about those considerations, do you not?
It doesn’t appear that anybody at NR even bothered with that concept. And that fact is very damning indeed.
