“Precedent… Doesn’t Matter Anymore”: Democrats Dispense With Pretenses & Principles In Pennsylvania

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

“People violate laws any time they want.”

Those words, shrugging off an alleged unlawful move last week, did not come from some Chicago gangbanger or Washington car thief. Those words of wisdom came from Democrat Commissioner Diane Marseglia in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

They came in response to the fact that the Democratic majority on the election commission had decided to ignore a binding state Supreme Court ruling in an attempt to engineer the election of Democratic incumbent Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.).

Rather than prompting a degree of introspection, the loss of both houses of Congress and the White House has had a curious effect on many Democrats, dropping any pretense of protecting democracy over partisanship.

Despite polls showing that the public trusted former president Donald Trump more than Vice President Harris in combating threats to democracy, Democrats made “saving democracy” the thrust of this election.

The polls reflected a certain common sense of the public when harangued with predictions from President Biden, Harris and a host of politicians and pundits warned that this would likely be our last election. Few believed that after over two centuries as the most stable and successful democracy in history, all three branches would collapse in unison and embrace dictatorship. Even fewer believed the predictions of the rounding up of homosexuals, journalists and political critics for camps in what some described as an American Third Reich.

American voters are not chumps and what they saw were strikingly anti-democratic positions from those claiming to be the defenders of democracy, including:

• Seeking to strip Trump from ballots under an unfounded theory rejected unanimously by the Supreme Court.

• Fighting to block opponents of Biden from ballots in the primary and general elections.

• Suing to keep Robert F. Kennedy on ballots after his withdrawal in swing states, in order to confuse voters and reduce the vote for Trump.

• Calling for blocking dozens of incumbent GOP officials and legislators from ballots as “insurrectionists.”

• “Protecting democracy” through the most extensive censorship in history and the blacklisting of opponents.

• Engaging in open and raw lawfare in the prosecutions of Trump in places like New York.

Each of these efforts ultimately failed to stop Trump and was opposed by a majority of voters even before the election. So now, Democrats are dropping the pretense for open partisanship.

That was evident in Bucks County, when a motion arose to reject a challenge to count provisional ballots, including undated or invalidly dated mail ballots.

It should have been easy.

To its credit, the majority-Democratic Pennsylvania Supreme Court had already refused a Democratic push to change the rules shortly before the election and to ignore the plain language of the election laws.

In ordering the rejection of ballots without dates, Justice Kevin Doughtery (joined by Chief Justice Debra Todd) wrote a concurrence declaring

“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. Yet they apparently were not heard in the Commonwealth Court, the very court where the bulk of election litigation unfolds.”

It is apparently still not being heard. In the Bucks County hearing, Marseglia spoke as she and Democratic Board chairman Robert Harvie, Jr., dismissed the earlier rulings in order to accept ballots without required signatures or mandatory dates.  She declared that she would not second the motion to enforce the rulings “mostly because I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country and people violate laws any time they want. So, for me, if I violate this law, it’s because I want a court to pay attention to it.”

That was a lot of words to say that she does not really seem to care if this is lawful. For his part, Casey has shown the same abandon as he clings to his Senate seat at any cost.

That cost, in this case, was an alliance with Marc Elias, the controversial Democratic lawyer at the center of the infamous Steele Dossier scandal. Elias has been sanctioned in court and criticized for his work to flip elections. He is known for baselessly blaming voting machine errors for electing Republicans and pushing gerrymandering plans rejected by the courts as anti-democratic.

Casey is unlikely to change the result without counting defective or challenged ballots. Fortunately, law and precedent “does matter in this country.”  There are still officials who can transcend their political preferences to maintain the rule of law. After the last presidential election, many Trump appointees ruled against the former president, and many Democratic judges rejected the effort to strip Trump from ballots.

That does not mean that Democrats who value the weaponization of law will not continue to embrace lawfare warriors like New York Attorney General Letitia James (D).

Others will use the rage of these times as a license to ignore legal and ethical obligations altogether. They are arguably the saddest manifestation of our political discord. They are people who have not just lost faith in our system but in themselves. They have become untethered from any defining principle for their own conduct. This election has left them adrift in a sea of moral and legal relativism, with only their rage as a following wind. They cling to that rage as reason vanishes like a distant shore.

For the rest of us, there is work to be done as a nation committed to the rule of law. We cannot win at any cost when that cost is the very thing that defines us.

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Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”