Democrats have been busy trying to cast themselves as the party of election fairness, access, and a free and open democracy. As such, they have fought bitterly to resurrect the Voting Rights Act, they’ve battled against gerrymandering, and they have done everything they can do to prevent Republicans from passing voter ID laws. But you know, it’s a funny thing. When it suits them, they have no problem making some very strange, unconstitutional laws that serve to limit democracy, not expand it. In that category, you can throw their push for the abolition of the Electoral College, which would only serve to elect Democrats and steal power from smaller red states.
Worse, there’s this (from Salon):
As President Donald Trump continues to refuse requests to hand over copies of his tax returns from Democrats on Capitol Hill, state lawmakers are considering making their release a condition of the 2020 presidential election.
Neary twenty states across the country have introduced legislation that would require all presidential and vice presidential candidates to release their individual tax returns in order to appear on the ballot during the presidential or general election, according to data from the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL).
Bills requiring prospective presidential candidates to disclose recent tax returns as a condition to appear on the ballot are currently pending in the following fourteen states: Arizona, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington. Similar legislation, introduced this year, failed in Maryland, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Virginia.
Now, it’s unlikely that any state that Trump has a prayer of winning in the first place will pass this legislation. So it probably won’t make any material difference in the election.
Even so, liberals should be disturbed by this blatant attempt to steal the presidency. What is the damn big deal about Trump’s tax returns? Why is this such a sticking point for the Democrats? Do they not have two years’ worth of Mueller investigation to tell them that their Big Russian Conspiracy was a crock of you-know-what? Of course they do. They just want to dig and dig and dig until they find something that might give Trump some bad headlines.
This is harassment, nothing more. The idea that we would turn this into an actual barrier to the ballot is outrageous, partisan, and anti-democratic.
But that’s pretty much what Democrats have become.
