Congressional Record/Volume 167/Issue 4/House/Counting Electoral Votes/Arizona Objection Debate/Bishop Speech
Mr. Bishop of North Carolina. Madam Speaker, it has been quite a day. And in contrast to the gentleman’s comments just now, I couldn’t get over this text that I received from the mayor of Charlotte, Vi Lyles, about 30 minutes ago. She is a progressive Democrat, a political opponent for years, a tremendous and graceful person. She said:
Representative Bishop, I hope you are safe and well. It must have been a day of anguish for the world to see our Capitol buildings under siege. I know you have a long night ahead and want you to know I was thinking about you, your family, and staff.
God bless.
Vi.
Back home, the generosity of spirit still exists.
And I understand the sharp words and feelings on the other side tonight, but there are also good people back home, and I have heard from many, many, many of them.
News would suggest there are millions of Americans—that is a big number—millions, tens of millions, who believe something went awry in this election. And they aren’t dumb. They aren’t mindless. They don’t believe things simply because the President says them. There were problems.
I know that Joe Biden will be President, but I don’t know that it hurts or would hurt any of us to have the generosity of spirit to continue to reflect on what might be better or what might seriously have gone wrong here, even if you reject the notion that the result was wrong.
I would like to offer a slightly different perspective, a distinct perspective. Perhaps it will be rejected. I think if I were sitting on the other side of the aisle, it would be very difficult for me to listen to tonight, but you all have heard it said, and it certainly is true, that many executive branch officials around the Nation departed from State legislatures’ enacted laws.
I know it is less understood how this came to pass.
It was not a spontaneous, independent decisionmaking, but it resulted, I would argue, from a coordinated, nationwide partisan plan. And the fact and scope of the plan really isn’t disputed.
If you go to democracydocket.com, it is the website of Marc Elias, the national Democratic election lawyer who appeared in hundreds of cases across the country in the course of the election year.
This plan was not a response to COVID, by the way. It preexisted that. And his website shows that as well. He explained that in January of 2020.
It was a chaos strategy, a plan to flood State and Federal courts with hundreds of simultaneous election year lawsuits aimed at displacing State legislative control.
Now, as I have seen it, only the most experienced and independent judges appear to have recognized what was afoot. In the fourth circuit, dissenting judges Wilkinson and Agee said this: “Let’s understand the strategy that is being deployed here … Our country is now plagued with a proliferation of preelection litigation.” And as they put it, 385 election year cases to that point on October 20, and they referred to the website healthyelections.org to verify that.
“Around the country,” they wrote, “courts are changing the rules of the upcoming elections at the last minute. It makes the promise of the Constitution’s Elections and Electors Clauses into a farce.”
This was a political operation masquerading as a judicial one. And in keeping with that, it featured gross breaches of litigation ethics: forum shopping, repetitive suits after losses, and collusive settlements with cooperating Democratic officials of State and local governments.
That is what led to officials changing the rules in State after State, mainly through consent orders, or the preliminary, unreviewed decisions of State and Federal trial judges inclined by partisanship or having limited experience with the Electoral Clause.
In turn, the displacement of rules set by State legislatures led to chaotic conditions on the ground, about which so many Americans are angry and disheartened.
I think we can do better. I think that strategy was unwise, and I think, particularly in light of what has happened here today, we should.