Lost Not Stolen: The Obvious Case That Shouldn't Be Needed
Lost Not Stolen: The Obvious Case That Shouldn't Be Needed
Everybody with any common-sense knows that Donald Trump lost the 2020 Presidential Election. Conservatives show why
In finally had a chance to read the report: Lost, Not Stolen The Conservative Case that Trump Lost.
It shouldn’t be necessary to have a report written by conservatives making this point. Because everybody of good faith already knows.
In releasing their report, the signatories stated the obvious:
We are political conservatives who have spent most of our adult lives working to support the Constitution and the conservative principles upon which it is based: limited government, liberty, equality of opportunity, freedom of religion, a strong national defense, and the rule of law.
We have become deeply troubled by efforts to overturn or discredit the results of the 2020 Presidential Election. There is no principle of our Republic more fundamental than the right of the People to elect our leaders and for their votes to be counted accurately. Efforts to thwart the People’s choice are deeply undemocratic and unpatriotic. Claims that an election was stolen, or that the outcome resulted from fraud, are deadly serious and should be made only on the basis of real and powerful evidence.
The signatories are hardly the people that anybody with common sense would identify as a liberal or a RINO.1 These are serious people, with serious conservative bona fides.
Senator John Danforth
Benjamin Ginsberg The
Honorable Thomas B. Griffith
David Hoppe
The Honorable J. Michael Luttig
The Honorable Michael W. McConnell
The Honorable Theodore B. Olson
Senator Gordon H. Smith
I wanted to take a second to share with you part of their Executive Summary.
For this Report, we examined every count of every case brought in these six battleground states. We include both a narrative for each state and an accompanying Addendum listing each case and its disposition.
We conclude that Donald Trump and his supporters had their day in court and failed to produce substantive evidence to make their case.
Of the 64 cases brought by Trump and his supporters, twenty were dismissed before a hearing on the merits, fourteen were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before a hearing on the merits, and 30 cases included a hearing on the merits. Only in one Pennsylvania case involving far too few votes to overturn the results did Trump and his supporters prevail.
Repetition of these false charges causes real harm to the basic foundations of the country, with 30 percent of the population lacking faith in the results of our elections.
In our system of government, these cases provided the forums in which Trump and his supporters could and should have proven their claims. This Report shows that those efforts failed because of a lack of evidence and not because of erroneous rulings or unfair judges. Judges, legislators, and other election officers, often including members of his own party, gave Trump ample time and every opportunity to present evidence to make his case. Post-election audits or reviews in each state also failed to show any irregularities or fraud that would overturn the electoral results. In many cases, after making extravagant claims of wrongdoing, Trump’s legal representatives showed up in court or state proceedings empty-handed, and then returned to their rallies and media campaigns to repeat the same unsupported claims.
Even now, twenty months after the election, a period in which Trump’s supporters have been energetically scouring every nook and cranny for proof that the election was stolen, they come up empty. Claims are made, trumpeted in sympathetic media, and accepted as truthful by many patriotic Americans. But on objective examination they have fallen short, every time.
Moreover, even if there were such evidence (which we did not find), there is an obligation on the part of a campaign challenging the veracity of official results to bring its challenges on a timely basis, through the established legal channels, based on ordinary rules of evidence and logic. In our system of government, these proceedings provide the forums in which Mr. Trump and his supporters could and should have proven their claims. They had every opportunity to use those channels.
Once they had lost, Trump and his supporters had an obligation to recognize that the election debate was over. Questions of election legality must be resolved dispassionately in courts of law, not through rallies and demonstrations—and most emphatically, not by applying political pressure and threats to induce Congress to ignore its constitutional duty and the electoral outcome for which the people voted, and which the legal processes of the affected states had examined and confirmed. The same system used to bring all his cases, recounts, and contests also sets deadlines for when the process becomes final, a winner is declared, and the losing candidate concedes. Trump failed to abide by that norm in contrast to prior losers of presidential elections such as Richard Nixon and Al Gore.
After reviewing the evidence presented in each court case and the post-election reviews with this lens, certain patterns emerge. Most obvious is that the former president’s rhetoric—before, during and after the election—was not supported by the legal cases he tried to make or any evidence he introduced. Cases and reviews in the six battleground states included similar charges and similar dismissals by federal and state courts.
That’s a very damning indictment of the behavior not just by Donald Trump, but by everybody in Trump’s orbit and every Trump supporter who repeated and continued to repeat to this day these bogus charges that the election was stolen.2
We shouldn’t need conservatives to tell other conservatives3 that the Republican President lost an election nearly two years after he lost the election. Anybody with common sense and operating in good faith knows this.4 But here we are.
There is no way at all that I can adequately restate the arguments of this panel better than the panel themselves did. If you are at all skeptical about the results, I would suggest you read this report and read the evidence for yourself.5 Click here to read the report.
Unless you’re acting in bad faith. Or are just an idiot.
Looking at you, Dan Cox.
The second reference to conservatives here should probably be in air quotes.
I think most of the politicians supporting these claims are not acting in good faith. Again looking at you, Dan Cox.
I am fully away that the people most in need of reading this report….won’t.