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It’s Long Past Time to Bend the Senate to the Will of the People
We’ll begin by revisiting some history that everybody here already knows.
Donald Trump’s first term was greatly hamstrung by the Republicans in the U.S. Senate, who were more interested in preventing him from taking over the GOP than in paying off Republican voters for putting their party in control.
There are lots of examples of how this happened. Here is the best example:
Repealing Obamacare and opening the door to a market-based health care reform plan was a fundamental promise that every Republican running for office in 2016 made. And yet Mitch McConnell, the then-majority leader in the U.S. Senate, allowed John McCain to torpedo that promise for the entire party and doom the Republican majority — something that would pay off in the 2020 election.
But in lots of ways, in those first two years of Trump’s term, the America First agenda was tripped up and retarded by that Senate caucus. And when it was over, a handful of them even voted to impeach Trump over his exhortation to supporters that they peaceably assert their First Amendment right to protest on Jan. 6, 2021.
Our readers are very well aware that there exists a Republican Party in Washington, D.C., that is very different from the one elsewhere in America, and a major part of the story of the past eight or nine years (actually, it’s been going on a lot longer than that) has been the conflict between the two.
The great Angelo Codevilla, writing here at The American Spectator back in 2010, described the binary in terms larger than just within the GOP. Codevilla said, accurately, that America was divided between the ruling class and the country class, and this divide cut across party lines — though the Democrats were clearly the dominant party of the ruling class.
I’ve said that those Republicans tying themselves to the ruling class, whether Never Trumpers or simply old-school establishment types, are the Washington Generals of American politics — happy to be rolled time and again by their superiors on the other side of the too-cozy aisle. McCain’s “thumbs down” Obamacare vote was eminently emblematic of that.
But the Washington Generals are no longer in season.
Trump absolutely represents the country-class GOP, and last week it became absolutely clear that the Republican Party is the country-class party. And the country class won big last weekend.
The country class has given a mandate not just to Trump but to Republicans in the House (at least that’s what’s being projected) and the Senate.
It cannot be wasted like it was in 2017.
And yet despite McConnell’s retirement as the Senate GOP caucus leader, something that is overdue by at least six years, the top choices thrown around to replace him in the early going were…
John Thune and John Cornyn. Two of the most egregious examples of the Washington Generals on Capitol Hill anyone could find.
Both have been dutiful McConnell lieutenants. Neither offer any reason for anyone to believe they wouldn’t simply be vessels for McConnell to continue running the caucus, at least until he leaves the Senate altogether following the 2026 election.
McConnell has specialized in sabotaging conservative Senate candidates since his ascension to the leadership role in January of 2007. More than a dozen races were lost as a result. This cycle was one of the more particularly egregious cases — McConnell threw millions upon millions of dollars at the hopeless Never Trumper Larry Hogan, who had zero chance of winning a Senate seat in Maryland, and in so doing, starving conservatives like Eric Hovde, Sam Brown, and Mike Rogers (not to mention Kari Lake), who with a little more support could well have added to the GOP majority.
McConnell’s legacy is not something that needs to be maintained.
Thune can’t be trusted not to maintain it. Neither can Cornyn. They’re classic examples of the Washington Generals.
Remember when McConnell’s other acolyte, James Lankford, the affable supposed conservative from Oklahoma tasked with giving the Democrats bipartisan cover for importing countless illegal migrants?
This was Thune:
The No. 2 Senate Republican and GOP whip, Sen. John Thune, said that negotiations on an immigration deal tied to the passage of a multi-billion-dollar global securities supplemental package are at “a critical moment, and we’ve got to drive hard to get this done.”
“If we can’t get there, then we’ll go to Plan B,” the South Dakota Republican said.
He did not go into details on what a “Plan B” would look like or if a deal on immigration would be removed from the supplemental, which would provide critical aid to Ukraine that some Republican and Democratic senators are advocating as the country runs low on ammunition in its war with Russia.
Here’s what Cornyn said back then:
GOP Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who endorsed Trump earlier this week, said that “Texas can’t afford to wait 11 months,” referring to a potential second Trump presidency in 2025.
“Some people have said, well, the (immigration) issue is going to go away, and so that’ll be denying President Trump the issue. I think that’s a fantasy,” Cornyn said. “You’re not going to turn off what’s happening at the border like a water faucet, so this is going to continue to be a problem and it’s obviously a very, potent, political issue.”
He said that while Trump is “an important voice,” the Senate “has a job to do, and we intend to do it.”
Both of these two guys were just absolutely breathless over the urgency of negotiating an immigration deal with Chuck Schumer, Chris Murphy, and Kyrsten Sinema — who entered with such good faith that the horse-trading quickly devolved to discussions about how many extra illegal migrants we’d take in before doing something about the problem, and, oh yes, how many of them would catch amnesty offers so they could be made into Democrat voters.
You saw what happened. Lankford (read: McConnell) released the details of his negotiations, the public guffawed at the abject rolling that it represented, and most of the GOP caucus ran away from the bill — which was respectable enough, one guesses, except for the fact that the Democrats then had a bat to beat Trump and the GOP with for the rest of the year.
Rather than just insisting Biden rescind his executive orders opening the border and write a clean border security bill and insist the Democrats bring it to a vote.
That’s how Washington Generals politics works.
This also can’t be forgiven:
Lisa Monaco was Robert Mueller’s chief of staff when he ran the FBI. She was one of Obama’s closest aides—she participated in secret Situation Room meetings with John Brennan in 2016 to concoct Russia collusion hoax.
After Trump won, she became an outspoken critic of Donald… pic.twitter.com/blekqJD0yf
— Julie Kelly (@julie_kelly2) November 11, 2024
No Republican who endorsed the hyper-corrupt, hyper-partisan Team Obama attack dog Lisa Monaco can possibly make a credible claim to leadership. It’s utterly, irretrievably disqualifying, and yet there John Cornyn is doing it.
Thune’s not much better. This is a guy who early in the campaign essentially claimed that if Trump was the GOP nominee, the party would lose the election.
And earlier this year when Biden Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin decided to politicize the military by providing money for abortion travel for servicewomen, something not authorized by Congress and that would never have passed on Capitol Hill, Sen. Tommy Tuberville courageously stepped in to place a hold on all Defense Department appointments until Austin’s decision was reversed.
Democrat Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, whom the public vigorously fired last week, laid into Tuberville with all the invective he could manage and soon Tuberville was “embattled” — at least according to the Propaganda Press.
It was time for the Senate GOP caucus to rally around Tuberville. Virtually all of them had made public statements of opposition to Austin’s move. And yet John Thune cut the Alabama senator off at the knees:
“I think the longer this drags on, the more problematic it becomes for the military to function and operate in the way that I think the American people expect them to operate,” Thune told reporters.
The president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, unloaded on Thune for that, and rightly so:
That’s Washington Generals politics in pure form.
Now, you could argue that Tuberville was going off on his own and the leadership wasn’t under any obligation to protect him from shooting himself in the foot.
But after 17 years of Washington Generals self-sabotage, in which the party’s Senate leadership never actually led — that McConnell still dines out on a solitary example of doing his damned job, that being when he held up consideration of Merrick Garland as a Supreme Court nominee in a move that would have been utterly unremarkable had Schumer or his Democrat predecessor Harry Reid done the same, is fairly instructive — we can’t do this anymore.
The reason the Tommy Tubervilles of the world have gone off tilting at windmills is that the leadership has never actually fought.
The Republicans’ ruling-class politicians, who are more heavily concentrated in the Senate than anywhere else, have been appeasers and Good-Time Charlies more interested in sipping cocktails and playing bridge in the cloakroom than slugging out the issues of the day in the chamber, can’t be allowed to drive the agenda.
Not after the 2024 election, which simply must signal the birth of a new era in American politics. And yet a whip-count list leaked over the weekend showed that the Republicans in the Senate still don’t get it.
EXCLUSIVE: A GOP Senate Source has leaked the internal whip-count for the Leadership Vote. The final votes will be on a secret ballot Wednesday.
Here is where the race stands now…
Cornyn (18)
Scott (11)
Thune (24)
Banks – Thune
Barrasso – Thune
Blackburn – Thune
Boozman -…
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) November 11, 2024
Thune and Cornyn aren’t qualified to lead the Senate into that new era. Perhaps one of them will change enough of his spots to merit an opportunity on a short leash, but if anyone has seen evidence of such an epiphany, I’d be grateful to see it.
Trump is touting Rick Scott, who ran against McConnell following the 2022 elections and lost a lopsided vote for the leadership job. Early returns had Scott far behind, though a public campaign in the Florida senator’s favor is said to be paying dividends as some number of senators have begun recognizing that making it their first vote to rebuke the winner of the popular vote isn’t such a good idea.
Rick Scott for Senate Majority Leader! https://t.co/lpT34yHTKk
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 10, 2024
The post It’s Long Past Time to Bend the Senate to the Will of the People appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
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