【Article/Observer Network Columnist Chen Lijian】
Storm within the Republican Party
On May 12, local time, the Republican caucus of the US House of Representatives passed a voice vote, and in less than 20 minutes, Liz Cheney (hereinafter referred to as Cheney) was removed from the position of chairman of the Republican Conference.
The president of the Republican Convention is the third-largest Republican in the House, and a big reason for Cheney's ouster is that more and more Republican house members are strongly dissatisfied with her.
Many news outlets have interpreted Cheney's ouster as a direct consequence of her vote in mid-January to support Trump's impeachment. I don't think it's true to say that.
Liz Cheney is the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney (Infographic/New York Times)
In early February, within the Republican caucus, Trump's staunch allies launched a vote to replace Cheney. But because Cheney is the daughter of former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney, and the Cheney family has deep roots in the Republican Party, House minority leader McCarthy and other senior officials feel that voting to impeach the president is not a good reason to replace Cheney, and the vote for Cheney is less than 1/3 of the total number of votes in the group. So this attempt to subvert Cheney was temporarily suppressed.
However, Cheney, as the second generation of political officials, has not stopped, and still continues to condemn Trump who has left office on social media. This behavior really infuriated the Republican caucus, because the consequence of this "reckless" action is to put the Democratic Party on the sidelines, the media attention is diverted from the ultra-left policies that the Democratic Party is trying to pursue, and more importantly, it will seriously damage the Republican Party's support in Trump's basic plate - a poll after Trump left office showed that more than half of The Republican voters voted for the Republican Party because of Trump.
USA Today's Feb. 21 "Scoop": "Despite being defeated and impeached, Trump still wins the loyalty of Republican voters"
Cheney's constant hype of her and Trump's contradictions has led many Republicans to worry that some Republican base voters will abandon the Republican Party, which will lead to a decline in their support. That is to say, many Republican lawmakers choose to give up Cheney in order to save their jobs, after all, their jobs are more important than the face of Cheney's former vice president.
Cheney was succeeded by Elise Stefanik from New York. She's not a conservative in the Republican Party if you look at her voting records, but Stephannick has become a staunch ally of Trump during his presidency. As soon as the news of Cheney's possible downfall came out, Trump immediately announced his support for Stephannick.
Trump and Stephanienick (Data Map/White House official website)
Unsurprisingly, Stephannick was elected chairman of the House Republican Convention, and the resistance encountered was negligible. In her inaugural address, Stephannick also made it clear that she wanted to unify the whole party, win the midterm elections smoothly and ensure Trump's important position in the Republican Party.
Seeing this, we can basically conclude that a small proportion of Republicans still regard Trump as the soul and leader of the Republican Party.
Some people may ask: Why does Trump, who lost the election, still have such influence in the Republican Party?
So we have to ask a question – do the results of the 2020 election really reflect public opinion?
Distorted election results
In the 2020 election, I bought a $1,000 lottery ticket to push Trump for a successful re-election. At 11 p.m. on November 3, my $1,000 lottery rose to $1,624, but several states stopped counting. At that time, I decisively sold seven hundred copies, and after an hour, I emptied them, and although my original dream of doubling was disappointed, I still made a small profit.
The results of the election were revealed a few days later, and the results were:
1. The famous polling agency is still a mess, the nonpartisan political analysis website Cook political report (Cook political report) expected the Republican House of Representatives to lose 15 to 20 seats before the election, but the result is that no one in the Republican Party has lost its constituency, and all 27 swing seats elected by the mainstream media have been won by the Republican Party. After the election, everyone once ridiculed, does the swing zone mean swinging among the republican candidates?
2. According to bellwether county in the US election, when a candidate wins the majority of bellwether counties, the candidate will be successfully elected. In the 2020 election, 19 counties in the United States became the weathervane counties, while Trump won 18.
3. In traditional history, if the president loses re-election, the party also loses seats in state assembly elections. But in the 2020 election, the Republican Party did not lose any of its controlled state legislatures.
Trump, however, was not re-elected.
Although I don't believe in conspiracy theories, some phenomena in elections do make people wonder.
In the early hours of November 4, large numbers of ballots popped up at polling stations in Michigan, Arizona, and Philadelphia. Among those votes, Biden's approval rating was as high as 96%. This is all well documented. In other words, the top administrator of the U.S. federal government is determined by mail-in ballots from Milwaukee, Phoenix, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Detroit.
The 2020 election debate is, in the final analysis, the handling of mail-in ballots. Many melon-eating masses have followed suit, saying that there is no evidence of election fraud; all I can say is that the Democratic Party's operation this time is a reasonable and legal "election fraud."
Because states want to change the rules of state elections, they must amend their state election laws through the legislature of the state legislature. However, in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia and other states, as early as the first half of the outbreak of the epidemic in 2019, they began to relax voting restrictions through executive orders such as governor's orders, requiring polling stations to relax the confirmation of voter identity.
In many areas, unattended ballot boxes have appeared; anyone can fill out ballot papers issued by the state government and put them in the collection box without confirming their identity. Especially after the outbreak of the epidemic, the swing states controlled by the Democratic Party have relaxed voting restrictions, even putting ballot boxes on the street to collect votes without supervision.
These are violations of state electoral laws and are not endorsed by state legislatures. If true, this is even a violation of the Federal Constitution.
However, now that the wood is in the boat, the Republicans and the Trump team, although they do not concede defeat, can only admit the results of the election.
Conflict from the grassroots
Despite the inability to overturn the election results, Republicans and the Trump team have not slackened since February 2021.
The first was that the Georgia legislature passed the most stringent electoral law in the state's history, severely restricting mail-in ballots and absentee ballots.
Then the Arizona Senate hired an independent oversight auditor to begin a public audit of millions of ballot papers in Maricopa County, including mail-in ballots, absentee ballots and electronic voting equipment. The audit, despite strong obstruction by democrats, proceeded as planned. Up to now, the audit company has found that a lot of voting machine data has been deleted before it is sent for audit.
Such behavior has undoubtedly made Republican voters more angry. The arizona Senate president asked the county government to explain whether it deliberately deleted election documents.
The Washington Observer reported May 13 that the Arizona Senate questioned whether Maricopa County had removed key election documents
In New Hampshire, audits of the 2020 election are also being done in an orderly manner.
As the investigation deepens, the distortions of the so-called democratic vote will be further exposed to the public eye. Undoubtedly, when the situation further ferments, when more problems are presented in the public eye, the legitimacy of the Biden administration will continue to be questioned, and American society will be further torn apart.
Biden's plan
While there are constant contradictions at the grassroots level, the ultra-left policies of the newly elected Biden administration are also an important driving force for further tearing American society.
Biden's far-left policies mainly include:
Abolish the structure of lengthy debates in the Senate that has been in place since the time of President Thomas Jefferson, remove protections for minority parties, and allow Democrats, who have a slim majority in the Senate, to effectively control the fate of all bills;
Reform federal election laws to remove voter identification nationwide;
Nominate more judges to the Supreme Court – Six of the 9 supreme court justices are currently Republican, and the Democratic Party is trying to change the system of 9 justices that has been established since the 1860s in order to promote a far-left line, and the current plan is to increase the number of judges by 6.
If these three articles can be smoothly advanced, will the Democratic ultra-left bill successfully pass through the US legislative and judicial system and become law, while the Republican conservatives who uphold traditional values sit still?
On January 6, 2021, I witnessed a massive pro-Trump march by conservatives in Washington, D.C. On the subway train returning from the parade, I was talking to a conservative business owner from Oregon. He told me that from today onwards, he will actively participate in various political activities, and once the Democratic liberals have any action to change the traditional way of life in the United States, he will actively organize resistance. I remember the last words he said before we parted were:
"I can't take a weapon this time to DC, but in my hometown of Oregon, that's another story..."
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