Who are the real ‘fascists’?

OPINION:

Psychology 101 describes a mental defense mechanism in which someone consciously or unconsciously attributes his or her own thoughts, feelings, or traits to another person or group of people. It’s aptly referred to as “projection.”

With just days left before the Nov. 5 election, projection is precisely what Vice President Kamala Harris, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and other Democrats are engaging in as they seek to scare voters into believing that former President Donald Trump would be “a fascist,” “a dictator,” and even the second coming of “Hitler” if he’s reelected.

Ms. Harris claimed at her Oct. 23 CNN town hall that Mr. Trump would be “a president who admires dictators and is a fascist.” (Never mind that he wasn’t in his first term.)

Despite a handful of disgruntled, nominal Republicans providing Democrats with cover smoke by echoing those claims, the epithets are as scurrilous as they are baseless. To borrow one of the favorite phrases of the liberal “fake news” media, the charges are “without evidence.”

But they’re also Psych 101 textbook examples of projection, considering what Harris and her party would do if she were to win the presidency and Democrats would capture control of both houses of Congress Tuesday.

With Ms. Harris in the White House and Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, both New York Democrats, running the Senate and House, respectively, there’s little doubt about the dangerous far-left agenda they would force upon America.

It’s an agenda only an actual dictator—fascist or otherwise—would love:

• In a move Hitler would surely support, the first thing Schumer and a Senate Democratic majority would do would be to scrap the Senate filibuster, the only procedural tool the minority party has at its disposal to stop legislation it opposes.
• When the Democrats themselves were most recently in the minority in the Senate, they enthusiastically—albeit hypocritically—embraced the use of the filibuster to block the Republicans’ agenda 327 times in 2020 alone.
• In fact, it’s only because of the filibuster—which necessitates a 60-vote majority in the 100-member Senate—that the Democrats haven’t already passed radical, far-left legislation, such as the grossly misnamed For the People Act, which would forcibly transfer virtually all election-related authority from the states to the federal government, putting it in the hands of unelected bureaucrats, and the so-called Equality Act, which would add sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes under federal civil rights law and penalize everyday Americans who hold to traditional beliefs about biological sex and marriage. (Say good-bye to Title IX and women’s athletics as we have known them.)
• Abolishing the filibuster would also enable Democrats to grant amnesty and a path to citizenship—and voting rights, which is all they really care about there—to an estimated 20 million immigrants in the country illegally.
• The only reason Senate Democrats didn’t pass these and other baleful bills during the first two years of the Biden-Harris administration, when Democrats also held the House, was because two Senate Democrats put their country and congressional comity ahead of party and wouldn’t agree to doing away with the filibuster.
• Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona—both of whom subsequently quit the party and became independents—are stepping down. If they’re replaced by other Democrats, and Democrats hold the Senate, repealing the filibuster would require only 50 of them plus the tiebreaking vote of prospective Vice President Tim Walz.
• As recently as a few weeks ago, in a livestream event with far-left Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., Mr. Walz mused: “I don’t know where you stand, but I’m going to guess you and I are probably the same on the filibuster.” AOC responded: “Oh, yeah, we have got to get rid of that thing.”
• If Democrats also take back the House, the leftist legislative floodgates would open, and a President Harris would surely sign into law whatever they send to her.
• With the filibuster repealed, Democrats would also vote to grant statehood to the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico for the express purpose of guaranteeing themselves four new senators in perpetuity and thus a likely permanent majority in the Senate. And as then-Rep. Mondaire Jones, D-N.Y., averred on June 2, 2022, in the context of debate on gun control: “If the filibuster obstructs us, we will abolish it. If the Supreme Court objects, we will expand it.”
• As for the Supreme Court, it’s also in dictatorial Democrats’ crosshairs. They would likely resurrect President Franklin Roosevelt’s failed 1937 court-packing scheme to add at least four new seats to the high court, so that a President Harris wouldn’t have to wait for vacancies to occur to appoint left-wing activist judges to rubber-stamp her radical agenda. Imagine four more justices who can’t even tell you what a woman is.
• Democrats likewise fantasize about abolishing the Electoral College, such that California, New York, Illinois, and other large Democrat-dominated states would relegate smaller, rural Republican states to irrelevance in presidential elections.

Fortunately, the Founders enshrined the Electoral College process in the Constitution, so it would require a constitutional amendment to abolish it—which has no chance of passage by the requisite 38 states.

That’s why the Left concocted the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, under which many left-leaning states and the District of Columbia have agreed to award their electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the overall popular vote. It’s a blatant attempt at an end-run around the Electoral College of, at best, dubious constitutionality.

All in all, the dictatorial mindset of Harris and other Democrats was summed up, only half-jokingly, by Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., in an Oct. 23 post on X: “The Left: ‘If we could just jail Trump, get rid of MAGA, end the Electoral College, pack the Supreme Court, ban voter ID, and censor free speech, we could save democracy.’”

All of that may be Harris’ dream of “what can be, unburdened by what has been” and “a new way forward,” but make no mistake: It’s nothing short of indulging a totalitarian temptation to create a one-party state, an anti-democratic Democratic dictatorship in America.

• Peter Parisi is a former editor for The Washington Times.