'This Is a Recipe for a Permanent One-Party Swamp': Regent Conference Blasts House Election Bill

Regent University in Virginia Beach, VA held its first conference for election integrity Tuesday.  It featured big names in politics and media, as well as some of the top experts in the field of election fraud.  Regent’s new dean for the Robertson School of Government, former Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, kicked off the conference saying America can’t allow national elections to be stolen.

“Without an honest count of votes, we won’t have a way to remove leaders that we don’t want,” Bachmann stated. “And we won’t have a way to get rid of laws that we don’t like. Instead, a permanent group of elites will ensure their own continued power. And that will require you and me to live the way the elites tell us to.”

Can Hardly Talk About It

Keynote speaker Ben Carson said he’s appalled at how people are being shut up now just for speaking out against fraud and how to prevent it going forward.

The former HUD secretary commented, “Even speaking about having honest and morally principled elections causes all kinds of uproars today.” 

A panel of election experts ripped into HR1, a bill the Senate’s now considering that detractors say would be a federal takeover of state election laws. 

‘We Should have No Representation Without Respiration’

John Fund of National Review Online said of HR1, “It basically throws open the vote to almost anyone who wants to pretend that they have a right to vote, that can vote twice, who can vote from out of state, who can vote if they’re dead. I believe and respect our dead, but I also believe that we should have no representation without respiration.” 

The Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky co-wrote a book with Fund called Who’s Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk.  During the panel discussion, he found nothing positive to say about HR1.

‘Make It Easy to Cheat…Make It Easy to Get Away with It’

 “It’s just one bad provision after another,” Spakovsky complained. “The whole intent of this law appears to be to make it easy to cheat, to make it easy to get away with it, and to make it almost impossible to detect or prosecute.” 

Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft said his state will challenge HR1 in court should it become law and refuse to obey it.

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‘The Swamp Trifecta’

Ashcroft explained, “I like to say that HR1 is unworkable, it’s immoral and it’s unconstitutional. Sometimes I refer to that as the Swamp Trifecta. That’s Washington D.C. for you.”

“It’s all partisan power grab,” Fund added. “There’s not a single good idea in this entire 900-page bill.” 

And political commentator Mark Steyn, a frequent fill-in for Sean Hannity and the recently-deceased Rush Limbaugh, worried HR1 could permanently warp American elections and democracy.

“This is a recipe for a permanent one-party swamp, which is the ruling party, and the controlled opposition in permanent minority status,” Steyn said.

Civil Unrest Ahead?

It could so frustrate the other side, it leads to civil unrest.

Steyn explained, “What binds the losing side to an election result is the fact that it’s a fair result.  That’s all that distinguishes a free society from some basket case where the outgoing generalissimo gets carried out by the handles from the presidential palace and gets strung up on a lamppost.”

Steyn said what’s happening in America reminds him of Northern Ireland in the bad old days.

“The two sides fundamentally disagreed on which country they were actually in. One side are Loyalists and regard themselves as British subjects and are quite happy about it.  And the other side are Irish Republicans and don’t want to be in the United Kingdom at all.”

Then he suggested if HR1 permanently disenfranchises half of America’s people, “I wonder if we’re not actually approaching the same condition as we are in parts of Belfast where we have groups of people who simply do not want to be in the same country with the other group.”