It looks like the Republicans come January will control both houses of Congress. The government will still be divided, so neither party will make any big legislative changes in the next two years. The president will no doubt use executive orders to get around Congress to push the Dems’ agenda, but such tinkering is hostage to the next president. So what should the Republicans do for the next two years?
We know what they shouldn’t do, and that’s indulge in happy talk about “bipartisanship” or “reaching across the aisle” or trying “to get things done.” The Democrats have swung so far to the left that there’s very little common ground, outside a national emergency, on which to base cooperation. The moderate Democrat is a near-extinct species, and the radical ideologues have cowed them into compliance. Most Dems who have some common sense and respect for the Constitution’s checks and balances against tyranny have been silenced.
So first, the Republicans must ignore charges of “obstructionism” and “partisanship.” The first principle of the Constitution is “first do no harm,” and one way to do that is for our Senators and Representatives to “set ambition against ambition,” and use their Constitutional powers to stymie the Dems’ tyrannical ambitions. These days that means, as Florida Senator Marco Rubio put it, that the Senate’s “most important job” in a divided government is “to stop bad things from happening,” like confirming the president’s nominees for the courts, his cabinet, and other federal officials.
So no more talk like “the president deserves to have his nominees ratified.” That, and the Republican preemptive cringe when it comes to race and sex, is how we get Supreme Court justices whose only recommendation is their race and/or sex. Like Orwell’s saints, all Biden’s picks should be presumed guilty until proven innocent.
In other words, the next two years should see a concerted effort to start holding accountable the bipartisan, big-government guild that too many Republicans have joined, accepting many progressive assumptions about, for example, the role of the federal government in creating, managing, and expanding federal agencies.
Some commentators have, with good reason, focused on the most dangerous bipartisan consensus: the redistribution of taxpayer money through entitlements. The consequences include our metastasizing federal deficits and debt paid for by borrowing or creating money, thus mortgaging our children’s and grandchildren’s futures. And it compromises our military readiness by starving the Pentagon of needed funds to counterbalance China’s long military build-up specifically designed to challenge the U.S.
Unfortunately, reforming entitlement spending is unlikely to be seriously addressed even if the Republicans take control of the government in 2024, despite the fact that increasing longevity and fewer workers mean the big three budget-devouring entitlements––Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which along with other health-care spending already devour half the annual budget––will face an influx of retirees into the system, at the same time that payroll taxes diminish, putting even more strain on the nation’s budget.
The problem is too many voters have become addicted to government largess and regard it as a sacrosanct right, deterring politicians of both parties from fixing this mess. For example, the House is charged with initiating government spending, the so-called “power of the purse.” But representatives in the past have faced fierce media attacks that demonize congressmen who want to use that Constitutional power to address this problem.
For now, then, the Republicans need to tackle what they can do––exercise their oversight powers to investigate publicly executive-office functionaries of agencies that are the mechanisms for federal interference in the sovereign states, individuals, families, and civil society. And the most dangerous of these agencies is the FBI and its boss, the DOJ, which have the power, backed up by lethal force, to investigate, surveil, charge, and try citizens.
For six years, we have witnessed the politicization of these agencies and the abuse of their power that has disregarded the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal treatment under the law. From the Russia hoax to Hunter Biden’s laptop, Hillary’s rogue server to the January 6 political prisoners, the FBI has brazenly used those powers to benefit one political party at the expense of the other. This violation of the bedrock principle of equality before the law has brought us closer to tyranny.
Moreover, the House Judiciary Committee has already done much of the investigative work in their 1050-page report “FBI Whistleblowers: What Their Disclosures Indicate about the Politicization of the FBI and the Department of Justice,” which blames the political corruption of agency chiefs Christopher Wray and Merrick Garland.
The report’s Executive Summary, for example, writes that the FBI leadership “is artificially inflating statistics about domestic violent extremism,” and “pressuring line agents to reclassify cases as domestic violent extremism,” thus “misrepresenting the scale of domestic violent extremism nationwide” by “categorizing January 6th-related investigations as organic cases stemming from local field offices, instead of all related to one single incident.”
Similarly, Biden, at the behest of the National School Board Association, suggested the FBI used “the Patriot Act against American parents,” and then, at the direction of DOJ chief Merrick Garland, had “the FBI Counterterrorism Division set up a special ‘threat tag’ to track school board-related cases.” The FBI also “had abused its foreign intelligence authority to spy on American citizens, including people associated” with Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. And the FBI “is clearing the Bureau of employees who dissent from its woke leftist agenda,” and “actively seeking to ‘purge’ FBI employees holding conservative views.” As a result of this illegal use of the agency, the ‘“criminal side’” of the FBI is being ‘“dragg[ed] down,’” resulting in resources being ‘“pulled away’” from ‘“real law enforcement duties’” like child sexual abuse.
These are just a small sample of Christopher Wray’s and Merrick Garland’s politicization of their agencies and violations of their oaths to uphold the Constitution. And the reason is clear:
To manufacture a “crisis” that the Biden administration is not letting “go to waste,” in order to expand its un-Constitutional assaults on the Dems’ political enemies.
The gravity and danger of this corruption cannot stand. If there is a Republican House and Senate, or even just the House, public hearings must be held, with subpoenas issued and Wray and Garland forced to testify under oath, or be prosecuted if they refuse, and charged if they commit perjury. And these hearings should be just the beginning of holding accountable those who politicize their public office.
For that road ends in tyranny: “arbitrary power,” as Aristotle wrote, “which is responsible to no one, and governs all alike, whether equals or betters, with a view to its own advantage, not to that of its subjects, and therefore against their will. No free man willingly endures such a government.”
The corruption of government agencies is a textbook illustration of an assault on our freedoms. We need our new House of Representatives and Senate to show that they ßare worthy representatives of free men.
“The Democrats have swung so far to the left that there’s very little common ground, outside a national emergency, on which to base cooperation. ”
As you point out later in the article, these emergency situations are being very deliberately CREATED. Mostly by the U.N.
THE CHOICE: (R)ED OR (☭)ED!
WE ALL KNOW that the Democrats have aided and abetted every enemy starting with Vietnam when the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) teamed up the KGB’S WORLD PEACE COUNCIL to start the peace movement with their logo, “Peace as a Weapon of War.” They recruited millions.
THEN IN 1979, Michael Myerson started the UNITED STATES PEACE COUNCIL run by the CPUSA and teamed up again with the KGB to take over CENTRAL AMERICA! (Nicaragua still run by Daniel Ortega and their fronts are taking over SOUTH AMERICA, not on the battlefield, but at the Voting Booth. “FREE FREE FREE BUT YOU MUST VOTE FOR ME!” which is the Democratic Party slogan. IT WORKS!)
AGAIN, THEY RECRUITED MILLIONS as those people are now our teachers, professors, Hollywood, MSM, city, state, national leaders, in Congress, and one CPUSA/KGB RECRUIT BECAME PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA, THE KGB’S PROUDEST MOMENT. He then surrounds himself with the same recruits that he then appoints to head departments which were then used to attack ALL political opponents and, in a coup attempt against a Sitting President.
PART TWO: Moderator says too long so I have to split it.
WHEN THE PEOPLE OF CUBA rose up against Castro and the regime, it was the DEMOCRATS who quickly came to the defense of THE COMMUNISTS and not the people who have lived in The Island Prison Society for decades. They blamed it on the embargo. College groups are still going there on their “fact-finding missions” but in order to be allowed to go, they have to have their facts straight first.
THE JOB OF THE MILLIONS OF CPUSA/KGB RECRUITS, NOW DEMOCRATS, is to recruit the next generation of Communists we see in the streets.
OBAMA is creating the conditions for The Downfall of the United States so he can be seen as the man who brought down The Empire and who will be a hero to BILLIONS AND ONLY HATED BY MILLIONS!
THE CHOICE: (R)ED OR (☭)ED!
Just to clarify: You think Obama is a KGB agent?
Ask Marshall Davis – his communist mentor.
Ok, again, you think Obama is a KGB agent?
Since Obama was surrounded by Communists for most of his life, it is very possible he was at least a tool of the KGB.
He wasn’t, but let’s say he was: You’re basically saying that hanging around with communists means that you must be an agent of a foreign intelligence agency?
probably not – the russians aren’t known for a love of homosexuals – but hussein is basically a presentable mediocrity/empty suit who shallow no nothings, like you, drool over
shallow KNOW nothings……:-)
The only issue that matters…. Nuremberg like trials for those responsible for and complicit with (and that includes republicans) the medical tyranny of the last several years….that’s the single issue.
Right, put people on trial for trying to stop a deadly disease. You’re not crazy at all.
Why not? We put people on trial for walking into the Capitol.
Yeah, the treason monkeys just strolled in, had a look around, and strolled out. That’s what happened…
No, the treason monkeys were the ones who jumped in front of the protesters and started rioting and hijacking the real purpose of the protesters.
They were just following orders.
Nothing even close to correcting the mud slide will happen under McConnell and McCarthy.
McConnell is spending millions to keep Murkowski in the Senate and trying to stop Sarah Palin, so you have a point.
Remember the Reagan “Revolution”? It wasn’t a revolution at all, it was a dying gasp for air, a dying spasm. Then the statist-collectivist-socialist-fascist-nihilist Leftist shark came back in 2008 (Obama) to attack once again and take the swimmer down once and for all. Remember the Republican “Revolution” of 1994? Another even weaker gasp for air, another but even weaker dying reach for life. Then Donald Trump, this time it wasn’t even labeled a “revolution”, the shark quickly attacked again, this time even more ferociously. Each new “revolution” becomes weaker than the last as the swimmer exhausts herself and the shark circles the swimmer prepaing for the final takedown.
The swimmer is the USA.
“Remember the Republican “Revolution” of 1994?” – Michael J. Hurd
I remember the Republican “revolution” of 1994, probably a bigger electoral victory than Republicans will experience next week. D.C. was a little less corrupt back then (not saying much), and Newt Gingrich meant well, as evidenced by the massive spending cuts (including all out elimination of entire federal agencies) he tried to pass. Two years later, it was a heap of ashes, Gingrich was ousted (like Trump 25 years later) and the cancer of irrationality and unlimited government regressed to the breaking point we see today.
Go out and vote, and create a Red Wave. Sure, why not? But it will be a brief injection of adrenaline, not a solution. We need either to get rid of the corrupt regime in D.C. completely, or freedom loving states will have to secede. It’s no longer fixable. The toxic bureaucrats remained in charge while Trump was President, and surely Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell will be no match for them.
Somehow I don’t think you will be part of any secessionist movement. That would require sacrifice on your part, something which you incapable of.
Why would I commit a sacrifice? Sacrifice is EVIL. The world is perishing from an orgy of altruism and self-sacrifice.
“Your self is your mind; renounce it and you become a chunk of meat ready for any cannibal to swallow….
If a man dies fighting for his own freedom, it is not a sacrifice: he is not willing to live as a slave; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of man who’s willing….
You have chosen to risk your lives for the defense of this country. I will not insult you by saying that you are dedicated to selfless service — it is not a virtue in my morality. In my morality, the defense of one’s country means that a man is personally unwilling to live as a conquered slave of any enemy, foreign or domestic. This is an enormous [selfish] virtue. Some of you may not be consciously aware of it. I want to help you realize it.” – Ayn Rand, address given to the graduating class of West Point, 1974
If there is a successful secessionist movement I thank God you will not be part of it. Just continue being the selfish little worm that you always have been. The sad thing is you will be able to take part in the result because you are a silly little hypocrite.
Enjoying the fruits of success without earning any of it. Sounds like a progressive, doesn’t it.
Sorry THX, there won’t be your Objectivist revolution no matter what the results are today. But thanks for that moronic vote of confidence re: America.
You are destined to be disappointed forever.
Objectivism is the answer if America, the West, and the rest of the world, is to have a future of freedom, liberty, and capitalism.
If you think Christianity leads to freedom, liberty, capitalism, and the personal pursuit of happiness on earth, you are destined to be disappointed forever.
“Christianity prepared the ground. It paved the way for modern totalitarianism by entrenching three fundamentals in the Western mind: in metaphysics, the worship of the supernatural; in epistemology, the reliance on faith; as a consequence, in ethics, the reverence for self-sacrifice.” – Leonard Peikoff
Capitalism is incompatible with freedom and liberty.
So says our rezidentura communist loser from across the pond.
except that it’s failed miserably and led to countless deaths wherever it’s been inflicted on people
In your simple little mind you may think that. But to win requires effort, something that you are simply incapable of grasping. Freedom isn’t free, much as you want it to be. Objectivism is the loser’s philosophy.
And I don’t have to sit around quoting some loser to prove a point. Peek-a-boo? Really? As bib a do nothing loser as you are.
There’s a very simple way to fund entitlements: Raise taxes on rich people. You know, the people most able to pay. Just a thought.
Of course, that won’t happen in America, because in America rich people get everything they want and everyone else can f— off and die. Nice country you got there.
I got a tax cut under Trump and Bush II. And I am not rich.
You really do think like a loser Communist. In case you haven’t noticed progressivism socialism and Communism fail everywhere they are tried. That is why the Democrats will take a beating today, unless they cheat, like we know they will try to do.
That is why your dink country will always be a dink country.
You got a tax cut for what? A few hundred dollars? A few thousand? Your plutocrats are getting tax cuts in the millions if not billions. What doesn’t get cut they avoid paying like Trump did. Meanwhile you get to pay for shrinking entitlements that they don’t need anyway. You’re screwing yourself and you don’t even know it. Hilarious.
You couldn’t tax the rich enough to pay for our bloated entitlements. That’s why we print money now. Besides the rich shelter their money anyway. If you weren’t blood sucking Communist you could do that too.
And the rich people that you hate are all woke Democrats now anyway. Hence the name the Woke Coasts….where all the rich people are.
Somehow I don’t feel screwed as much as you want me to feel that way.
You couldn’t tax the rich enough, but you can tax the middle class enough? That makes literally no sense. Why on earth would you not want to take the tax burden off yourself and put it on to people who could buy Belize tomorrow if they wanted to? It’s INSANE. I really don’t understand Americans… You seem completely masochistic.
how much is enough for a freeloader like you???
Thornton suggests prosecution of Garland and/or Wray if necessary. But what agency can legally do this? Maybe the House can force these two men to prosecute themselves, or each other. They may be vulnerable, at least to a certain extent, beginning in 2025. But that’s a long time from now.
It’s time for this uni-party CRAP to end once and for all. If you can’t do you job we the American Public will find people the can.
I read the comments posted regarding this article, but in the final analysis, if the American government does not begin to address the real problems facing this nation, we are not going to make it. Because America and the people themselves have so many problems, I am not optimistic about America’s future.