But Hart is petitioning the House to overturn the election, and the House Management Committee is now looking into the case. POLITICO Playbook reported earlier this week that the effort to overturn the election “has been blessed by the upper echelons of Democratic leadership in the House.”
With regard to Mayor Pelosi and company, it is “honoring the election results for you, but not for me”.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is paying for Democratic electoral lawyer Marc Elias, who fought Donald Trump in election cases before and after November 3, to represent Hart.
A petition for Miller-Meeks persuasively points to precedents for the House to refuse to hear cases that the contesting candidate did not address first in state courts.
Elias’ briefing for Hart offers a lame excuse to avoid a contesting court in Iowa. She says that Hart now knew about all 22 ballots that she considered to have been improperly discarded until December 1 and that meant that there simply was not enough time to go to court (it would be made up of the Iowa Supreme Court president and four district court judges) .
Certainly, however, the contesting court would be aware of the time constraints and streamline the process, which would have centered around the 22 contested ballots. If the court could not make a decision within a week to meet the December 8 deadline for the final determination of a dispute, presumably the deadline could have been postponed. (Hart, who is calling for all kinds of ballot rules to be ignored, is not in a strong position to be an advocate for deadlines.)
The decision to skip the contest court and go directly to the House of Representatives is, in a transparent manner, an effort to circumvent a body that aspires to neutrality in favor of one that does not, and to avoid a decision based on Iowa law to seek one based on the party interests of other Democrats.
This is how it has been interpreted by the editorial boards of newspapers in Iowa.
Certainly, Elias basically put the question in black and white. Citing the latter case, when a Democratic-controlled House overthrew an election (in 1985 to award a seat in Indiana to a Democrat), its report says that the committee “is certainly not required” to follow Iowa law and, in fact, , “there are cases where you are in fact bound by justice and equity to deviate from it.”
Hart does not claim any fraud or irregularity in the consideration of the ballots she says they should now count, or even party favoritism. She just found 22 ballots that she wants to count that would put her on top.
There is some doubt about the provenance of some of the 22 ballots she is highlighting, and others clearly violate Iowa law. Five involve absent ballots whose envelopes have not been sealed, as required by the bylaws. Two other ballots, which by law must be returned by election day, did not reach the municipalities where voters reside in time.
The decisions on these ballots were all difficult decisions that election officials must make, using the law and their best judgment, all the time.
It is not by chance, by the way, that all 22 ballots, except four, are for Hart. It can be safely assumed that a more systematic survey of the district would raise similar determinations that went against Miller-Meeks.
But we should not want closed elections to be endlessly litigated and re-litigated in protracted battles over who can, after the fact and fight against the limits of the law, bring together more voters who claim that their ballots have been wrongly rejected.
Iowa has a robust and clean electoral system through which voters in the 2nd District speak.
Revoking his verdict on the basis of a selective and selfish collection of dubious ballots would be a party scam, which is exactly why Rita Hart is asking the Democratic House party to do so.
The very casual observer could have been forgiven for thinking that the Democrats, given their vehemence and passion around January 6, sincerely believed that it is in principle wrong to question the legitimacy of the electoral results signed, sealed and handed over to Congress.
Marc Elias, for example, knew better.