The election went through a recount and was certified. The sore loser is demanding it be reversed, asking party colleagues to go along with the effort to steal an election. No, this loser isn’t former President Donald Trump. It’s Rita Hart, a Democrat, and her party is seriously considering following through with it.
Hart ran in Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District, losing the election by 47 votes in the initial count. After requesting a recount, she cut the deficit to six votes but still lost. Iowa’s bipartisan State Canvassing Board unanimously — I repeat, unanimously — voted to certify the election on Nov. 30, making GOP candidate Mariannette Miller-Meeks the winner.
Hart could have taken her case to Iowa courts. Instead, she skipped that path, taking her complaint to the Democrat-controlled Committee on House Administration, which could green-light a House vote to unseat Miller-Meeks and replace her with Hart. Committee Chairwoman Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California has already signaled that the committee will back Hart’s challenge, meaning House Democrats could be voting to steal a certified election from their opponents.
Removing a Republican for a Democrat has obvious benefits for House Democrats, who would increase their razor-thin eight-seat majority to 10 seats. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has played coy about the situation, calling it a “hypothetical” and saying, “We will see where that takes us, but there could be a scenario to that extent.”
The fact that Democrats are even considering this after rightfully criticizing Trump over his post-election antics is a disgrace. The only difference between what Trump did and what Hart is attempting to do is that the latter could actually happen. It would be yet another Democratic escalation in partisan politics, ignoring the certified results in Iowa to make-up for the fact that Democrats underperformed expectations in November and are stuck with a slim majority.
Even the Des Moines Register, which endorsed Hart, has called on her to concede, saying she should have taken her case to the courts and that Iowa “doesn’t need more partisan bile infecting its politics.”
It’s not new that Democrats would consider being hypocrites, but this would be especially toxic. Stealing a House seat would crater the already low confidence people have in elections. It would be a blatant power grab, and Republicans would have no choice but to retaliate once they claim the House majority, leading to yet another tit-for-tat battle of escalations, which would likely culminate in the serious erosion of the idea of free and fair elections in the United States.
