Bob Casey Is Humiliating Himself — and His Party

National Review Online

Wednesday, November 20, 2024

 

Pennsylvania senator Bob Casey Jr.’s electoral fate was decided by voters on November 5, with an outcome apparent to all before the end of the night: After a remarkable streak of political fortune in the Keystone State, the three-term Democrat was narrowly defeated by Republican businessman Dave McCormick. Although he ran ahead of Kamala Harris in the state, Casey’s incumbency (and family name) provided insufficient cushion to save him from being swamped by Donald Trump’s larger statewide margin of victory on the presidential ballot, which carried McCormick — already a strong challenger — over the finish line. It was the end to a long and undistinguished career for Casey, a D.C. politician most respected by Pennsylvanians for the career of his father.

 

Except Bob Casey has refused to admit that it is over. This was perhaps understandable in the immediate days after the vote, as Casey entertained the forlorn hope that outstanding mail-in and absentee ballots in populous Democratic-leaning counties would disproportionately break in his favor. But it was already clear by November 12, when the editors of National Review first wrote about Casey’s intransigence, that the math simply could not possibly add up for him, as indeed it has not.

 

The twist is that since that day, Casey’s strategy — spearheaded by his counsel, Democratic superlawyer Marc Elias — has turned to seeking to count illegal ballots. As the margin in the race closed to around 17,000 votes, Casey’s Democratic allies on the boards of elections in Philadelphia-area counties were publicly enjoined by his team to adopt a strategy of open defiance of the Pennsylvania state election code, which stipulates that undated ballots are automatically invalid and cannot be counted for any purposes. The election boards of Bucks, Philadelphia, Delaware, and Centre Counties all happily did so, with one Bucks County election commissioner, Diane Ellis-Marseglia, proudly asserting that Democrats would count illegal, unmarked, late-arriving ballots — despite two preexisting court rulings demanding otherwise. Her rationale: “We all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country. People violate laws all they want.”

 

This was too much even for the Pennsylvania supreme court, which ruled resoundingly on all of this Monday afternoon. In an extremely brusque majority opinion, the court ordered all boards of elections to comply with the black-letter law of the state election code, as written, and dispose of all undated or otherwise facially invalid ballots. After the ruling, Governor Josh Shapiro finally spoke on the matter, castigating the rebel Democrats: “Any insinuation that our laws can be ignored or do not matter is irresponsible and does damage to faith in our electoral process. The rule of law matters in Pennsylvania.”

 

And yet, Bob Casey Jr. remains in the race. He now stakes his hopes on a statewide recount likely to flip fewer than a hundred votes, if that, from one column to another. In doing so, he is humiliating his own party by shamelessly inverting — and thereby vitiating — arguments they’ve lodged against others who refuse to accept legitimate electoral outcomes. The vote has been counted, the Pennsylvania supreme court has emphatically ruled, and it is now time for Senator Casey to spare Pennsylvanians any further farce, salvage what public dignity remains of his career, and publicly concede the election.