It's been a while since we checked in on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s independent bid for the presidency. The former environmental lawyer turned anti-vaccine crank is still running, has announced a vice presidential running mate (who manages to be even more bizarre than he is), and is still looking for a way to get on all 50 state ballots.
In other words, modest progress, at best, to being a serious part of the national conversation.
Not that RFK, Jr.'s presence isn't stirring up Team Trump and Team Biden. According to the Wall Street Journal's Kim Strassel, Junior poses a mortal threat to the Biden re-election effort, and as such, Team Biden is pulling out any and all stops to thwart RFK's ballot access effort:
Mr. Kennedy's announcement this week of a running mate—tech entrepreneur Nicole Shanahan—was met with louder-than-usual howls of “Spoiler!” The Democratic National Committee is assembling a team dedicated to the destruction of Mr. Kennedy and other third-party candidates, led by veteran strategist Mary Beth Cahill. Left-wing groups are already working to block Mr. Kennedy from the ballot in key swing states, rolling out liberal legal titan Marc Elias to file complaints of campaign irregularities.
Well, bully for them. These are all standard tactics the two major political parties use to shape the candidates voters have to choose from in November. It's profoundly cynical, and, at least, for Democrats who ritualistically assert they are the only true defenders of democracy and voting rights.
Except when democracy and voting rights threaten, even remotely, to offer voters an alternative to the major parties. In those cases, Democrats can be as brutally authoritarian as the anti-democracy bogeyman in their anxiety closet.
As for the Trump campaign, they played both sides of the street on Kennedy's campaign. As the New York Times noted, Trump was all for Kennedy's effort…when he was running in the Democratic primary:
“I like him a lot. I've known him for a long time,” Mr. Trump said in an interview in September. “He's very much a libertarian in a certain way. And I think I have certain qualities along those lines, too, if you want to know the truth.”
However, after Mr. Kennedy opted instead to run as an independent candidate, the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee quickly began tying Mr. Kennedy to the left, arguing that his independent bid was an effort to deceive voters about his politics.
And so on. The bottom line is that neither major party likes competition on the ballot and finds creative ways to either elevate or erase the option from voters' minds and, if all goes well, their ballots, too.
But let's not forget that the animus toward third parties and independent candidacies is a strictly political phenomenon. The courts, up to and including the Supreme Court, are in on the game, too. As ballot access analyst and scholar Richard Winger wrote:
A close examination of the language in ballot-access cases demonstrates that the Court has consistently watered down the relevant constitutional inquiries when addressing claims by minor political parties because it sees these groups as a threat to orderly elections and to the stability of the major parties. The Court also underestimates the value of third parties because it tends to view elections as horse races in which it only matters who wins, and which otherwise serve no expressive function either for the individual voter or for the political parties involved.[emphasis added]
As Kennedy's campaign moves forward in the byzantine process of getting on the ballot in every state, we can expect the major parties and the courts to make the entire process even more burdensome.
We can also expect numerous, tedious, and increasingly cynical efforts to convince America that voting for any candidate who isn't on Team Red and Team Blue is the closest thing we have to a civic mortal sin. Don't forget: your vote doesn't belong to any party, candidate, idea, or group. It belongs entirely to you. Cast it wisely.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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