True Threats to Democracy

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, President Biden marked the third anniversary of the January 6 Capitol riot by calling it a ``day that we nearly lost America,'' and he asked: ``Is democracy still America's sacred cause?''

That is an important question. What happened on January 6 was a national disgrace. A riotous mob disrupted the Congress and its congressional responsibility to observe the counting of the votes of the electoral college. To conclude that ``we nearly lost America'' to a lunatic wearing buffalo horns that day is hysterical hyperbole, to say the least. True insurrections are made of sterner stuff.

When the last of these yahoos was kicked out of this building a few hours later, Congress calmly completed the electoral count and confirmed Joe Biden's election.

Nevertheless, Mr. Biden is correct to raise concerns about the growing threats to our democracy, and he is right that democracy depends on the loser of an election accepting its outcome as the legitimate will of the majority. Many Democrats refused to do that in 2016 and many Republicans in 2020.

Why do so many voters no longer trust the integrity of our elections? Could it be that so many of the safeguards that assure a fair election and an accurate count have been stripped away?

For hundreds of years, we all looked our neighbors in the eye as they handed us our ballots. We all cast our votes in curtained booths where no one could influence us. We all watched our ballots placed in locked containers. At 8 p.m., we knew exactly how many votes had been cast, and a few hours later, we knew the outcome of all the elections.

We all had our say during the campaign, and we waited until the debate was over to make our decision on election day. It was very hard to cheat, and everyone could trust that process.

All that has changed. In recent years, the leftist Democrats have rigged election laws to extend voting over an entire month, accept ballots after election day, harvest ballots by political operatives, use mail-in ballots where there is no chain of custody, prevent observers from unobstructed views of ballot counting, and suppress debate and hide critical information from voters.

Freedom of speech is the beating heart of democracy, yet the left- leaning bureaucracies, increasingly independent of the will of the voters, actively colluded to influence elections by intimidating political opponents, starting with the Tea Party. They have promoted utterly false narratives, most notably the Russian collusion hoax.

Courts have recently found the government guilty of violating the First Amendment by actively pressuring social media platforms to censor the very political dialogue that is central to the functioning of a democracy. The President even attempted to establish a disinformation czar to decide what information could reach voters.

Our fundamental democratic institutions are also under growing attack. The left has been very clear that it intends to pack the Supreme Court by creating new seats for leftist appointments and to pack the Senate by creating overwhelmingly Democratic States, like Washington, D.C.

Less than 2 years ago, leftist mobs descended on the homes of Supreme Court Justices in an illegal attempt to pressure and intimidate them, yet Mr. Biden's Department of Justice refused to enforce the law that protects jurists from such bullying.

The President has opened our borders and produced an illegal mass migration unprecedented in our history while his party has pushed to permit foreign nationals to vote in our elections, making a mockery of Americans' right to self-determination.

How does Mr. Biden explain the unprecedented acts of his agents seeking to ban from the ballot candidates who directly challenge his candidacy? It is not just the brazen and unconstitutional attempt to keep his leading Republican challenger from the ballot. The agents of his party have been aggressively working to ban Democratic primary challengers as well and seizing from Democratic voters in Iowa the right to have any meaningful say in next week's election, for fear they would not vote for him in sufficient numbers.

Mr. Speaker, our democracy is indeed under attack from the lunatic fringe on both extremes. When we ask which presents a clear and present danger to our democracy, I would respectfully but earnestly suggest the President remove the log from his own eye before he criticizes the speck in his neighbor's.

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