The End is Near: The Coming Constitutional Insurrection
© 2004 By David Lytel
If it is true that wisdom grows only from truth then the newspaper-reading public in the
nation’s capital is being starved of the food they need to be wise citizens. After more
than a month of avoiding the single most urgent question before the American people –
whether the presidential election was conducted lawfully and the actual winner awarded
with the victory – the Washington Post has taken up the issue with appalling results,
lending what credibility it has left as an objective news source to the White House’s
cover up of crimes against democracy.
In an effort to appear “even-handed,” which is to say to not provoke Bush and his cabal
from damaging the company’s ability to get government approval for its mergers,
acquisitions and license renewals, the Post hides the most salient fact: There are
considerably more reported cases of vote suppression, fraudulent vote casting and
fraudulent vote counting than George W. Bush’s margin of victory in Ohio. In all
likelihood the surveys of voters as they left the polling places are accurate and
considerably more people went to the polls that day to vote for John Kerry both in Ohio
and nationwide. Should he be re-inaugurated on January 20th Bush will once again be
securing the greatest prize the American political system has to offer, the presidency,
through fraud, deception and illegal activity aided by a willfully ignorant press.
The commercial news media parrots the Bush “explanation” of the widespread
misadministration of the 2004 election and is prepared to accept it as uncritically as it did
Bush’s deceit on weapons in Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s involvement in the attacks of 9/11
or a host of other outright lies they have carried on Bush’s behalf. They tell us that the
fraud and deception used to maximize the vote totals of the party in power and minimize
the votes of opposing parties are merely random “glitches” or “irregularities” and that the
only recourse is to fix the system in time for the next election, but they are wrong on both
counts.
The misadministration of the election was deliberate and purposeful and we have more
than one course of action to return the nation to the proper path right now.
There is overwhelming evidence that the misadministration of the election was nonrandom.
There are disparities between the number of people who signed in to vote at
polling places on election day and the number of votes recorded on the machines in Ohio
and Florida. The original records of who showed up to vote have been deliberately
destroyed in Volusia County, Florida and elsewhere.
Virtually all of Bush’s statewide
victory margin in Ohio comes from just 9 counties. In Warren County, for example,
officials closed the vote counting to outside observers for the first time anyone can
remember, on the advice of the national Department of Homeland Security, which now
denies it. The county emergency services coordinator, however, reports he was told that
Warren County, which is suburban Cincinatti, was a ten on a scale of ten as a likely target
of terrorism. Warren County has nothing in it Al Qaeda cares about but it is the single
most important county in the nation to Bush’s re-election, being the last polling place in
the state to close and providing a third of the margin he needed to claim victory on
election night.
None of this passes the simple test of randomness – it is literally
impossible that chance could produce errors that all point in the same direction, giving
votes to Bush.
We do not have to suffer another four years of an illegitimate presidency since the
Constitution provides us with two ways of successfully challenging Bush’s
reinauguration.
First, there almost surely will be a Constitutional challenge to the legitimacy of the
electors from Florida, Ohio and potentially other states as well. I was involved in the
drafting of the written challenge available to Florida Congressman Alcee Hastings and
the other brave Members of Congress who challenged Florida’s electoral votes in 2000,
when there was no one alive who had ever experienced a Constitutional challenge of
electoral votes. Now, however, I can say I have a pretty good idea how to succeed this
time. Kerry must be told that he is not authorized to “accept” a fraudulent election on our
behalf, and I suspect that once the dimensions of the conspiracy to steal the election in
2000 become known Al Gore will regret having done so four years ago.
This time we
can and will have widely recognized public advocates, a great legal team and leaders in
both the House and Senate who are widely respected by their peers and the public.
When the Congress meets in joint session on 1/6 there will be a written challenge duly
signed by at least one member of each house and they will return to their respective
chambers to conduct a time limited debate. Can we actually win a challenge against the
electors of Ohio, Florida and other states? Yes. If we have about 80 House co-sponsors
by January 3rd or so then the House Democratic Caucus will stand united and we will
have Nancy Pelosi as our leader. The historic decision on the continuation or termination
of the Bush presidency will then rest with the most lonely and abused faction in the
House – moderate Republicans. Look to Sherry Bohelert and Chris Shays and people
like that to see what they will do. Not all Republicans back Bush or the brutal tactics he
and his cronies are prepared to use to remain in power. With a dozen or so Republicans
joining House Democrats the Bush presidency would be over and democracy restored. A
similar dynamic will play out in the Senate if we have five or so co-sponsors before the
session begins.
And if that doesn’t work there is another way. Article 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment
sets out penalties for massive vote suppression, since that is one of the problems the
union faced after the Civil War. Northerners feared precisely what ended up happening –
that the white elites in the South would take advantage of the increased number of
citizens they now had once slavery was over but that they would not permit the freed
slaves access to the ballot so they could successfully secure representatives they could
trust. It says that if the right to vote in an election for president is “in any way abridged”
then the representatives of that state will be reduced in proportion to the scale of the vote
suppression. While this applies to representation in Congress, it also applies to the office
of Elector, even though people only hold that office for a single day to do just one thing –
vote for president. A Federal lawsuit backed by 550,000 affidavits from a state would be
sufficient to reduce the number of electors from that state and as a consequence the
number of electoral votes it has to cast on January 6th. Happily, the Internet makes it
possible to put up a form necessary to produce a legal affidavit on Monday and have well
over 550,000 of them from multiple states on the next day. Bold and messy, but
plausible.
The treasonous conspirators behind the unlawful theft of the presidency must stand trial if
the nation is to heal and usher in a new era of democratic revival. Our deepest
commitment is to democracy and to the rule of law, which must be able to produce a just
outcome if our political system is not to bleed to death from the loss of legitimacy.
While the commercial news media is now reporting that something happened, the giant
institutions protected by the First Amendment must now dust it off and take it out for a
ride speaking truth to power once again. Just as the story of the fires in Charles County
were not reported as an unexplained personal tragedy, the damage to our democracy is
being done by arsonists. Worse, they appear to work for the fire department, and we
need the news media to do its job and secure the truth for us so we may act widely as
citizens.
David Lytel is the founder of ReDefeatBush.com, a political action committee. He lives
in Washington, DC.
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