With the support of the oil and gas industry, Yvette Herrell has shown herself to be both oily and gassy. Like others with the interests of party or its supporters to advance or protect, she has violated her oath of office in the earliest days of the 117th Congress. That violation is an early warning of her political inclinations—to overturn democracy.
The Constitution gives states, not Congress, exclusive authority over their elections. Yet Herrell accepted repeated falsehoods about Pennsylvania’s election procedures and ballot counting, and the resulting disenfranchisement of New Mexican voters. To explain her position, she would sully the truth because Pennsylvania law and New Mexico facts are against her. To defend it, she would invoke her loyalty to a president despite his being impeached for a second time, wanting to remain in power, and seeking to wield it without restraint. Her vote to reject Pennsylvania’s election results violates her oath.
Two down-to-earth questions for Herrell are how does she know that claims of voting irregularities in Pennsylvania are true and substantial; and how does she, a recently elected, first-term representative from New Mexico know more than Pat Toomey, a three-term representative and two-term senator for Pennsylvania? And then there is the judge.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann in Williamsport [PA] turned down the request for an injunction by Trump’s campaign. In his ruling, Brann said the Trump campaign presented “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations … unsupported by evidence. In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state. ... Our people, laws, and institutions demand more.”
Sen. Pat Toomey, the [sic] Republican from Pennsylvania, recognized the decision and called on Trump to “accept the outcome of the election. ... With today’s decision by Judge Matthew Brann, a longtime conservative Republican whom I know to be a fair and unbiased jurist, to dismiss the Trump campaign’s lawsuit, President Trump has exhausted all plausible legal options to challenge the result of the presidential race in Pennsylvania. …” (AP, 21 Nov)
Case closed. Yet Herrell defies the knowledge and judgment of a conservative Republican judge well qualified and positioned to know the law and the facts. She displays not only arrogance and ignorance undesirable in any elected official, but also reflexive complicity with or obedience to Republican radicals, some Congressional colleagues, meaning to overthrow a free and fair election, and establish an apartheid autocracy in America.
We need to understand that Herrell’s early voting has given us an early, though no doubt unintended, warning. It warns us that she is an elected official who cannot be trusted to act on facts and logic as the basis of truth and serve public interests. It warns us that she is a tool serving the interests of her party and its financial supporters. We in New Mexico’s Second District must not ignore this early warning as government agencies ignored early warnings before 9/11 and 1/6. We had better pay close and continuous attention to Herrell; we had better publicize, criticize, and condemn her efforts which disregard New Mexico’s interests and betray America’s constitutional democracy.
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