Hypocrisy, Thy Name Is GOP

In Hawaiian, “Aloha” means both “hello” and “Goodbye.” Which just shows that if you spend enough time in the sun, surrounded by water, you don’t know if you’re coming or going   George Carlin

You know, we all know that sometimes there’s stupid. And other times, there’s something I can only call really fucking stupid! And right now, what’s going on in the Pennsylvania US Senate primary for the GOP can only be described as really fucking stupid. And hypocritical to the nth degree as well.

At the last time I heard, Trump backed media quack Mehmet Oz’s lead over challenger Dave McMillen had shrink to about 900 votes. Obviously the insufferable tragedy of the Texas school shooting has pushed primary politics to the back burner. But it’s time to get to work and do my job, I already vented.

Cast your mind back to the days following the belated calling of the state of Pennsylvania for Biden. It was belated for a reason. Most states allows early mail in and absentee ballots to be at least pre-processed, if not counted but unannounced before election day. Pennsylvania law prohibits early mail in or absentee votes from being touched before 7AM on the morning of election day. Which means, since they have to be processed by hand, it takes forever. Which means that final results are delayed unless it’s a blowout.

The Trump campaign made nothing but hay of that law. They screamed that election day results which showed Trump as leading were all of the votes that should be counted. I don’t have enough fingers and toes to count the number of Trump challenges that were filed in state and US courts in Pennsylvania that only lily white GOP votes cast on election day were the only ones that should be counted. Trump went out for Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania has an arcane rule regarding mail in ballots. On the envelope, there is a space to write the date that you’re submitting the ballot to the mailbox. If that date is missing or unreadable, then the ballot can be considered incomplete, and discarded without counting.

There was a special election held in 2021 in Pennsylvania in which multiple early absentee and mail in ballots showed up with either no filing dates on the label, or an illegible date was provided. A lawsuit ensued, and a PA judge ruled that a missing or illegible send date was not enough to invalidate the votes. If everything else was correct, they should  be counted.

Will wonders never cease? It turns out that in the 2022 GOP Senate primary, there is another tranche of early mail in ballots that either have no date on the envelope, or are illegible. And since McMillan is trailing Oz by 900 votes, he jumped on that Friday decision with both feet.

He filed a lawsuit that claims that since the PA judge that ruled in the 2021 case that early and mail in ballots whose only flaw was a missing or illegible mail in date should be counted constituted judicial precedent, and that all of the questionable ballots from the 2022 primary should be counted as well. The Democratic Secretary of State, loving every minute of this, has placed the ballots in hold, pending a judicial decision.

My question is, How hypocritical can you be? In 2020, every GOP arm went to court to try to throw out every possible early mail in ballot, presumably Democratic, in order to reverse the result of the election. And now, in 2022, you have a Republican candidate for Senate who is 900 votes down, and he’s begging a PA court to count every possible early or mail in ballot.

Predictably, both the PA state GOP as well as the RNC are up on their hind legs to block McMillan’s lawsuit, since Oz is their golden haired boy. But when you look at the GOP’s record in 2022 in the courts, I’m not so sure that I’m putting any bets on the results of their objections. Don’t touch that dial.