By In what seems to clearly be a rigged election, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro declared victory in Sunday’s election despite exit polling showing his challenger Edmundo González captured twice as many votes.
The Washington Post reported that “the United States and several Latin American countries cast doubt Monday on claims by Venezuelan elections officials that President Nicolás Maduro won reelection on Sunday, and they called for transparency in vote-counting.
Venezuela’s National Electoral Council, which Maduro controls, claimed early Monday that he won 51 percent of the vote to opposition candidate Edmundo González’s 44 percent, despite independent exit polling and partial results that suggested González captured twice as many votes as Maduro. On Monday afternoon, Elvis Amoroso, the president of Venezuela’s electoral council, officially declared Maduro president for another six-year term. The official declaration suggests that a possible recount would not change the outcome announced Sunday.
The Venezuelan opposition, which saw the election as its best chance in years of defeating the authoritarian socialist, demanded that Maduro hand over scanned printouts of all voting records — more than 30,000 documents — signed and dated by poll workers and opposition observers, and not just the numbers shown on the government webpage.”
Fat chance that happens, but Americans should remember how a once-thriving democratic country found itself being transformed in a socialist hellscape where its leaders simply ignore election results because Democrats don’t seem to be too far behind.
Venezuela’s descent began when Hugo Chavez used his elected office to “reform” his country’s Supreme Court in the name of “protecting the people.”
First Liberty explains: “In 2004, Chavez’s allies held a majority in Venezuela’s National Assembly (congress), passing a law that increased the number of judges on the Venezuelan Supreme Court from twenty (20) members to thirty-two (32).
Those seats were quickly filled with Chavez loyalists. But it wouldn’t be the last time those in power manipulated the Court for political gain.
In 2015, opponents of President Nicolas Maduro (Chavez’s hand-picked successor) won a majority of congressional seats. But pro-Maduro members of the lame-duck congress rammed through thirteen (13) new Supreme Court justices who favored Maduro’s regime retaining power. That was in addition to the sixteen (16) pro-Maduro judges appointed just the year before.
This hyper-partisan fixing of the Court quickly devastated Venezuela’s constitutional structure. In 2017, the Supreme Court issued a shocking and dystopian ruling stripping the country’s national assembly of its powers, allowing the magistrates to assume legislative duties.
Court-packing also destroyed judicial independence. Research reports show that of the 45,000 rulings issued by Venezuela’s high court since 2004, the court never sided against Chavez’s government after it was packed. Not once.
Biden has not personally made a statement on what’s happening in Venezuela and for good reason and Kamala Harris’ statement was slammed as shameful after she appeared to stand on the side of Maduro, saying, “The United States stands with the people of Venezuela who expressed their voice in today’s historic presidential election.”
The Harris statement caused Elon Musk to worry that the United States could be on the same path if it elects Harris to the White House.
I think the risk of this is very real https://t.co/aCb3NNO3mp
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 29, 2024
Judicial independence and the impartiality of judges form the foundation of a free society. Venezuela’s experience shows what happens when courts get filled with judges who act on behalf of a political party, the independence of the judiciary and the stability of a constitutional republic are at risk of rapidly declining.
In the United States, having a Supreme Court that demands Democrats campaign and pass laws rather than rely on courts to enact their preferred policies has caused them to follow in the shoes of some of the worst of leftwing totalitarianism of the past few decades. Because their entire view of politics revolves around holding a self-righteous vision that they are the “anointed ones,” democracy and democratic institutions, in their minds, have become a means to validate what they want to do and why they should hold power rather than constraints on power created to protect American liberties. Now that America’s judicial system has begun to act to do the latter rather than the former, the only option liberals have left is to push “reform“
Just hours after Venezuela found itself on the brink of civil war, the president announced a plan to pack the court, a move that scholars have labeled as the typical first move away from democracy.
The National Review writes that President Joe Biden unveiled on Monday morning his three-point plan to overhaul the Supreme Court with a focus on limiting former president Donald Trump’s immunity for official acts.
Biden laid out his Supreme Court reform plan in an op-ed for the Washington Post, calling for a constitutional amendment limiting presidential immunity, 18-year term limits for justices, and a code of ethics to prevent corruption.
Biden wrote that “the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision on July 1 to grant presidents broad immunity from prosecution for crimes they commit in office means there are virtually no limits on what a president can do. The only limits will be those that are self-imposed by the person occupying the Oval Office.”
In his call for term-limits, Biden said no president should have the opportunity to significantly shift the court’s ideological makeup, another reference to Trump, who appointed three justices in his four-year term, justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.
The conservative magazine also noted that this push to take away judicial independence has been years in the making. “Left-wing dark-money groups have campaigned extensively against the Supreme Court’s conservative justices as part of a broader campaign to undermine the court and lay the foundation for court packing. Democratic politicians and mainstream media outlets have joined in the effort, most recently waging a partisan campaign against Justice Samuel Alito based on the flags flown outside of his home and beach house.”
Kamala Harris as announced support for Biden’s plan.
Earlier in the month, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced that she had filed articles of impeachment, saying, “The unchecked corruption crisis on the Supreme Court has now spiraled into a Constitutional crisis threatening American democracy writ large. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito’s pattern of refusal to recuse from consequential matters before the court in which they hold widely documented financial and personal entanglements constitutes a grave threat to American rule of law, the integrity of our democracy, and one of the clearest cases for which the tool of impeachment was designed.
The Constitution of the United States explicitly outlines a higher standard of conduct for the judiciary to meet, far surpassing its existing bars on treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors for all civil officers: the standard of Good Behavior. Judicial ethics and rules, to which even the lowest level judges are held, make those standards clear. The lifetime appointments of Supreme Court justices make enforcement of these standards a solemn responsibility for the protection of our democracy.“
The chances of implementing Biden’s reform or impeaching the Supreme Court justices remain slim so long as Republicans control the House of Representatives, but as liberals become more and more radical, voters should be wary of the path Democrats promise to lead the country down.
[Read More: Warren Makes Shock Comment About Harris]
