Hard as it is to believe, most Americans likely took a break from the incessant political turmoil the past few days to mingle with family and friends in a social setting or simply do
the things “normal” people did when they weren’t obsessing on overhyped health threats or what’s going on hundreds or thousands of miles away from themselves in a far-off capital.
My family gathered to celebrate a wedding and two anniversaries on the weekend. Seeing smiling faces and mask-less people hugging and shaking hands again was a terrific experience after a year’s worth of regional confinement for our geographically scattered group. To my knowledge, the COVID pandemic is still in existence, but the paranoia seems to have eased quite a lot. Dr. Anthony Fauci isn’t dominating the news as much. Does anyone miss him?
Regardless of the precious hours’ respite from the backbiting, bickering and finger-pointing of politics, it’s clear that the Washington stalemate still exists and isn’t dying down. Like a chronic medical condition that might feel better for a time but then resurfaces with a raging force, Democrats have now had several months’ worth of inactions on their disastrous agenda to stew over, and one foresees that their calls to counteract the senate filibuster will grow louder and louder as time goes by and the legislative casualties pile up.
The divided nation is mirrored by a Congress literally split down the middle. The rumblings of a change in attitude are already in existence on one side. Brace yourself for the rancor to come. Rep. Val Demings wrote at the USA Today:
“The future of our republic is being decided, and by some quirk of history, a once-obscure Senate procedure is at the center of it.
“The filibuster threatens the freedoms of every American, no matter the color of your skin, your gender, ZIP code, political party, or how much money you have (or don’t have) in the bank. The filibuster doesn't just mean a minority of senators can block critical legislation on everything from voting rights to the minimum wage. The filibuster undermines the basic principle that makes our democracy work: government of the people, by the people, for the people...
“But the people voted. They chose their representatives. We cannot simply sit on our hands doing nothing during critical national emergencies. It’s true that, perhaps, the other party will take power, and perhaps they will pass legislation that I believe would be bad for middle class families across our nation. But that’s how a democracy works.”
Thanks for the civics lesson, Val. The Florida Democrat congresswoman is expected to represent her party and run against Sen. Marco Rubio in The Sunshine State next year. If she somehow were to win, she’d be in position to vote out the minority-protecting senate tradition that is the filibuster. You may recall it was about a year ago this time that Demings’ name was prominently mentioned as a leading contender to be senile Joe Biden’s running mate. The media hyped her because she fit the two main demographic qualifications for the selection committee: she’s African-American, and, a woman who identifies as female.
Which begs an important question in these all-too-interesting and confusing times: Would Biden have considered a transgender woman for the position under the circumstances? Talk about being ultra-“woke” and cool at the same time. At any rate, Kamala Harris got the job, probably because she’d already been semi-vetted as a presidential candidate and let’s face it, is more surface pleasing than Demings.
The two-term House member did get some national exposure alongside Adam “Shifty” Schiff and 5’ 3” troll-like Jerrold Nadler during the first Trump impeachment trial before the Chinese virus craze hit, where she spent hours in front of the CSPAN cameras telling us how awful then-president Donald Trump was. She could’ve used her platform to blast on the filibuster back then, but the Republicans held the majority at the time. Why the hypocrisy?
Without coming right out and saying it, Val has now laid the foundation for what will be the Democrats’ next round of verbal (and maybe physical?) assaults against the filibuster: namely, that it is preventing Congress (translation: Democrats) from confronting “critical national emergencies.” Everything is a pending disaster in Democrat-land -- except for themselves, of course -- and most assuredly the effective use of the filibuster by Mitch McConnell has threatened our very existence.
If you listened to the radical leftists in the Democrat party, just about every principle that conservatives believe in constitutes an “existential threat” to somebody’s life. To Democrats, if Georgia’s legislature passed a law reducing the number of days people can vote early by a couple, democracy’s existence is under siege. It was comical listening to liberals assail the common-sense Peach State law because they said thirsty black voters would be denied water because interest groups wouldn’t be allowed to solicit them while in line at their precinct.
I wonder if Ms. Demings would be in favor of instructing voters of all colors that the rules apply equally to everybody, and rural white voters might just as well pass out from dehydration as dark-skinned fellow citizens in Fulton County.
Not to be left out is the awful life-challenging “climate change” menace. Wow, it was dang hot in Portland last week, wasn’t it? I saw one news report where there was a mad consumer run on air conditioner purchases because less than half the homes in Oregon and Washington have one. Why? Because 99.9 percent of the time they don’t need cooler air. It’s kind of like no one has a furnace in Hawaii, either. Or what about that freak cold spell in Texas earlier this year?
Not to outdo herself, Demings outlandishly claimed that the filibuster is responsible for stalling racial progress and cited an anti-lynching law that was blocked over a hundred years ago, in 1918, as an example. And there still is no anti-lynching law today! With the rampant (not!) nature of lynching in this country, we need a law criminalizing it just about as much as we do legislation that federalizes all elections. This is a “critical national emergency”?
If the southern border crisis doesn’t fit the category, what does? Joe Biden could address it with sweeps of his executive pen if he so chose. No filibuster needed!
It takes a giant leap of faith to swallow Demings’ plea that the filibuster alone is the source of major suffering based on wicked Republican state legislatures doing mean things like requiring a valid ID to cast a vote or limiting the amount of weekend early voting hours. Democrats like Val will do and say anything to rile up her voter base, including railing against a senate practice that a year ago she would’ve defended to the hilt.
No one ever claimed politicians had good memories, but Republicans held both houses of Congress and the presidency up until January, 2019, and there weren’t any Democrats complaining back then about how national emergencies weren’t being addressed because they were the ones blocking major agenda items from going through. During Donald Trump’s entire presidency, then-Minority Leader “Chucky” Schumer slow-walked everything he possibly could, including administration and judicial nominees, both of which were no longer subject to the filibuster thanks to Harry Reid’s having “nuked” the practice a few years prior in those categories.
Recall that former president Trump also called for getting rid of the filibuster when the Republican senate couldn’t pass a repeal and replace of Obamacare as well as honestly thought-through immigration reform proposals (among others). For years, Democrats moaned and cried over the poor unfortunate fate of the “DREAMERS”, yet wouldn’t agree to overhaul the legal immigration system and to construct a border wall in exchange for granting resident status to the class.
Demings and her fellow Democrat gripers aren’t fooling anyone. “Democracy” is not at stake here, but the Democrat agenda is certainly in peril. The party’s presidential candidates spent the better part of two years promising everything -- including a proverbial government paid-for kitchen sink -- if they were ever given complete control of Congress and Trump was removed from office. Now that “democracy” (fraud?) gave them the chance, they’re frustrated that they just can’t steamroll over the minority.
Not even a complicit establishment media is able to move the needle for the Dems. The talkers have joined in the pressure campaign to get Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to relent on their support for the 60-vote threshold. Does this mean one man from West Virginia and one woman from Arizona are effectively bringing down the “future of the republic”?
The fact is, even if the filibuster were gone today, Democrats would still face a mighty uphill climb to pass the most atrocious items on their wish-list. Mitch McConnell’s been doing some threatening of his own, suggesting he’d use every procedural trick in his book to stall the senate’s business to a standstill. Democrats wouldn’t enjoy the consequences.
Val Demings
filibuster
Chuck Schumer
Nancy Pelosi
Mitch McConnell
Joe Manchin
Kyrsten Sinema
Biden Agenda
Climate change
2020 Election
Donald Trump