Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) is tired of the Republican Party.
I wish the Republican Party would be—somebody would take it back, that we’d have a real Republican Party.
The Progressive-Democratic Party position, as demonstrated by Pelosi, is that the Republican Party should go back to being satisfied with being the loyal opposition and stop being so uppity.
Senator Tommy Tuberville (R, AL) has a hold on a number of President Joe Biden’s (D) DoD appointments and promotion lists—something often distorted into being an outright block, but in fact is only a requirement that these appointments and lists go through by floor votes in the Senate rather than by rubber stamp, unconsidered unanimous consent. Tuberville’s hold is motivated by his opposition to SecDef Lloyd Austin’s insistence that DoD fund military members’ abortions, travel to locations providing abortions, and abortion-related services. It’s bad enough that DoD would cover these expenses—can only cover these expenses—with taxpayer monies, but Austin’s insistence is in direct violation of the Hyde Amendment, which blocks just such taxpayer-funded expenses.
And that’s before we get to the immorality of killing unborn babies in the first place.
Lucas Kunce is a Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for Senate from Missouri and is running against the incumbent Josh Hawley. He decries Tuberville’s hold. He thinks Tuberville’s hold is negatively impacting national security, and he cynically wraps himself in his 13 years as a Marine, including his time in the badly bloated (my characterization) Pentagon.
Kunce has it backwards, and cynically so. To the extent the lack of these appointments and lists affects national security, that is solely from Austin’s insistence on DoD support for abortion. If Kunce—and Austin and Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D), the latter whom controls the Senate’s vote schedule—were serious about claims of national security risk, they’d leave off from holding out for abortion at taxpayer expense. They’d drop that matter and allow the appointments and lists to go through, or they’d push for the floor votes; either way, they’d desist from using the disagreement for their personal political gain.
Recall that, in the wake of Vice President Kamala Harris’ (D) slur regarding Florida’s updated education curriculum, Governor Ron DeSantis (R) invited her to Florida to discuss with him that curriculum.
Harris doesn’t want to. She made it to Florida, though, to talk to the 20th Women’s Missionary Society of the African Methodist Episcopal Church Quadrennial Convention. That’s where she made her excuses and backed away.
They attempt to legitimize these unnecessary debates with a proposal that most recently came in of a politically motivated roundtable[.]
Well, I’m here in Florida, and I will tell you there is no roundtable, no lecture, no invitation we will accept to debate an undeniable fact. There were no redeeming qualities of slavery.
The core of her excuse-making is that strawman of hers, a dolly she’ll have to play with by herself. No one is suggesting, including in the curriculum, that there are, or were, any redeeming qualities of slavery. Nor was that the subject of the discussion DeSantis offered; he offered to discuss the curriculum and how it proposed to teach, in the proximate matter, black history, including slavery, in the United States and in Florida.
It’s easy to sit in the safety of the sidelines and carp. It’s cowardly, too, but it’s entirely consistent for the border tsar who’s never been to our southern border.
…out loud, to coin a hackneyed, but cogent, phrase.
On the matter of Federal government industrial farm policy, the Biden administration has made itself crystalline. This is the backdrop:
In January 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect, followed by other trade pacts, which significantly increased commercial opportunities for American farmers. Those arrangements have borne great fruit: US agriculture exports stood at $196 billion in 2022, up from $62.8 billion in 1997.
President Joe Biden’s (D) National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, doesn’t like that, but in a recent speech, Sullivan went even more broad than just NAFTA, to openly disparage the general policy environment surrounding the development of that treaty. Sullivan lamented that this era of policy was one that
championed tax cutting and deregulation, privatization over public action, and trade liberalization as an end in itself.
Because leaving more money in the hands of us ordinary citizens by taking less of it as taxes, by reducing our cost of doing business by getting regulations out of our way, is inherently bad, says this maven of the Progressive-Democratic Party. Even more: public action must take precedence over private action—because, apparently, Government Knows Better than us ignorant ordinary citizens. And trade liberalization, which further reduces our costs, is a bad end in itself.
This demand that Government must control what our private enterprises produce is a well-understood and textbook…ideology…regarding the importance of government control over our lives. And it’s a central plank of the Progressive-Democratic Party platform.
Too many Republican Senators are joining their Senate Progressive-Democrat colleagues in pushing Senator Tommy Tuberville (R, AL) to drop his blocking of President Joe Biden’s (D) military appointments and flag officer promotions.
Tuberville is holding up—not blocking—final confirmation votes on those appointments and promotion lists over SecDef’s insistence on using taxpayer funds to pay for abortion and abortion-related services used by military members and/or families.
Tuberville isn’t holding up anything; he’s merely blocking blanket moves to use unanimous consent for approval. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) readily enough could bring each of those appointments and promotion lists to the Senate floor for votes, but they refuse. Apparently, they want, instead, the spectacle of the holdup.
That’s a minor point, though. The larger point is SecDef Lloyd Austin’s stubbornness in demanding that those tax dollars be used for abortion services, Hyde Amendment be damned, on the legal front, and he just doesn’t care about those babies’ lives on the moral front.
If Austin wants his promotion lists, and if Biden wants his appointments, all they need do is remove their demand to spend our money on abortion services and on abortion.
It’s that straightforward.