As we head into the new year, many Republicans have been commenting on the prospect of having a free and fair — and trusted — congressional election in 2022 after the mess in 2020. I’ll paraphrase some of this:

Listen up, Democrats! Now that we know about all the ways the vote is vulnerable to manipulation and essentially un-auditable, we’ll have our eyes on you this time! By golly, we’ll make sure there’s a chain of custody for every ballot box and refuse to let you keep our poll watchers away. We’ll have cameras on all the election workers feeding ballots into machines, and we won’t let you shut down the vote counts and kick observers out of the room. Not this time! We’re on to you, and if you think you’re gonna get away with anything this time, you’ve got another thing coming! You might have done it once, but you wouldn’t dare try it again under the kind of scrutiny you’re gonna have. We’ll be watching every move, so this election will be secure! 

We will indeed be watching as closely as possible, but challenges remain. Marc Elias and his army of attorneys got laws changed in battleground states so that safeguards against mail-in ballot fraud, such as signature matching and ID, are much looser than they used to be. He’ll fight any attempt to change back. And nothing has changed regarding our ability to audit electronic voting systems, so unless we disconnect ourselves from these, we will not know if our vote count is true.

A New Strategy to Cheat

Still, it will be harder to cheat this time. So the Democrats need new strategies to keep Congress from turning red in the expected bloodbath of 2022. And, thanks to Elias, they’ve got some.

One of them ties in to the events of January 6, as currently being “investigated” by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “Special Committee.” The Capitol Hill security breach plays into Democrats’ hands so well, I still say that if it hadn’t happened, they would’ve had to create it, with a little help from the FBI, and you may make of that what you will. Revolver News has done some excellent reporting on this; recall an earlier installment we brought you. For when you have time — this is extremely detailed — here is another chapter of their investigation into what they call the “Fedsurrection” of January 6.

We don’t typically wander down the conspiracy-theory path, but as they say at Revolver, “FBI Director Chris Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland have an awful lot of explaining to do.” They need to tell us why the individuals who seem to have been most instrumental in whipping up and directing the crowd that day (and even the day before) have not been pursued by the FBI. Pelosi’s rejection of Trump’s offer of thousands of National Guard troops for security that day is suspect as well. I’ll have much more to say about this later, but for now the story is how Elias and the DNC are planning to use January 6 to affect the composition of Congress after the 2022 election. Because they are.

Insurrection and Rebellion!

Elias himself tweeted about this on December 20: “My prediction for 2022: Before the midterm election, we will have a serious discussion about whether individual Republican House Members are disqualified by Section 3 of the 14th Amendment from serving in Congress. We may even see litigation.”

I’d say that with DNC superlawyer Elias in charge, we most definitely will see litigation. That’s a promise.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment reads:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, SHALL HAVE ENGAGED IN INSURRECTION OR REBELLION AGAINST THE SAME, OR GIVEN AID OR COMFORT TO THE ENEMIES THEREOF [emphasis mine]. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

In a follow-up, he said, “I am making it clear that members of Congress who engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States are not eligible to serve in Congress.”

Elias would like to disqualify Republicans who supported Trump from even being on the ballot in 2022. He has one problem, which Matt Margolis at PJ Media pointed out: Text messages released by the January 6 committee show that there was no insurrection, and no one at all has even been charged with insurrection. But Elias will no doubt allege that anyone who has even expressed less-than-full confidence in Biden’s win — let alone (horrors!) the thought that Trump might actually have won — is part of the rebellion. Those presumably would include Jim Jordan of Ohio and Jim Banks of Indiana, the two members of Congress chosen by Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to be on Pelosi’s January 6 committee but refused by her. They, along with Troy Nehls of Texas, even voted against certifying the results of the 2020 election. Insurrectionists!

Why, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Louie Gohmert of Texas even offered aid and comfort to insurrectionists, by visiting them in prison and (gasp!) praying with them. Yes, the so-called reasoning could get that nuts. And Lauren Boebert of Colorado has already been criticized for innocent actions on January 6. Elias is bound to target her.

A Real Head-Scratcher

In what is a real head-scratcher for me, even a couple of Trump-appointed judges have made it clear they think the Capitol Hill breach was worse than the riots in Portland in which buildings were torched. They’ve ruled that attorneys for the January 6 defendants can’t compare their treatment under the law with that of the left-leaning Portland defendants, who were treated much more leniently.

Believe it or not, D.C. District Court Judge Trevor McFadden found a reason to say the Capitol Hill breach posed a greater risk to safety. “The Portland defendants primarily attacked at night,” he wrote. “In contrast, the January 6 rioters attacked the Capitol in broad daylight…their actions endangered hundreds of federal officials in the Capitol complex…”

His colleague, Judge Carl Nichols, did the same: “The Portland rioters’ conduct, while obviously serious, did not target a proceeding prescribed by the Constitution and established to ensure a peaceful transfer of power. Nor did the Portland rioters, unlike those who assailed America’s Capitol in 2021, make it past the buildings’ outer defenses.”

Well, that wouldn’t have happened if the Guard had been there as Trump wanted and if certain key figures hadn’t moved barricades and directed the crowd. In charge of security: Pelosi.

These mystifying rulings will no doubt help Elias with his out-there argument that this really was an insurrection. Expect him to pull out all the stops. Once again: Our lawyers have to be better than their lawyers.

Mike Huckabee is the former governor of Arkansas and longtime conservative commentator on issues in culture and current events. A New York Times best-selling author, he hosts the weekly talk show Huckabee on TBN. 

Originally published at MikeHuckabee.com. Reprinted with permission.