Among the muddled results of this year’s elections there were a few clear messages. Voters tended not to support candidates who had refused to accept the results of legitimate elections. And in New York state specifically, a very liberal electorate registered its displeasure with the party in power by handing four Democratic seats in the U.S. House over to the GOP. This Empire State realignment has helped create a new Republican House majority. So it may seem a little odd that House Democrats now appear set to choose as their new chief a New York Democrat who was a 2016 election denier, to use the popular media phrase. But it also represents an opportunity for expected House Minority Leader Rep.
Hakeem Jeffries
to chart a new course toward a healthier and less divisive politics.
Some readers don’t like use of the term “election denier“—even when it’s used to note the hypocrisy of some of those who most loudly oppose denialism—because as Americans we are free to question everything about our government. This is true but the November results suggest that if a candidate has a history of questioning election results long after any reasonable challenges have been exhausted, voters are inclined to select somebody else. Americans enjoy that right, too.
Unfortunately the losers of our last two presidential elections have made repeated claims suggesting that the winners were not legitimate. For this reason this column is skeptical that either
Hillary Clinton
or
could win an election in the future. It’s also unfortunate that Rep. Jeffries chose to embrace the Clinton denialism and then stuck with it for years. “The more we learn about 2016 election the more ILLEGITIMATE it becomes,” Mr. Jeffries tweeted in 2018.
At a House Oversight Committee hearing that year, the New York lawmaker continued to promote the Russia collusion hoax. Rep. Jeffries said:
For the last few hours, we’ve sat in this hearing, and some of my colleagues, part of the cover-up caucus, have attempted to peddle conspiracy theories that the investigation into the Trump campaign’s potential criminality, where we were attacked by a hostile foreign power, is a witch hunt.
There is not a scintilla of evidence that a witch hunt exists right now. In fact, if any individual connected to the 2016 presidential…
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