Tag Archives: political parties

Toddler Temper Tantrums and the Fears of the Timid

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Karl Rove may be whistling past the graveyard in his Wednesday WSJ op-ed. He opened his piece with this lede:

Conventional wisdom is that Republicans will lose the US House this fall. That may be right.

Then he ran a counterargument.

Yet the conventional wisdom that Republicans will lose the House may be wrong.
One reason is retirements. Much has been made of how many Republicans are leaving, including talented members such as Wisconsin’s Mike Gallagher, North Carolina’s Patrick McHenry, and Washington’s Cathy McMorris Rodgers. But more Democrats (24) than Republicans (19) have announced their retirements. Moreover, all the Republican retirements are in overwhelmingly red districts. The only open GOP seat considered competitive—the Cook Political Report calls it “lean Republican”—is Colorado’s Third District. Cook’s partisan vote index—which estimates a district’s leaning relative to the country based on the two most recent presidential elections—labels it an R+7 seat.
Retiring Democrats represent more-competitive seats. Cook rates the open Michigan Seventh and Eighth districts as “toss-ups.” They are R+2 and R+1 respectively. Cook classifies the California 47th (D+3) and Virginia Seventh (D+1) as “lean Democrat.” The Maryland Sixth and New Hampshire Second (both D+2) are “likely Democrat.”

Rove gave too little credence to the damage the toddler temper tantrum, led by Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, GA) and her Chaos Caucus supporters, does. These toddlers may well hand the House Speakership, and control of the House agenda, to the Progressive-Democrat Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY) before the current session ends, especially given the number of nominally Conservative Republicans who are abjectly cutting and running from their House seats, whether at the end of the current session or quitting just as soon as they can get their desks cleared.

The inability of Republicans to agree among themselves on what to put forward—the Chaos Caucus blows up anything that doesn’t suit their veriest whims to t—and the party’s timidity in putting any Conservative policies forward and putting the onus on the Progressive-Democrat-ruled Senate and the White House to work with them—tells the voting public that this is a ragtag collection of junior high politicians not ready for the national obligations they have.

Rove also gave too little effect to the timidity of the remaining “mainstream” Republican Congressmen. There are number of legitimate conservative policies that are proposed by the Freedom Caucus (when they aren’t acting in their Chaos Caucus guise). These, though, are routinely rejected by too many of the other Republicans in the House Republican caucus under the excuse that the Progressive-Democratic Party Senators would never agree to them, and that the Progressive-Democrat President would never sign, even were something to get to his desk. So, these Republicans won’t even try. They’re too timid to do something that might force the Progressive-Democratic Party’s politicians to take a stand, much less to force them to work with Republicans. Instead, these Timid Republicans would rather try, meekly, to work with the Progressive-Democrats, ceding functional House control to the minority party.

That timidity isn’t encouraging for voters.

Rove also underestimated the effect on voters by those who are heading out the door just as the battle is heating up. That timidity may well turn off voters, voters who won’t vote for the overtly destructive Progressive-Democratic Party, but who find they can’t trust Republican candidates who might well run away themselves. These voters are likely to stay home, which with today’s divisions is the same as voting Progressive-Democrat.

More Progressive-Democrats (my term, not Rove’s) than Republicans are leaving the fight? Only by five, and that, out of 43 departures, is as thin as the current Republican nominal majority. The Republican Party, too, has demonstrated in elections from 2018 forward that it’s fully capable of throwing away eminently winnable seats and donating them to the Progressive-Democrats. It would take only a net gain of five seats to get Jeffries as Speaker.

Public disgust with a Republican Party populated, at least at the national level, with toddlers and timids may well cost us a government interested in our borders, our economic strength—our national security.

Whistling past the graveyard, indeed.

Another Example…

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…of the racist and sexist bigotry of the Biden administration.

The Biden administration’s Department of Agriculture has begun making disaster relief funding contingent on the race and sex of the disaster sufferer.

[T]he Biden administration has taken roughly $25 billion in disaster and pandemic aid approved by Congress for farmers in eight programs and devised a system to make awards based on race, gender, or other “socially disadvantaged” traits.

Texas farmers have filed suit to block this USDA move, noting that the

USDA does this by first defining farmers who are black/African-American, American Indian, Alaskan native, Hispanic, Asian-American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, or a woman as “socially disadvantaged.” Then, it provides farmers who qualify as socially disadvantaged more money for the same loss than those it deems non-underserved, along with other preferential treatment[.]

An unbigoted Biden administration never would have done this in the first place. The farmer’s lawsuit shouldn’t be necessary, and it wouldn’t be, absent this administration’s naked racism and sexism.

Progressive-Democratic Party Selling Out Israel

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Progressive-Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren (MA) wants to deny Israel F-15 fighters—in the middle of Israel’s war for survival against a Hamas and Islamic Jihad of Palestine’s effort to exterminate that nation. She’s gaslighting Americans with her premise that Israel is somehow responsible for the destruction and death that the terrorists are inflicting through their use of Gazan civilians as shields for the terrorists, and the terrorists’ use of civilian residences, schools, mosques and churches, and hospitals as cover for the terrorists’ weapons caches, launching sites, and command centers.

Nor is Warren’s move an isolated incident. It’s typical of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s sellout.

House [Progressive-]Democrats called on President Joe Biden to stop sending weapons to Israel following the country’s drone strike that killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in Gaza.

These wonders are using the tragically mistaken strike by the IDF as their own excuse to betray Israel. They don’t care that one of the things that makes the mistaken strike so notable is the utter rarity of such mistakes by the IDF and the enormous pains they go to to minimize civilian casualties. Those pains include, but are far from limited to, warning everyone in the target zone—including, in consequence, the terrorists—of an impending strike so the civilians (and terrorists) could leave beforehand.

This is the depth of the perfidy of the Progressive-Democratic Party that they’ve become so protective of the Hamas and IJP terrorists.

Putting Mayorkas on Trial

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Republican Senators Ted Cruz (TX) and Mike Lee (UT) opined on the Senate’s duty to hold a trial of DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas when the House delivers the articles of impeachment and on the Senate’s Progressive-Democrat Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (NY) intent to block any such trial. Toward the end of their piece, they offered this assessment of Schumer’s move:

He [Schumer] also wants to insulate Democrats from having to vote guilty or not guilty.

On this aspect of Schumer’s block I disagree.

Those Progressive-Democrat Senators who vote to table the impeachment trial will be putting themselves clearly on the record in two ways. One is that their vote to table will be their confession that they know Mayorkas (and Biden) are guilty and don’t want to have to vote against one of their own and, by implication, against Party’s boss on the matter.

The other is that they’ll be putting themselves on the record as lacking either the political courage to hold the trial, or the moral courage to hold the trial, or both.

An Argument for Patronage

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James Freeman described Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s move to strengthen bureaucracy’s and bureaucrats’ control over our Federal government. Citing a CNN report, Freeman wrote:

Betsy Klein and Tami Luhby report for CNN:

The Biden administration has finalized a new rule bolstering protections for career federal workers, marking a move to preemptively halt or significantly slow any efforts by former President Donald Trump, should he win in November, to reduce or alter the federal workforce.

No swamp-draining allowed! The new Biden rule from the Office of Personnel Management is intended to impede Mr. Trump if he wins the presidency again and revives an executive order he issued in October of 2020. The Trump order created the option of converting thousands of senior bureaucrats into at-will employees. The CNN team has more:

Trump’s executive order created a new classification of federal employees titled “Schedule F” for employees serving in “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating positions” that typically do not change during a presidential transition.

Why shouldn’t a duly elected president have the authority to hire and fire policymakers in his own administration?

Indeed. While it’s certainly true that one administration’s agency or departmental rules or a President’s Executive Orders can be undone by a subsequent administration, Biden is illustrating the need for a return to statutory patronage in the Federal government’s bureaucracy. Statutes, after all, while undoable by a subsequent Congress, are much harder to undo.

With a patronage modification, this: civil servants and bureaucrats are hired on five-year contracts. Those contracts then are renewed, or not, in five-year increments at the sole discretion of the then sitting President or relevant Department/Agency head. And this additional fillip: upon leaving Federal government employ, whether through resignation/retirement/termination or through simple non-renewal, that now ex-employee has his security clearance automatically withdrawn.