August 15, 2024
The Decline and Fall of RFK Jr.?
By John F. Di Leo
For months, election-watchers have wondered: will Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. make it onto enough states’ ballots to have an impact? Will he have the money to run a real campaign? And most importantly, who will he hurt more: Donald Trump or Kamala Harris?
One thing most didn’t expect was what happened on Monday, August 12: he was bounced from the ballot in the state he grew up in, on a technicality.
Now, election law has always been full of technicalities, and some of us would argue that there’s nothing wrong with that. Government is about compliance with the law, and if you’re too sloppy to comply on your very first responsibility — the paperwork that creates your candidacy — then arguably, you shouldn’t be in charge of writing, implementing, or enforcing the law.
Those of us who have been in politics a while have seen candidates bounced from the ballot for forged signatures on petitions, for missing a declaration or two, or even for incomplete pagination on the filing packet. And we usually don’t mind, as odd as it seems to outsiders, because we argue that if the candidate can’t be trusted to get these fundamentals right, then we can’t really trust him to keep campaign promises, or to notice pork that other pols sneak into bills, or to hold agencies to the line in department oversight.
But this week’s news was such a consequential violation that it was rather surprising.
more
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/08/the_decline_and_fall_of_rfk_jr.html
