At this moment, Ohio Democrats and their Beltway masters are diligently working to steal the state’s 12th Congressional District from Republican Troy Balderson. Balderson’s Democratic opponent, Danny O’Connor, refused to concede after narrowly losing the special election and a few hours later — the county where he works — miraculously “discovered” 588 uncounted votes in a “routine audit.” When they were counted, Balderson’s lead shrank by 190. Similar skullduggery will accompany the count of provisional and absentee ballots, which will inevitably lead to an automatic recount, which will ultimately lead to an O’Connor “victory.”

What does this have to do with conservative confusion?

It’s a timely reminder that the Democratic Party is little more than a criminal conspiracy and that any conservative who sits at home during the midterms, griping about “GOPes,” will be complicit in the destruction of the republic. If this sounds over the top, think about who will take over the leadership of crucial committees if the Democrats flip enough seats to regain a majority in the House: Adam Schiff will probably become the Chairman of the Intelligence Committee — Adam Schiff! Before we go any further, think about that. This buffoon is still braying about Russian collusion even as he covers up the crimes of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Schiff’s first order of business as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee will be to halt any ongoing investigations into Obama administration abuses of power — particularly the illegal deployment of the FBI, CIA, and IRS against domestic political opponents of the Democratic Party, including the Trump presidential campaign. Schiff will likewise close down all inquiries into Mrs. Clinton’s copious catalogue of crimes. Having thus enabled Obama administration officials to escape justice, Schiff will then pivot to his primary goal — destroying the Trump Presidency. Just three months ago, he wrote the following in the New York Times:

[I]f President Trump participated in a conspiracy to defraud the United States during the campaign by colluding with the Russians, there is a historical basis for the Senate to remove him from office. It is even more clear that if he committed the offense of obstruction of justice while in office, that would provide a legal basis for removal.… During the course of our investigation in the House Intelligence Committee, we have found troubling evidence of both collusion and obstruction of justice.

Schiff will turn the Intelligence Committee into a Trump-seeking missile, and he’ll have lots of help from other committees. Maxine Waters, who calls for the President’s impeachment at every opportunity, is the ranking Democrat on the House Banking Committee. Other top Democrats on House committees who supported last January’s impeachment motion include Tim Walz (Veterans Affairs), Raúl Grijalva (Natural Resources), Bennie Thompson (Homeland Security), Frank Pallone (Energy & Commerce), Eliot Engel (Foreign Affairs), Jim McGovern (Rules), and Nydia Velázquez (Small Business). And this doesn’t include subcommittees.

This will not require a Democratic landslide. All it will take is a few thousand cranky conservatives in each of 23 pivotal congressional districts who can’t figure out who the bad guys are, who think the enemy is Speaker of the House Paul Ryan or Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. There are, of course, legitimate reasons to be disappointed with the GOP leadership. They didn’t work hard enough to rid us of Obamacare, and their fiscal incontinence has not exactly been a feather in their cap. But allowing the Democrats to capture a majority would be a disaster for the nation. As former Georgia Rep. Bob Barr writes at Fox News:

Even if the midterm elections do not result in the “blue wave” for which Democrats pine, a bare majority of one Democratic House member will cost the GOP every committee chairmanship, the speakership, and control of the legislative agenda.… Up to now, the question of impeachment has resided on the ideological and financial fringes of the Democratic Party.… All that will change on Nov. 7 if the previous day’s voting confirms a House and possibly a Senate majority win for the Democrats.

It doesn’t matter that the impeachment of the President, for mythical crimes committed in Adam Schiff’s tawdry little mind, wouldn’t result in a Senate conviction. Fighting it would involve so much White House time that virtually nothing else would get done. And this is the Democratic goal. President Trump, to the surprise of yours truly, has been a very effective president: On his watch, unemployment has dropped to 3.8 percent, economic growth is twice what it was under Obama, taxes have been cut for 8 in 10 Americans, Obamacare’s justly reviled individual mandate has been effectively repealed, the VA has been overhauled, ad infinitum.

The Democrats need to stop this, or they will go the way of the Whig Party. But they can’t pull it off by running empty-headed candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who thinks arithmetic is a conservative talking point. They can’t win a majority in either house of Congress by calling for open borders or pimping Medicare-for-All. They plan to regain their lost majorities by vote fraud — as they are demonstrating in Ohio’s 12th Congressional District right now — lying to the voters through their toad eaters in the legacy media, and demoralizing conservatives to the extent that they sit home on November 6, allowing hard-won GOP majorities to collapse.

OH-12 shouldn’t have been close enough for the Democrats to steal. The razor-thin majority by which Balderson won is the result of absent suburban voters who have forgotten that, after 2006, the Democrats nearly destroyed the U.S. economy and set the stage for the Obama era with all its trademark criminality. The Democrats are crooks and liars. Even worse, they are incompetent. If they are allowed to get their tentacles on the levers of power again, they will ruin everything they touch, and it will probably require more than mere votes to get rid of them next time. Conservatives can save the republic from all this by showing up for the midterms.