DV Journal

Democrat commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia started a firestorm last week that has turned the eyes of the entire country, including U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton and the entire Washington Post Editorial Board, to Bucks County.

In a now-viral moment posted to X by the Bucks County GOP, and shared by the likes of Elon Musk, Commissioner Marseglia motioned to accept ballots in defiance of recent Pennsylvania Supreme Court rulings.

While Bucks is not the only Democrat-led county to ignore the state Supreme Court in seeming attempt to help Democrat Sen. Bob Casey (who previously endorsed Marseglia in her 2023 election) retain his seat, the downright hubris in her comments at the November commissioners’ meeting is the reason for her current notoriety. (It is worth noting that Marseglia’s campaign committee donated to Bob Casey’s campaign this year.)

In her rationale for ignoring the rulings of the Democrat majority Pennsylvania Supreme Court, Marseglia stated, “I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country. People violate laws anytime they want. So, for me, if I violate this law, it’s because I want a court to pay attention. There’s nothing more important than counting votes.”

She did not display this same level of concern for counting all votes in October, when Bucks County turned away voters in line for on-demand mail-in ballots well before the deadline, and was forced to extend the on-demand mail-in ballot deadline by a Bucks County judge.

Her tenure as both commissioner and member of the board of elections was marred by additional lies in October, when reports of individuals with seemingly official election lanyards, that were not county employees, was brought up in a commissioners’ meeting in October. Marseglia immediately pointed the finger at Republicans, stating “they weren’t from the Democratic Party,” and alleging they were Republicans, absent any evidence.

As it turned out, the badges seemed to have the words “paid for by the Pennsylvania Democratic Party,” directly printed on them. Marseglia was wrong again, and faced no repercussions.

Marseglia’s open disrespect of  the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s authority to rule on election laws is a stain on election integrity for Bucks County. Nobody is above the law, including Commissioner Marseglia.

How can Bucks County voters have any trust in their elections when their commissioner, who is also a member of the board of elections, openly ignores the rule of law that exists to protect the integrity of our elections?

Marseglia’s carelessness has made Bucks County the epicenter of election denial. For her part, she should resign and apologize to the people of Bucks County.

In a society governed by the rule of law, capturing and trying the intellectual force behind the 9/11 terror attacks, Ayman al-Zarahiri, would have been ideal but it was very unlikely. So kudos to the U.S. intelligence community under President Biden for doing the detailed work needed to locate a single individual among the millions of people in the Afghanistan/Pakistan region. 

Eleven years ago, in 2011, the same intelligence community, under President Barack Obama, found then al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden living in Pakistan near a base of the U.S.-allied Pakistani military. In that instance, the American military killed bin Laden with a Special Forces raid; this time, Zawahiri was killed by Hellfire missiles fired from a U.S. drone.

However, the usual fist-pumping and chest-beating triumphalism surrounding such counterterrorist killings will likely drown out any discussion of the larger questions about the excessively grandiose U.S. foreign policy that motivated al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks in the first place and continues in the attenuated form today. To their credit, presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden have indirectly raised questions about excessive interventions in the Middle East, which bin Laden, Zawahiri and al-Qaeda made very clear was their motivation for launching the 9/11 attacks and other successful strikes against American targets (for example, attacks against the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and the USS Cole in 2000).

The American people, not much on historical introspection, never have wanted to hear such “unpatriotic” talk, especially with their understandable desire for revenge in the aftermath of the catastrophic 9/11 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 American civilians. No excuse ever exists for such terrorism against innocents. But the U.S. government, after 9/11, should have at least privately taken notice of some of its own bumbling culpability for al-Qaeda’s potent retaliatory strike; and, after limited retaliation to quench a public thirst for retribution, brought a much lighter touch to the greater Middle East to reduce future motivation for Islamist radicals to strike U.S. targets.

Instead, then-President George W. Bush doubled down on the U.S. intervention in the Middle East that motivated al-Qaeda’s war on the United States in the first place. Instead of more limited retaliatory strikes against the al-Qaeda group, he chose to invade Afghanistan, take out the Taliban government, which was playing reluctant host to al-Qaeda, and then begin a long nation-building war that Biden ended two decades later. Even worse, Bush used public fear and furor over the 9/11 catastrophe to imply a false connection between al-Qaeda and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to carry out what seems to have been a personal vendetta against the Iraqi despot. 

The unneeded invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq turned into U.S. occupations that predictably drove more retaliatory Islamist terrorism, in those countries and worldwide. In Iraq, al-Qaeda’s resistance to the U.S. occupation morphed into the virulent Islamic State group, which eventually took over large parts of Iraq and Syria until it was beaten down by even further U.S. military intervention.

The two-decade Afghan invasion and nation-building war and the long Iraq invasion, occupation and reinvasion were unnecessary, costly (in lives and trillions of dollars), and counterproductive ways to fight terrorism.

The efforts by the United States over time to painstakingly find and kill terrorists with Special Forces raids and drone strikes show that Biden’s over-the-horizon approach to terrorism may not be ideal, but it is workable and is much less inflammatory to Islamist jihadists than costly and counterproductive quagmires on the ground in the greater Middle East.

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