As the school year begins this week, down here in the Magnolia State, Chris McDaniel and his legal team are preparing to teach Senator Thad Cochran a lesson.

WAPT reports from Jackson, MS, that

Lawyers for U.S. Senate candidate Chris McDaniel allege he defeated incumbent Thad Cochran by more than 15,000 votes in the June 24 Republican primary election.

“They asked us to put up or shut up — here we are,” McDaniel said in a news conference Monday.

McDaniel and his attorney, Mitch Tyner, said they’ll file an official legal challenge to the Mississippi Republican Party Executive Committee. 

“The facts are on our side. The law is on our side,” McDaniel said. “We look forward to our venue in front of the Republican Executive Committee. This is the opportunity for our party to take the lead on honest, good, transparent government.”

The Mississippi Republican Party nominated Cochran, the incumbent, as its candidate after certifying the results June 24 runoff election, which Cochran won by more than 7,000 votes.

Tyner said a review of the election results by McDaniel supporters found 3,500 crossover votes, 9,500 irregular votes and about 2,275 absentee ballots that were improperly cast, among other voting problems.

“We anticipate after they review the challenge, they’ll see Chris McDaniel clearly won the Republican vote in the runoff,” Tyner said. “Now, I say that very assuredly because that’s what the mathematics show, that’s not what I’m arguing.”

Mark Garriga, an attorney for the Cochran campaign, said Jackson law firm Butler Snow has been hired by Citizens for Cochran to defend the election challenge.

“Like other Mississippians, we have watched with interest as the McDaniel campaign has made repeated and baseless allegations of fraud and misconduct against not only members of the Cochran campaign staff, but also circuit clerks and volunteer poll workers around the state,” Garriga said in a statement. “The filing of this challenge marks the point where this matter moves from an arena of press conferences and rhetoric into a setting where nothing matters but admissible evidence and rule of law.”

Ten days after the appeal to the GOP committee, McDaniel can head to state court.

State GOP Chairman Joe Nosef said Monday that there’s a court case from the 1950s that may determine that the deadline to appeal the election has passed.

Nosef says there are no set rules for handling senate election appealhttp://t.co/7Z7uiK7wRRpic.twitter.com/Yj7NYiBEFy

— Scott Simmons (@ScottSimmonsNwz) Aug. 4, 2014

As a Mississippian, I have lost all faith in my state’s Republican Party. As regular readers know, I have gone after the out-of-touch National GOP Establishment incessantly, bestowing upon them the title of “Vichy Republicans”. However, in my naiveté, it never occurred to me that a politician from the Magnolia State, where we pride ourselves on our gentlemanly manners and Christian upbringing, could be just a big a cold-hearted snake as the spineless Speaker of the House and that product of Chicago Backroom Politics, the fallen messiah in the White House.

Brother,was I wrong.

The battle down here in Mississippi reflects the divisive battle being waged at a national level between the old guard “Moderate” (i.e., Liberal), Vichy Republicans and the Grassroots Conservative Political Movement, known as the TEA Party.

Back on June 25th, the undisputed Godfather of Conservative Radio Talk Show Hosts, Rush Limbaugh, said the following about the disgusting flyer (featured at the top of this blog) that the Cochran Campaign distributed among Mississippi’s Black Democrat Voters, in order to get them to vote illegally for their their candidate:

Now, it would be one thing if the Democrats did that. They do it every election cycle anyway. But for them to be joined, even if from a distance, by the Republican establishment here, simply confirms what we have long said on this program about establishment Washington. It is ruling class vs. country class. It’s elites vs. the plebes. You and me are the plebes, and they are the elites, and they are aligning together.

My friend Mark Levin, F. Lee Levin, makes the point that Washington is not going to be fixed from Washington. This proves it, if there was any proof needed. Washington is not going to be fixed in Washington. The establishment is going to align itself every which way it can against any outside challenger, like this Tea Party candidate. But it does look like African-Americans.

Democrat African-Americans really did secure the victory for Thad Cochran in a Republican primary. So here we have a result that is not representative of the Republican Party thinking in Mississippi. The technique that was used and the manner in which this was achieved is reprehensible.

A Former Republican Senator from our fair state was recently asked in an interview what he thought about the Cochran/McDaniel Scandal and the state of the Mississippi GOP, in general.

SunHerald.com has the story…

On the eve of Chris McDaniel’s major announcement today [Monday], former Sen. Trent Lott stepped back into the quagmire of the GOP’s effort to nominate a candidate for U.S. Senate. And, what he had to say has to be unsettling for his colleagues in the state Republican Party.

Lott hadn’t been heard from recently outside of a robocall he made for his former colleague Sen. Thad Cochran, late in the slugfest with McDaniel.

Sunday, he decided to sit with The Hill’s Alexandra Jaffe and Megan R. Wilson in Washington for a lengthy rumination on the state of the GOP back home.

Here’s the prognosis:

“This has shown the fissures that are there and I do think the party leaders – it may cause the need for some change in the party leadership,” Lott, now the co-chairman  of Squire Patton Boggs’ public policy practice, told The Hill.

He warned that the Mississippi establishment is ignoring the Tea Party wing of the GOP at their own peril.

“If they try to just stuff ’em or stiff ’em, and don’t realize that there’s a lesson to be learned there, it could be a problem,” said Lott, a former Senate majority leader.

Although he says “we are the Tea Party, philosophically,” he allows he’s also the kind of establishment figure that could have been a target.

“Times are so different. I don’t know how I would do, but I do know one thing: They’d have to take me out, because I’d sure go down swinging,” he said.

It has become very apparent to those of us in the Conservative Base of the Republican Party that the Old Guard “Vichy” Republicans, like Senator Thad Cochran, and in his day, Senator Trent Lott, care more about their Capitol Hill Way of Life, than their constituents. It is time for them to get out of the way, and allow Sen. Cruz and these new TEA Party Conservatives, like Chris McDaniel, to lead the battle against Obama and his corrupt anti-American Administration.

Because, as the old saying goes,

If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.

Until He Comes,

KJ