Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, people, one thing at a time.
One month and one day until the long-anticipated Election Day, 2022, Democrats and Republicans alike are bracing themselves for the possible changes to come. With most polls (the good ones and the slanted ones) showing the GOP with a solid chance to pick up more than enough House seats to hand Speaker Nancy Pelosi her career-ending walking papers, pundits and prognosticators from both sides are envisioning what’s in store if and when Republicans take over.
It's all conjecture, of course, with the GOP’s recently released “Commitment to America” supplying a broad overview of the likely future under Republican control, but with precious few specifics. Last week, the House Republican Study Committee got a bit more detailed with the group’s 80-item “Family Policy Agenda”, which clearly borrowed a page from Virginia GOP Governor Glenn Youngkin’s successful campaign from a year ago.
These are good starts, but much will depend on the new majority’s selection of a Speaker to carry out their wish lists. Current House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy seemingly has the inside track to wresting the gavel from Pelosi’s gnarled leftist hands in early January, which characteristically places a huge expectations burden on the central Californian’s narrow shoulders.
Most conservatives I’ve talked with are apprehensive about McCarthy’s willingness to be aggressive enough to push home conservative policies that will not only halt senile president Joe Biden’s disastrous reign of “woke” terror, they’ll put the wheels in motion to turn the country around prior to the all-important 2024 presidential election. To his credit, McCarthy seems to be saying all the correct things in the right circumstances and preliminary reviews of his combativeness have been mostly positive. We’ll see.
Democrats, on the other hand, appear terrified of the prospect of turning the people’s power over to Kevin McCarthy. How can this be? Are Democrats simply running out of issue topics to throw at voters in an attempt to dislodge them from voting Republican on Election Day? In a commentary titled “Kevin McCarthy would be a weak, disastrous Speaker”, the always good for an unintentional chuckle liberal Fox News mouthpiece Juan Williams wrote at The Hill:
“McCarthy’s approach to possibly being the next Speaker looks unsteady, like a man who fears he is walking his party and his country off a cliff. McCarthy’s trouble begins with polling that favors a GOP House majority after the midterms but by a narrow margin – perhaps fewer than 10 seats. That will make McCarthy less a leader than a puppet being controlled by the loudest Republicans on his far-right in the House and even louder voices ginning up outrage outside Washington on talk radio.
“Already there are screams for McCarthy to drag the party into fiery hearings to impeach President Biden as retribution for House Democrats twice impeaching former President Trump. The reality that Trump committed acts worthy of impeachment — such as inciting a riot at the Capitol — while Biden has done no such thing is less important to a future GOP majority in the House than staging a payback circus…
“The biggest challenge for McCarthy will come from calls among his members for a government shutdown to protest a range of grievances. That includes Congress’s own failure, stemming largely from Republican opposition, to pass immigration reform for the last 30 years.”
As I’ve often quipped in the past, that Juan is quite a kidder. Practically every sentence he commits to paper (or more likely, the computer) is chock full of distortions, half-truths and arguments, not facts. Republicans have been the roadblocks to immigration “reform”, Juan?
Williams omits that President Trump introduced a very sensible four-pronged immigration “reform” package when he was still in the White House, which included border security (a wall and meaningful reinforcements for the border patrol), some recognition/legalization of the DREAMERs, eliminating the inane “diversity lottery” and instead devoting those visas to skilled immigrants to come to the United States legally, and, ending chain migration, which has had unfathomable negative consequences on this country.
Trump’s was a full-throated immigration compromise that would have satisfied everyone but pleased no one. But Nancy Pelosi and “Chucky” Schumer wouldn’t go for it. The matter became so contentious that the nation endured a five-week government shutdown before Trump decided the wall could still be built with non-targeted defense funds instead of relying on Congress to do its job to secure the country. The “loyal opposition” was neither loyal nor merely opposed. They were anarchists.
Democrats are the obstructionists on immigration and a myriad of other issues, not Republicans. And having someone like Juan Williams griping and whining about Kevin McCarthy only demonstrates that there’s very little for them to say this year, so they’re getting desperate in their effort to save themselves.
The Democrats’ pathetic longing for something of electoral substance to use against Republicans this year kind of reminds me of a legendary analogy from Civil War lore. During the Battle of Second Manassas (or Second Bull Run for the Yankees) in late August of 1862, Confederate troops under the command of Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson were ordered to defend a section of their army’s line known then and today as the “Railroad Cut”. As you would guess by the name, the ground was a series of cuts and fills designed to hold railroad tracks – and also acted as a perfect set of man-made earthworks for a defensive position.
After several determined Union assaults on the center, the southern defenders ran low or out of ammunition. Rather than abandon a critical portion of the line and thus expose the regiments on either side to a potential breach, the rag tag soldiers of Stonewall’s brigade began hurling rocks and other debris at the federals before engaging in hand-to-hand combat. The temporary tactic worked and the hole was plugged. But no fighting man wants to be reduced to throwing rocks.
Which is basically what Democrats have engaged in for months now. Faced with the necessity of defending a hopelessly listless and faltering party president and then running short on excuses for the cavalcade of failures that resulted from the Democrats’ impossibly stupid policies, liberal candidates are out of rhetorical ammunition and must now use “rocks” to try and save themselves.
We’ve all seen it. How many times have Democrats gone on TV – either on liberal cable news and/or network Sunday shows or through false and deceptive political ads – and tried to use the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade overturning Dobbs decision to smear and debase Republicans? As though informed people required a refresher, the Supreme Court merely corrected the Constitutional record to mandate that state populations – through the ballot box – controlled the very controversial issue of abortion.
Democrats lie and distort the words of Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion, making it seem as though all abortions were outlawed, everywhere. It’s simply not true, unfortunately. For those who’ve labored on the pro-life cause for decades, there’s still a lot of work to do. There are millions of minds to change, beating hearts to protect, low-information voters to educate and propaganda to defeat.
To Democrats, abortion has become the fill-in ammunition (rocks?) to fling at Republicans when they’ve got nothing else of substance to offer Americans who are struggling under the crushing burden of inflation, ill-thought-out energy policies, non-existent economic growth, vastly higher interest rates and shrinking wages. The current economy isn’t sustainable. No additional government subsidies or giveaways will fix the problems, because Congress and the president are what created them in the first place. Democrats also tried tying the horrific damage caused by Hurricane Ian to “climate change” and the Republican Party’s reluctance to rely on an unproven theory to wreck the fossil fuel industry and go all-in on electric cars and so called “renewable energy” sources such as wind and solar. On his show last week, Fox News host Tucker Carlson said Democrats sought to place blame on the energy-consuming American public for “increased intensity” of hurricanes.
It's not true, but then again, neither is the Democrats’ hysterical hyperventilating over Dobbs and abortion, too. Not to be omitted in his writing was Juan Williams’ perfunctory dig at former President Donald Trump. Speaking of old and tired political arguments, Juan reasoned that, as Speaker, Kevin McCarthy would be virtually powerless because most of his members would be controlled by Trump’s mythical invisible reach. It’s almost as though Democrats would have everyone believe that conservatives and Republicans check in with Trump before visiting the restroom.
Trump remains highly influential in the Republican Party and probably will be the early leader for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024, but he doesn’t maneuver everything. Maybe Democrats are just jealous because they don’t have a strong leader like Trump to keep all of their competing factions in line. Perhaps Liz Cheney will resign from the GOP and provide liberals the unifying anti-Trump force that they seek.
Because Kevin McCarthy will never be that commanding all encompasing-type personality, no matter how earnestly folks like Juan Williams insist that he will be. McCarthy ain’t no Nancy Pelosi, put it that way.
Even if the Republican party does as well as expected next month and the Democrats are sent back to the various holes from which they came, the current liberal leadership will still have two months remaining to do plenty of damage in the lame duck session. Conservatives hope Kevin McCarthy is up to the job of leading a new Republican House majority. Will he be?
Joe Biden economy
inflation
Biden cognitive decline
gas prices,
Nancy Pelosi
Biden senile
January 6 Committee
Liz Cheney
Build Back Better
Joe Manchin
RINOs
Marjorie Taylor Green
Kevin McCarthy
Mitch McConnell
2022 elections
Donald Trump
2024 presidential election