“It’s my turn!”
In the natural order of things, it’s customary to wait until your turn to take the next throw of the dice or play of the next card, or, in the case of American politics, to present your agenda for passage. That’s precisely what’s happening on Capitol Hill these days as anxious House Republicans await their opportunity to set the calendar and floor rules after spending the past three-plus years serving as driftwood to the tyrannical swells of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her caucus full of leftist radicals and would-be country transformers who’ve taken advantage of numbers to do pretty much whatever they wanted to do. Anyone who understands anything about how it works in Washington knows it isn’t much fun being in the House minority. Unlike in the senate, where a single senator can employ procedural rules and tradition to gum up the process -- at least temporarily -- a lowly minority House member must submit to the will of the majority… and like it. In today’s Congress, that means Pelosi sets the course of history, at least until she’s voted out. If San Fran Nan were akin to a football quarterback, she alone would call the plays, set the formations, snap the ball to herself and choose whom to hand it off or throw it to. Or, as her two tenures as speaker demonstrated, she keeps the ball herself on a perpetual quarterback sneak. Legislatively, she’s been stopped time after time, but then unilaterally declares a first down anyway and refuses to relinquish possession. Nanny P’s a bully and a prude at the same time. To liberals in the lower House, Pelosi is the Democrat party. Republicans don’t like it, but it hasn’t been their turn since Pelosi and company took back the majority in 2019 after Democrats swept the GOP out of power the previous November. Now, however, with polls consistently showing Republicans with an edge on the “generic” ballot, it appears almost certain that the balance will shift again in nine months, just as it did in 1994 and 2010. House Republicans aren’t just sitting on their hands waiting, either. Last week they announced what they intended to accomplish if the public opinion surveys ring true and the GOP takes the Speaker’s gavel out of Pelosi’s hands. Mike Lillis reported at The Hill:
“Republicans are eyeing an ambitious legislative agenda if they flip the House in November’s elections, setting the stage for countless clashes with President Biden on a host of thorny issues, from COVID-19 protocols and Big Tech to border security and the national debt. “The midterm cycle is historically brutal for the party of first-term presidents, and that track record — combined with Biden’s approval rating, which is underwater, and consumer inflation, which is soaring — has created a golden opportunity for Republicans to win back the lower chamber after just four years in the minority wilderness.
“With that in mind, GOP leaders are already turning their gaze beyond the elections to discuss how they’d wield their power, presuming they seize it. Their strategy features a series of lawmaker ‘task forces’ charged with itemizing the party’s top-tier reform ideas across a spectrum of hot-button issues — a wish list designed to serve as both a messaging tool on the campaign trail this year and a legislative guide in 2023 if they do gain the majority.”
Lillis additionally reported that a full spectrum of conservatives and Republicans is involved in the planning effort, from Club for Growth President David McIntosh to former Speaker Newt Gingrich. The range of issues to try and tackle is both wide and deep, everything from delving into the inept Biden administration’s COVID response to securing the southern border and, ambitiously, to pass a Balanced Budget Amendment.
Wow, that’s good stuff, right? Call me skeptical, but when push comes to shove, Republicans had better show more gumption for dismantling the damage Biden has done to the country than other GOP majorities did when their turn arrived. And after that, there should be legislation to return the country to limited government constitutional order. Under Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan, the party couldn’t agree on a set of agenda items much less pass them. The inertia frustrated President Trump and grassroots conservatives to no end.
The mere remembrance of the back-biting and bickering brings forth bad memories. But not this time, right? It’s my turn! The Democrats did their own celebrations and somersaults when it was their crack at running the show.
My how things change. Recall how the establishment media gloated over the Democrats’ 2018 victory, claiming that it was Pelosi and her colleagues’ shot at using the investigatory powers of Congress to delve into the sinister (to them, at least) dealings of Donald Trump and his administration team. No longer would Trump get away with anything! Liberals were in charge! The stars aligned in the heavens again! Voters came to their senses and yanked the authority right out from under the do-nothing Republicans!
Democrats would serve as the “check” on Trump’s excesses, remember?
Pelosi didn’t come right out and say it, but the hungry for revenge Democrats were primed to impeach Trump for all the purported high crimes and misdemeanors he’d committed in office and before it. They were bent on looking into his company’s tax returns to snoop out any wrongdoing. They would probe and investigate his family, too! Making too much money was a bad thing, unless it was a Democrat building the wealth pile!
Democrats originally denied they intended to remove Trump from office, but it didn’t take long for the wackos to convince poor ol’ Nancy P that the president couldn’t be allowed to finish his first term. Why wait for an election when you’ve got everything you need within arm’s reach in the House chamber? Plus, there was bug-eyed pencil neck geek Adam Schiff and 5’3” troll Jerrold Nadler ready to do the dirty work in committee, too.
Together with deep state cooperation, Democrats found a “whistleblower” and lined up a series of ruling class witnesses to testify as to how awful Trump was. After all, he’d mentioned Joe Biden in a phone call to the Ukrainian president and bingo! It was a quid pro quo! Let’s spend months on the insanity and then conduct a show trial in the senate! Heck, they “won” the public relations battle, right? Didn’t Mitt Romney vote to convict Trump?
Legislatively speaking, not much of what Democrats hoped for squeaked past “Murder Turtle” Mitch McConnell’s senate but that hasn’t stopped Pelosi from pushing bill after bill that would’ve codified the left’s wildest fantasies into law. And it certainly meant that Trump’s Make America Great Again agenda had no chance of becoming reality outside of the president’s executive order pen.
America no longer has the luxury of waiting to squelch the bleeding. The past three years and change have been an unmitigated disaster under Democrat control. The COVID spending alone (much of which was appropriated while Trump was still president) added trillions to the national debt -- and for what? There’ve been around 78 million confirmed cases and well over 900,000 deaths in the U.S. (not all of those solely attributable to the virus).
Question: If there were that many confirmed cases, how many were never confirmed or not even detected? To suggest that the virus hasn’t already invaded every nook and cranny of the country is pure folly. How much more needs to be dumped into this?
The economy was shutdown by order of the president and seconded by congressional leaders. Executive agencies like the CDC and NIH have overstepped to suppress freedoms with little pushback from Democrats in Congress. Bureaucrats like Dr. Anthony Fauci assumed the role of dictator rather than advisor, since president senile Joe made the man his COVID czar. Calling for the firing of Fauci should be the Republican House’s first order of business.
With Democrats retaining a filibuster worthy minority in the senate (if not a majority), much of what the GOP House comes up with will never see the light of day or print in the federal statute book. But this hardly means that Republicans will be helpless. With control over the government purse, Republicans can have their way with the budget if they stick together. Defund this, defund that. Democrats will need to pick and choose what to keep and what to let go of.
Or simply allow the government to shut down. The age-old establishment arguments of political fallout from such a move no longer carry weight. It might very well be that the only “results” the public can expect from a Republican House or complete control of the legislative branch (along with a conservative majority on the Supreme Court) is gridlock. That’s okay. At least senile Joe and gal pal veep Kamala won’t be permitted to revive the failed aspects of their own agenda.
And markers will be set for the all-important 2024 election where Republican majorities can be established or expanded. With a strong presidential nominee -- either Trump or someone with a commanding presence like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis -- the promise of a powerful liberty-centered government would serve as a positive campaign message.
If it does become Republicans’ “turn” to control the House, they’d best make the best of it. Conservatives will be watching closely.
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