Perhaps like me, your blood boiled when you read the response filed by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to the “Emergency Application for Injunctive Relief filed by Congressman Mike Kelly and other Plaintiffs.” 

Read for yourself the salvo fired in what is the modern equivalent of Fort Sumter.  From Red State, December 8, 2020:

Petitioners ask this Court to undertake one of the most dramatic, disruptive invocations of judicial power in the history of the Republic. No court has ever issued an order nullifying a governor’s certification of presidential election results…. They make that request without any acknowledgment of the staggering upheaval, turmoil, and acrimony it would unleash. In issuing equitable relief, this Court rightly seeks to avoid inflaming social disorder. So to say that the public interest militates against Petitioners would be a grave understatement. Their suit is nothing less than an affront to constitutional democracy. [italics added]

Why did my blood boil?  Why should yours?  Because the response was a Declaration of Intimidation, and it wasn’t just filed for the purposes of calling off the U.S. Supreme Court in the brazen, evidence-abundant conspiracy to steal the presidency from Donald J. Trump in the Commonwealth -- and, not incidentally, nullify the ballots of a majority of Pennsylvania voters. 

It was shots at the Court and GOP-controlled legislatures in the contested battleground states, save Nevada, where the Democrats hold sway.  The insinuation: If these flagrantly bogus elections are overturned, there will be hell to pay.

What else can we conclude?  Aggrieved Democrats, leftists, and their plutocrat backers (and the lurking Xi Jinping and Iran’s mullahs) won’t take kindly to the coup they’re attempting to commit being scuttled.  The left, with tacit approval of Democrats, demonstrated this year that they have no compunction about smashing things and hurting innocents.  Be scared, very scared, is the message.          

Knowing Republicans -- legislators and jurists, among others -- who appear to put pathological premiums on social stability and comity, the threat has been registered.  In fact, the threat of instability and strife simply triggers what is a Pavlovian response in many Republicans.  Democrats and the left have no such reflex.     

What battleground state GOP legislators and the Court’s five originalists need to grasp is that without justice, stability is an injustice, and inevitably, a chimera.  If these scam elections are permitted to stand, the legitimacy of elections will be fatally wounded.  Trust in government by the people will quickly erode.  Government, based on so spurious a foundation, will inevitably clash with patriots unwilling to bend to an illegitimate government’s edicts.  Imposing rule through various means of force will mount.  What resolves, then, is tyranny that invites social disorder and clears the way for intensifying conflicts.  What, then, are the prospects of the republic’s survival? 

This epic election con isn’t a matter of shrugging and saying, “Ah, shucks, we’ll just get ‘em next time.”  It’s nearly a cliché, but if Democrats and their sinister allies get away with this theft, there will be no next time.  The conspirators will act diligently to consolidate their gains and institutionalize and refine the means of stealing future elections.  This elections theft is no outlier.  If we naively -- or fearfully -- treat this heist as such, we will consign future elections to banana republic farces.  Only a fool would then slap an “I voted today” sticker on his shirt and mean it as anything more than a woeful, wry joke.          

But let’s not shrink.  If the U.S. Supreme Court and battleground GOP legislatures do their duties in striking down historic elections fraud, the Democrats will, again, flood the streets with provocateurs and thugs -- their brown and blackshirts -- who’ll be tasked with inciting riots and all manner of convulsions.  Democrats will seek new theatres to intimidate and disrupt.  Their warfare is asymmetric.  The recent -- and now infamous -- video of Congresswoman Cynthia Johnson threatening Trump supporters is a small aspect.    

Yet, the thirst for justice must be quenched.  A nation where the rule of law is tattered, where rump elections have installed a pretender president, where a people are bullied into sullen silence, and are compelled to circumscribe or surrender their God-given rights, is unacceptable.  If trial by fire is our fate, so be it.  Let us like steel be forged in fire.  For, as Lincoln said, “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.”   

Our country was born from a war for independence… a war to cast off a tyrant.  Our Constitution was a revolution in human history.  Our rights aren’t conferred by kings and potentates, but God, and governments are instituted among men and by men to safeguard and advance those rights.  We must not bow to a tyrant’s will ever.    

The Civil War was a test of union, yes, but very much a fight for the primacy of law and civil society, and, as it evolved, a fight to extinguish the most abject tyranny, slavery.

Then we fought other wars in the 20^th Century, at great cost in blood and treasure, against the darkness and barbarity of fascism and communism.  Neither were completely vanquished.  Today, we confront both in new guises on our own soil.          

We have a sacred obligation to those men and women who sacrificed so much for our liberties.  Today, we are being called to duty, and to make sacrifices ourselves, as need arises.  Greater still is our obligation to our children, grandchildren, and beyond.  Will we bequeath to them a free nation risen like a phoenix, or another terrible instance of human failings -- a squalid land of perfidy and oppression?    

Whether or not there are sufficient numbers of GOP legislators in battleground states who will exhibit the courage and integrity to seek justice -- in other words, either select electors who represent the voters’ true will or vacate the matter, turning it over to the U.S. House -- is the question of the hour.  Of equal urgency are the five SCOTUS justices who know how high the stakes are.  We can only hope that the Court refused to entertain the Kelly litigation to affirmatively address the matter globally in the Texas lawsuit. 

Neither GOP legislators nor the five originalist justices can pass the buck.  Nor can they defer this matter to some later time; that cedes victory to the conspirators, enemies all of liberty.  These men and women are now liberty’s line of defense.  Should they equivocate in their duties, they open a Pandora’s Box of injustices.  If they act rightly, then justice and liberty will serve as our lodestars, guiding us through whatever trials arise.    

We are a free people, to whom much has been given, and much is asked.  Right and duty must compel us at this critical crossroads in our nation’s life.            

J. Robert Smith can be found on Twitter @JRobertSmith1and Parler @JRobertSmith.  He also blogs at Flyover.             

Image: Picryl