Joe Biden’s Legacy Is a Lawfare Assault on Free Elections Around the World
A French court sentenced Marine Le Pen to four years in prison and banned her from standing for public office for five years. It seems likely that the court may forgo incarceration for an ankle monitor, and it is quite unlikely that it will lift the ballot ban.
You see, Le Pen consistently leads in the polls for the presidency of France by double digits. So, an ends-justifies-the-means Left concocted a charge of embezzlement — claiming that her National Rally party used aides within the European Union to conduct political activities in France — to deny the people of France the right to issue their verdict on whether they wanted Le Pen to lead them or not.
“It looks like this movement is spreading around the world,” former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro reacted. “The Left has found an easy way to perpetuate itself in power by using judicial activism.”
Indeed, a court barred Bolsonaro from running for office, and just days ago, the Brazilian Supreme Court ordered him to stand trial for, among four other charges, the abolition of the democratic rule of law. Hmmm.
In February, Romanian authorities arrested Călin Georgescu, leading in the presidential polls by a 2-to-1 margin, while he sat in traffic. Reuters reported that “after questioning Georgescu for several hours, they said they were formally investigating him on accusations of forming an antisemitic organisation, promoting war criminals and fascist organisations, and communicating false information.” (RELATED: Biden’s Last Gasp Subverted Romania’s Democracy)
The government subsequently barred him from running in May’s presidential election. Its the reasoning for prohibiting choice on Election Day? Georgescu does not “respect the Constitution and defend democracy.”
Some people do not grasp their own irony.
In Turkey, as in France, charges of public corruption greet those who dare challenge the ruling party. On March 19, the government arrested Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu. Ozgur Ozel, a leader of Imamoglu’s party, commented: “God is my witness that Ekrem Imamoglu’s crime is to be [Turkish President] Tayyip Erdogan’s rival.”
Venezuela’s government posted a $100,000 reward in January for information leading to the arrest of Edmundo González, who defeated Marxist dictator Nicolás Maduro in an election last year that Maduro convinced a court to conclude that the opposite had happened.
Last fall in Tunisia, courts sentenced presidential candidate Ayachi Zammel to decades in prison for falsifying endorsements. The various rulings came just days before, and immediately after, the election, which President Kais Saeid won with 91 percent of the vote.
No press accounts noted whether the governments in those foreign cases also rummaged through the underwear drawers of the spouses of the persecuted opposition leaders. It does all come as a Guardian Angel Clarence, It’s a Wonderful Life counterfactual of what awaited Americans had politically corrupt judges and prosecutors triumphed last year in the lawfare waged against Donald Trump and American democracy. Such visions bring gratitude, but also shame. Depressingly, the brazen assaults on free and fair elections around the world occur in large part as a result of that lawfare waged against Donald Trump and American democracy.
“Our government is the potent, omnipotent teacher,” Justice Louis Brandeis opined. “For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by example.”
The “whole people” includes not just those living in the United States. As the most economically, militarily, and culturally powerful nation on Earth, the United States presents, for good or for ill, an example for other nations to follow. Clearly, Joe Biden provided cover for Lula, Maduro, Erdogan, and other thugs to prosecute political opponents. If they can prosecute the opposition candidate leading in the polls in the United States and call it democracy, why can’t they do the same in Tunisia and Romania, and Venezuela?
In all instances, the persecutors of popular candidates follow the Democratic Party’s model of accusing the threat to their governance of instead threatening democracy and engaging in corruption through novel charges rarely, if ever, seen in other cases. (RELATED: Elephant in the Courtroom)
The courts act as the Left’s sonic screwdriver not just on elections but on laws and policies offensive to progressives. Judges increasingly behave as tyrants. (RELATED: Shooting Blanks From the Bench)
The silver lining? A thwarted, frustrated electorate sees through the lies of the powerful. In Tunisia and Venezuela, the regimes rule without legitimacy. In the United States, Donald Trump defeated the secretaries of state, prosecutors, and judges who sought to litigate away a republican form of government. In France, Romania, and Turkey, the repression of dissenters results in mass protests that whittle away remaining support for the ruling clique.
Even after Trump’s triumph discredited lawfare as a fool’s errand (at least in the United States), the Left figures to try, try again. Their lone regret seems to be: why did this idea not occur to us before Brexit?
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