Dueling Proposals to Reopen Government Fail in Senate Vote as Schumer Shutdown Drags On
By Cristina Laila – The Gateway Pundit – Oct 9, 2025
Dueling proposals to reopen the government failed in the Senate for the 7th time on Thursday. On October 1 at 12:01 am, the government partially shut down because two measures failed in the Senate. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer rejected the House-passed, clean, short-term stopgap funding bill to keep the government open. Instead of working with Republicans to responsibly extend funding until November, Schumer chose a shutdown… READ MORE
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, Elon Musk, and President Trump.
While the liberal media continues to parrot talking points blaming Republicans for the ongoing government shutdown, the truth about the Democrats’ shocking spending demands is finally breaking through to the American people. Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) has been a courageous voice cutting through the left’s disinformation campaign, boldly detailing the absurd and wasteful foreign projects that Chuck Schumer and his caerus are holding the American government hostage to fund.
In a powerful and revealing list, Senator Kennedy exposed the sheer insanity of the far-left’s priorities, which are being placed ahead of the needs of hardworking American taxpayers. The items that Democrats are demanding be reinstated before they agree to reopen the government are not just wasteful; they are a slap in the face to fiscal responsibility and common sense. These outrageous demands include a staggering;
“$3.6 million for cooking and dance workshops for male prostitutes in Haiti”
“over $4.2 million for LGBTQ projects in the Western Balkans and Uganda.”
“$6 million to subsidize Palestinian media outlets”
“$3 million for circumcision and vasectomies in Zambia.”
“more than $833,000 for transgender people in Nepal”
“$500,000 to purchase electric buses in Rwanda,”
“$300,000 to sponsor a pride parade in Lesotho.”
This is the radical agenda that Chuck Schumer has chosen to shut down the government for, proving that the Democratic Party is entirely controlled by its extreme socialist wing.
Appearing on Fox Business with host Larry Kudlow, Senator Kennedy laid out his prediction for how this manufactured crisis will ultimately end, revealing the raw political calculus behind Schumer’s actions. Kennedy stated, “I know him well. This shutdown is not about policy. It’s about politics.” He went on to explain the Minority Leader’s futile motives, saying, “He is trying to get the loon wing, the socialist wing of the Democratic Party, which is in control, to love him. And they will never love him.“”
OMG.. you cannot make this up..
These are some of the things the Democrats are demanding we fund:
– $3 million for circumcisions and vasectomies in Zambia – $833k for transgender people in Nepal – $4.2 million for lgbtq people in the Western Balkans and Uganda – $3.6 million… pic.twitter.com/maGvy3mLvC
Kennedy correctly argued that Schumer would be better off abandoning this political theater, noting he should be “doing what he did back in March and just calling it like he saw it and keeping government open.” Instead, Schumer is making an impossible ultimatum, which Kennedy summarized as, “’We’re going to keep government shut down until you Republicans and President Trump give the Democrats $1.5 trillion,’ and they’re going to tell us how to spend it.”
The Louisiana Senator predicts that the shutdown will only end when Chuck Schumer is forced to orchestrate a face-saving retreat. Kennedy told Kudlow, “It will end eventually, when Senator Schumer goes to six or eight of his members and Democrats and says, ‘Do me a favor. Vote to open it back up. I may have to criticize you. I’m not going to vote with you, but I need a way out of this. I need an off-ramp.’” He concluded that this is the inevitable outcome, warning, “But he’s got to be careful because if it looks contrived, he’s blown it. And he can’t look like he’s having a mutiny. But that’s how we’ll open back.” This entire crisis underscores the necessity of President Donald Trump’s strong stance against out-of-control spending and his commitment to putting America’s interests first.
HISTORIC!… President Trump Announces: “OUR SOUTHERN BORDER IS CLOSED!!!”
By Jim Hoft – The Gateway Pundit – Feb 22, 2025
When President Trump left office he had the lowest illegal immigration numbers in recorded history. Joe Biden quickly changed that and opened the borders to a sea of illegal aliens like nothing the world has ever seen! When President Trump entered office on January 20, 2025, he signed numerous executive orders and shut down the border. President Trump restarted construction of the border wall. And President Trump started to round up violent illegal aliens and return them to their home… READ MORE
EPIC! White House Trolls Press and Hakeem Jeffries by Playing Sombrero Meme in Briefing Room (VIDEO)
By Jordan Conradson – The Gateway Pundit – Oct 1, 2025
The White House press office was savagely trolling the leftist media and the Democrats this afternoon, showcasing the Sombrero meme that President Trump posted of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in the White House Press Briefing Room. As The Gateway Pundit reported, President Trump posted a couple of memes recently, which depict Jeffries in a cartoonized mustache and wearing a Sombrero hat after he and Schumer met with Trump at the White House. Trump was mocking the Democratic Party’s obsession with illegal immigration as a voter-replacement scheme. But Hakeem Jeffries and the leftwing media claimed it was racist, so the White House blasted the meme in the White House Briefing Room… READ MORE
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, Elon Musk, and President Trump.
Washington DC Memorial Service and Prayer Vigil for Charlie Kirk to be Held Sunday at 6 PM ET – Tickets Available
By Jordan Conradson – The Gateway Pundit – Sept 13, 2025
Friends of Charlie Kirk will host a memorial and prayer vigil for Charlie Kirk on Sunday as the country and the world mourn his horrific assassination. Kirk’s assassination on Wednesday, September 10, has sparked peaceful gatherings across the United States and even across Europe, where millions are turning out to mourn the 31-year-old Turning Point USA founder. On Friday, Micah Rea, the Director of Faith Based Initiatives at the US Department of Commerce, announced that he and others are planning a Memorial for Charlie Kirk on Sunday evening in Washington, DC. The location is set to be announced on Sunday afternoon… READ MORE
A.F. Branco Cartoon – After years of Democrat violent rhetoric directed at conservatives and MAGA, and now with blood on their hands, Dems call for unity against political violence. By their fruits ye shall know them.
WAYNE ROOT: No, “Both Sides” Are Not the Same. No, “Both Sides” are Not Guilty. Stop Preaching Unity and Kumbaya. The Left Hates Us. They are Demonic. Here Is the Only Way to Respond.
By Wayne Allyn Root – The Gateway Pundit –
As everyone knows by now, on Friday morning, authorities found the Charlie Kirk assassin. A 22-year-old, antifa-indoctrinated, leftist punk who hated what Charlie stood for. It appears that simple. But it never is. For two reasons… First, millions of brainwashed liberals hated Charlie…and hate President Trump…and hate me…and hate you…just like that vile, violent, mentally-ill young man in Utah. So, please understand, after this killer, there will be many more to take his place. My gut says we are at a place in America where Charlie was the first, but he won’t be the last. There may be more assassination attempts this month…or this week…or tomorrow. Because the left desperately wants civil war. Who knows what they have planned next to try to make it happen…. READ MORE
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, Elon Musk, and President Trump.
Remember when the Biden administration recruited a bunch of kids on TikTok to repeat canned pro-Biden propaganda, and we all laughed at what an obviously disingenuous op it was? Now imagine if those kids were older, uglier, and members of the U.S. Senate. (Haven’t you always wanted to GRWM with Chuck Schumer and see Liz Warren’s OOTD?)
Ahead of President Donald Trump’s Tuesday night address to Congress, Democrats have been whispering to their media allies that their messaging strategy surrounding Trump’s speech matters because “tonight marks the first moment since the election that much of America will actually pay any attention to the Democrats.”
The Democrats have landed on their messaging strategy, and it is, in their own words …
Tuesday morning, two dozen Senate Democrats posted their honest, genuine, heartfelt thoughts about Trump’s first 43 days. Those straight-from-the-heart perspectives just happened to all follow the same, word-for-word script, which Sen. Cory Booker took credit for writing.
Booker, along with Senators Angela Alsobrooks, Tammy Baldwin, Richard Blumenthal, Chris Coons, Tammy Duckworth, Dick Durbin, Kirsten Gillibrand, Mazie Hirono, Tim Kaine, Mark Kelly, Andy Kim, Ben Ray Lujan, Ed Markey, Jeff Merkley, Alex Padilla, Gary Peters, Brian Schatz, Chuck Schumer, Chris Van Hollen, Mark Warner, Elizabeth Warren, Peter Welch, and Sheldon Whitehouse each recorded a video rattling off the same lines about how Trump is evil for cutting government bloat and not undoing Bidenflation yet.
Democrats cared nothing about the prices of Americans’ groceries, gas, and housing for four years under Biden. As for government spending cuts, a Harvard-Harris poll just last month found Americans “overwhelmingly support cutting down government expenditures,” so that’s a weird choice of martyr to patronize.
The weirdest choice, though, is being so transparently obvious about the fact that all of Democrats’ outrage about Trump is scripted and fake. It’s not a surprise that Warren, Schumer, and their ilk don’t have original thoughts, but usually their comms staff try to keep that hidden, not broadcast it in a coordinated media blitz.
Democrats are doing the congressional equivalent of copying and pasting fake Amazon reviews. It’s “Can I get 10 REAL friends to copy and paste these five paragraphs onto their own Facebook pages?” but for U.S. senators — a plan someone looked at and thought, “this is exactly the rebrand Democrats need!”
It’s not the first time Dems have manufactured their mania, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a more succinct example. Even the left-wing media, who have the same habit, are conceited enough to change up the words a little when they all turn in the same assignment about things like Joe “sharper than ever” Biden or “No one is above the law” or “no evidence” Biden made money off of the family influence-peddling business.
It’s foolish enough for grown adults whose salaries are paid by tax dollars to stare into an iPhone camera and screech vulgarities, like an out-of-touch grandparent trying to earn points by using Zoomer slang. (Just adding expletives doesn’t make you cool, guys.) When those words are fresh off some social media intern’s copy machine, the effect is even more clownish.
One of the things that neutered Democrats’ 2024 campaign to defeat Trump was the dwindling effectiveness of their manufactured panic. In 2017, thanks to their control of the media establishment, they convinced a sizeable portion of the country that the sitting president was a Russian asset who had colluded with the Kremlin to steal the 2016 election. In 2018, they orchestrated a manic smear campaign to convince the country that Brett Kavanaugh had helped run a gang rape operation in the Washington suburbs. In 2020, their mass-produced panic about the Coronavirus literally shut down the country. In 2021, they said Trump had tried to overthrow the government.
In a last-ditch effort to kill his 2024 campaign, they called him and his supporters fascists and Nazis and Hitler-lovers and threats to democracy, and couldn’t understand that the name-calling had lost its oomph after nearly a decade of Trump repeatedly turning out to not actually be Hitler.
Clearly, Democrats on the Hill still aren’t willing to learn that lesson. They’ve marked Tuesday as the day they’ll set the tone for the ResistanceTM for the next four years, and they’ve chosen the same tone of faux horror that they’ve taken for Donald Trump’s entire political career.
Can’t wait to see how it works out for them!
Elle Purnell is the elections editor at The Federalist. Her work has been featured by Fox Business, RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_ellepurnell.
A.F.Branco Cartoon – Walz endorses his own staffer for DFL chair as he ramps up possible reelection campaign. Richard Carlbom’s bid to replace Ken Martin comes as Gov. Walz prepares a potential run for a third term as governor.
Walz endorses his own staffer for DFL chair as he ramps up possible reelection campaign
By Hank Long – Alpha News.org – Feb 6, 2025
Just a few hours after longtime DFL Party Chair Ken Martin was elected on Saturday to lead the Democratic National Committee, the competition to replace him back in Minnesota began without delay. Richard Carlbom, deputy chief of staff for Gov. Tim Walz, launched his campaign website for DFL Party Chair that afternoon, and received an endorsement from his boss before nightfall. “Richard has the organizing, coalition building, fundraising and messaging experience needed to lead the Minnesota DFL Party,” Walz said in a statement. “I ask my fellow Democrats to support his bid to be our next Chair of the MN DFL.” READ MORE
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Chuck Schumer may be under investigation for his threats against SCOTUS. It was he who said Trump better be careful because the Deep State has six ways to Sunday of getting back at you. Well, Trump is back, and what goes around…
DOJ Opens Investigation into Chuck Schumer For Threatening Supreme Court Justices
By Been Kew – The Gateway Pundit – Feb 1, 2025
The Department of Justice has opened an investigation into Chuck Schumer for threatening Supreme Court justices. According to The Washington Post, interim D.C. U.S. attorney Edward R. Martin, Jr. is looking to scrutinize Democratic leaders and former Justice Department officials. Among them is the Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in connection with comments regarding Trump’s Supreme Court justices, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. During a pro-abortion rally back in 2020, Schumer said that the two justices would “pay the price” for overturning Roe vs Wade, a decision that they eventually handed down two years later.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
In March the Republican-led House passed H.R. 3391, which would continue funding research of pediatric diseases like childhood cancer. The legislation never went anywhere in the Senate under the leadership of Democrat Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. But now Democrats are trying to use sick kids with cancer as leverage to pass 1,500-plus pages of pork.
On Wednesday Speaker Mike Johnson unveiled a 1,500-page so-called “continuing resolution” that was really nothing more than a stuffed omnibus bill that included money for censorship, sweetheart deals for Congress, and other unnecessary expenditures. Almost immediately the pork-stuffed “continuing resolution” was rebuked by millions of Americans, including President-elect Donald Trump and incoming co-director of the Department of Government Efficient (DOGE) Elon Musk.
Following public pressure, the House released a trimmed-down version (116 pages) on Thursday. That measure funds the government through March 14. The new version keeps the $110 billion in disaster relief and farmer assistance from the original bill and suspends the debt ceiling for two years. The new version also removed the funding for childhood cancer.
And suddenly — after H.R. 3391 has collected dust in the Senate under the leadership of Schumer for months –Democrats are outraged about funding for pediatric cancer research.
The Bulwark’s Sam Stein wrote that after “pediatric cancer research advocates spent years” working to get funding, “Elon began tweeting.” Elon “killed the budget deal,” according to Stein, and with it funding for childhood cancer research.
Hawaii Democrat Sen. Brian Schatz posted on X: “F-ck cancer. Especially pediatric cancer. These people want to punish these precious little kids to pay for tax cuts for the wealthiest corporations in human history.”
Pod Save America host Jon Favreau blamed Musk: “Congrats to Elon Musk for giving the people what they want: less funding for child cancer research.”
But where was the condemnation from Favreau or Schatz or Stein when Schumer sat on H.R. 3391? Why haven’t they begun pressuring Schumer to do something with the legislation he already has?
If the only time you come out swinging in defense of funding for childhood cancer research is when you can use it to smear your political opponents and push through pork spending, but you stay silent when your own party sits on the legislation (after Republicans passed it), you’re not the good guy. You’re a hypocrite using sick children as leverage to further your pet projects.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Chuck Schumer threatened Kavanaugh, saying,” You have released the whirlwind. You won’t know what hit you!”. Now it’s Schumer and the Democrats who are facing the whirlwind of change and don’t know what hit them. Trump election 2024, that’s what.
Video of Chuck Schumer Threatening Kavanaugh He Will “Pay The Price” For Roe V Wade Resurfaces In Wake Of Attempted Murder Of Supreme Court Justice
By Michael Robison – The Gateway Pundit – Article dated June 9, 2022
A video of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer telling Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh that he would “pay the price” for a potential reversal of Roe V Wade resurfaced Wednesday amid the arrest of a potential assassin outside of Kavanaugh’s home in Maryland.
In March 2020, Schumer made a speech outside the Supreme Court as justices heard a case about a Louisiana abortion law. Schumer shouted a stark warning at Kavanaugh and Justice Neil Gorsuch during that speech, saying they could face sinister consequences for their “awful decisions.” READ MORE
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was blasted on social media over the weekend for a Father’s Day post, which the New York Democrat eventually deleted, showing off his backyard grill.
“Our family has lived in an apartment building for all our years, but my daughter and her wife just bought a house with a backyard and for the first time we’re having a barbeque with hot dogs and hamburgers on the grill!” Schumer posted on X on Sunday. “Father’s Day Heaven!”
The post was immediately criticized by conservatives accusing him of placing cheese on one of the burger patties prematurely and not knowing how to properly grill the burger.
“Chuck is making an E. coli with cheese,” Cavalry founding partner Michael Duncan posted on X.
“You put cheese on a raw patty,” Popular conservative account
“Nuance Bro” posted on X. “Y’all are so bad at pretending to be normal human beings.”
“I get that you’re playing to the masses but literally no one puts cheese on a raw beef patty,”
Donald Trump Jr. posted on X. “If you need help learning how to do basic grilling stuff let me know. Nice try relating though. Fuc$&?g communists!!!”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer speaks at a news conference. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Schumer eventually deleted the post which had been “ratioed” by conservative accounts.
“Chuck Schumer just deleted this post where he got insanely ratioed for not knowing how to make a cheeseburger,” LibsofTikTok posted on X.
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., conducts a news conference after the senate luncheons in the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, June 21, 2023. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
“Democrats try to be relatable without being super cringe challenge: IMPOSSIBLE.”
Fox News Digital reached out to Schumer’s office for comment but did not receive a response.
“Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there!” Schumer said in another Father’s Day post that remains on social media.
Andrew Mark Miller is a reporter at Fox News. Find him on Twitter @andymarkmiller and email tips to AndrewMark.Miller@Fox.com.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said he is planning to hold a vote on legislation to bar gun bump stocks after the Supreme Court invalidated a ban on them.
“The Senate can help restore this public safety rule, and next week, it will try. As majority leader, I have the ability to allow a unanimous consent vote, and we’ll see just what Republican MAGAs do: Will they allow it to go forward, or will they cower to MAGA and hurt the American people?” Schumer said Sunday.
In a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s decision that sided with Michael Cargill, a gun shop owner from Austin, Texas, who challenged the ban on bump stocks. The devices enable semiautomatic rifles to fire rapidly like machine guns. The court’s liberal minority dissented from the decision.
“The only way to permanently close this loophole is through legislation,” Schumer said after the ruling. “Bump stocks have played a devastating role in many of the horrific mass shootings in our country, but, sadly, it’s no surprise to see the Supreme Court roll back this necessary public safety rule as they push their out-of-touch, extreme agenda. They’re even further to the right of Donald Trump.”
Schumer has planned a series of votes in the Senate to help boost embattled incumbents and divide Republicans on key issues.
President Joe Biden, who blasted the Supreme Court ruling Friday, said he would sign a bill banning bump stocks immediately if it reached his desk.
“Americans should not have to live in fear of this mass devastation,” Biden said.
The bump stock ban was enacted by the Trump administration in 2017 after a Las Vegas concert shooting in which 60 people were killed.
A political group supporting Jewish Republicans lashed out Thursday at Democrat Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s call for Israel to hold new elections and oust Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu amid the continued bombardment of Gaza.
In a stinging response to Schumer’s “anti-Israel speech,” Republican Jewish Coalition leader Matt Brooks declared the New Yorker had “crossed a real red line.”
“As Israel continues to righteously fight to defend itself from barbaric terrorists, the most powerful Democrat in Congress knifed the Jewish state in the back,” a RJC statement said — deriding the Schumer speech as having “demanded that Israel’s democratically-elected government be evicted from power and replaced by one more to his liking.”
“Sen. Schumer crossed a real red line,” the statement said. “It is outrageous and unacceptable to meddle in Israel’s domestic politics by demanding that a democratic ally hold elections on our timetable, particularly when the Jewish state is fighting for its very survival.”
The lashing noted that Schumer “has frequently described himself as the so-called ‘Shomer’, or guardian, of the Jewish people, but that his remarks Thursday were “a ‘Shanda’, a disgrace.”
The denouncement ended with “a clarion call to take back the White House and US Senate from this radical Democrat leadership,” accusing those leaders of “waging political warfare on our key ally Israel and rewarding terrorists.”
The searing criticism comes as Senate Republicans question Schumer’s outrage.
“Chuck Schumer’s demand for new Israeli elections is inappropriate and offensive,” Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., wrote in a statement on social media. “Israel is a close ally and a healthy, vibrant democracy. The last thing Israel needs is the ‘foreign election interference’ that Democrats so often decry here.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson was “very optimistic” after Tuesday’s meeting with President Joe Biden and the other three top Congressional leaders that a government shutdown will be averted before Friday’s deadline.
“We have been working in good faith around the clock every single day for months and weeks and over the last several days, quite literally around the clock to get that job done. We’re very optimistic,” Republican Johnson told reporters after the meeting with President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
“We believe that we can get to agreement on these issues and prevent a government shutdown, and that’s our first responsibility,” Johnson added.
In the meeting, Biden warned the leaders of the consequences of failing to move quickly to pass funding to avoid a looming partial government shutdown and send weapons to Ukraine, or face dire consequences.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” Biden said in the Oval Office, with Vice President Kamala Harris at his side and the four leaders sitting on couches nearby.
The meeting left the president optimistic of avoiding a shutdown, Jeffries said, according to Politico.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters at the Capitol that the meeting focused mainly on keeping the government open, “which I think we all can agree on.”
The White House meeting came almost two months after Johnson and Schumer agreed on a $1.59 trillion discretionary spending level for the fiscal year that began on Oct. 1. Despite that deal, Congress has failed to pass spending bills to fund the government, largely due to in-fighting by Republicans who control the House of Representatives by a thin majority.
Biden said he believed a solution could be reached on funding the government by a Friday deadline to avoid a partial government shutdown, which he said would be damaging to the U.S. economy.Ukraine funding becomes more urgent every day, Biden said.
“I think the consequences of inaction are dire,” he said of Ukraine.
The spending bill is being held up by demands from ultra-conservative Republicans in the House who want to see spending cuts and policy positions injected into how dollars are spent. A group of hard-right Republicans has brought the government to the brink of a shutdown or a partial shutdown three times in the past six months.
Schumer and Johnson traded accusations in recent days over who was to blame for the stalemate. On Monday, Schumer told reporters that “Democrats are doing everything we can to avoid a shutdown.”
The first batch of government funding, which includes money for agencies that oversee agriculture and transportation, will run out on Friday at midnight, while funding for some agencies including the Pentagon and the State Department will expire on March 8. The government spending package is separate from the national security aid bill that includes Ukraine and Israel funding.
The House is under pressure to pass the $95 billion national security package that bolsters aid for Ukraine, Israel as well as the Indo-Pacific. That legislation cleared the Senate on a 70-29 vote earlier this month, but Johnson has resisted putting up the aid bill for a vote in the House.
The White House has ramped up public pressure on Johnson in recent weeks as Ukraine marked the second anniversary of the Russian invasion.
“What the president wants to see is we want to make sure that the national security interests of the American people gets put first and is not used as a political football,” Jean-Pierre said. “We want to make sure that gets done.”
A lot of ink has been spilled in recent days about the Senate’s $118 billion border bill, most of it detailing just how awful the proposed legislation is — awful, that is, if your goal is actually to secure the border. The bill creates a new baseline of admitting 1.8 million illegal immigrants annually, doles out work permits and green cards on the whim of federal bureaucrats, and funnels billions of tax dollars to the same NGOs that have for years facilitated mass illegal border crossings. And that’s just for starters.
But not much has been said about Mexico’s role in the new immigration regime this legislation would create. In fact, Mexico is barely mentioned at all in the 370-page bill. That’s odd considering that no border enforcement mechanism that actually keeps illegal immigrants out of the U.S. will work without some level of Mexican involvement.
Consider that the so-called “bipartisan” legislation, crafted behind closed doors by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, includes a “border emergency authority” to shut down the border if 5,000 illegal immigrants are arrested daily over seven consecutive days or 8,500 are arrested in a single day. Setting aside that this would cement into law nearly 2 million illegal immigrants every year, what would happen to all those illegal immigrants arrested in the U.S. after the border is “shut down” under this emergency authority?
Apparently, they would all be sent back to Mexico. But why would Mexico agree to that? Admitting hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals into northern Mexican border towns after they’ve already crossed into the U.S. would create massive problems for a country already beset by record-breaking violence and crippling levels of corruption.
The answer is that the Senate bill hopes to bribe Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Buried in the bill (on page 85) is a $415 million slush fund “to increase foreign country capacity to accept and integrate returned and removed individuals.” The unnamed foreign country here is almost certainly Mexico, which is where the “removed individuals” would be sent once the border is “shut down.” Another $850 million in the bill is set aside for undefined “International Disaster Assistance” to “address humanitarian needs in the Western Hemisphere.” Again, the likely recipient of the bulk of these funds will be Mexico.
For his part, López Obrador, popularly known as AMLO, has been candid about his desire for the United States to pay for Mexico’s cooperation on the border. Last month, following a high-level visit of Biden officials to Mexico City in December, AMLO reportedly demanded $20 billion from the Biden administration to help tackle the “root causes” of illegal immigration, as well as sweeping reforms to U.S.-Cuba policy and 10 million visas for Mexican nationals currently living in the United States.
In this context, it’s hard not to see the hundreds of millions of dollars set aside in the border bill as a down payment on AMLO’s demands. At best, it’s a quid pro quo for cooperation on the border. At worst, it’s a ransom payment to a hostile neighbor with ill intent.
Now, one might argue that Schumer and McConnell and the Biden administration are just doing the practical thing here and securing Mexico’s cooperation. But such a view belies a misunderstanding of the relevant history and Mexico’s malign role in the border crisis.
For many decades now, the default assumption in Washington was that Mexico is our partner, that we can’t solve illegal immigration without Mexico’s help. But that’s only half true. The reality is that Mexico is not a partner, not a friendly neighbor with whom we can cooperate to solve this problem, but an antagonist. Over the last 15 or so years, the merging of Mexico’s most powerful cartels with certain elements of the Mexican state means that much of the border crisis is being directed and facilitated by the cartels in collaboration with Mexico’s National Guard and the National Institute of Migration, the federal agency in charge of migration in Mexico.
On top of that, it’s now a well-established fact that AMLO himself is cooperating with the Sinaloa cartel, the country’s most powerful, and has been for many years. A long and detailed report published by ProPublica last week chronicled Sinaloa’s bankrolling of AMLO’s 2006 presidential campaign, which appears to have been the beginning of a long partnership that has now borne fruit — for both parties. Sinaloa has helped consolidate electoral victories for AMLO’s left-wing Morena party in the last two election cycles, while AMLO has pursued a policy of placating the cartels and disavowing the drug war — “hugs, not bullets,” as he put it on the campaign trail in 2018.
That AMLO’s administration has been compromised by its association with the cartels, or that the cartels have figured out how to monetize illegal immigration, isn’t some conspiracy theory but well-established fact. Given that reality, it stands to reason that if AMLO is going to cooperate with the Biden administration to reduce the flow of illegal immigration into the U.S. at the expense of the cartel networks with which he is politically allied, he’s going to want compensation. After all, the illegal immigrant black market was worth an estimated $13 billion a year as of July 2022, and is likely much more than that now, not counting the $56 billion in remittances to Mexico from the U.S. every year.
Put bluntly, that’s what the $415 million slush fund is really for, to make up for lost revenue that would otherwise go to the cartels, smuggling networks, and corrupt elements of Mexican officialdom. And it’s likely just a first installment.
Given all this, what other ways could we secure Mexico’s cooperation on the border crisis? Recent history suggests that sticks work better than carrots. In 2019, amid a much smaller border crisis, President Trump famously threatened to slap a tariff on all Mexican goods coming over the border unless the Mexican government did more to crack down on the caravans wending their way north through the country. If Trump had followed through, it would have collapsed the Mexican economy in short order, and everyone knew it.
Sure enough, the newly elected AMLO got the message. Arrests at the border soon began to plummet. The caravans were dispersed, and most never made it to the border. By the time Trump left office, illegal border-crossings were at historic lows.
That changed the month after Biden took office, and we have more or less been in crisis since then. Under Biden, almost nothing has been asked of Mexico, even as illegal immigration reached historic levels. Yet Biden hasn’t threatened AMLO’s government with a thing, and of course, the lack of consequences has incentivized more bad behavior from a corrupt Mexican state and the cartels that profit off the crisis.
If Senate Republicans were serious about convincing Mexico to accept expelled or deported illegal immigrants under a new U.S. border policy, they would treat our southern neighbor as the antagonist it actually is and threaten massive tariffs or some other economic penalties. As for the cartels, Republicans need to start making a more forceful case for going to war with them. Otherwise, there’s no way to get either the fentanyl or border crises under control.
The last thing you would do with such a neighbor, under these circumstances, is offer a bribe, validating the corruption right at the heart of the border crisis. Yet that’s exactly what the Senate bill does.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
After the much-anticipated “bipartisan” Ukraine and border bill finally dropped on Sunday, it took little time to confirm that all 370 pages are worse than intelligent observers predicted. The $118 billion boondoggle is dead on arrival in the House. For Democrats and their accomplice media, however, the legislation and House Republicans’ response to it are going exactly as planned.
Not only did national disgrace Sen. Mitch McConnell (feat. useful idiot James Lankford) work tirelessly with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on this bill to keep America’s borders open, give out amnesty Oprah-style, and write more blank checks to Ukraine and Hamas sympathizers in the Middle East, they also helped the corrupt corporate media run a propaganda operation against House Republicans and the rest of the GOP. Worse, they’re deliberately running it during an election year to boost Joe Biden on the border issue — which the near-dead incumbent has aided and abetted, and voters say is top of mind next to Bidenomics.
The Republican-majority House predictably isn’t going for the bill. Why would they? It would allow nearly 2 million illegal aliens into the country in one year — as long as the numbers stay below 5,000 entries per day for seven consecutive days, or below 8,500 border encounters in a single day — before triggering “emergency authority” for the Department of Homeland Security and closing the border. Even then there are exceptions.
Worse, if Biden decides it’s in the “national interest” to beckon some more Democrat representation padding and likely future voters across the Rio Grande, he can unilaterally suspend the border closure for 45 days per year. There’s more where that came from.
If GOP members of Congress had taken the bait, Democrats would have come out on top, having
convinced their political foes not only to continue funding a no-win forever war in Eastern Europe but also to keep letting illegal aliens into the country virtually unrestricted. Bonus: A codified open border could hamstring “the fixer” Donald Trump if he wins the general election later this year, zapping his political power to rehabilitate U.S. security and sovereignty.
Yet even without the House conceding to the bill, Democrats win anyway. Now Biden and his accomplice media can simply blame Republicans for not solving the crisis this administration caused. That’s exactly what’s happening, starting with Biden pointing fingers at Republicans:
Working with my administration, the United States Senate has done the hard work it takes to reach a bipartisan agreement. Now, House Republicans have to decide. Do they want to solve the problem? Or do they want to keep playing politics with the border?
Biden’s media lapdogs dutifully advanced the narrative, which they’d already been spinning before the text of the bill was even released.
“GOP Blames Biden for Border Crisis That GOP Refuses to Solve,” blared one Daily Beast headline. “Republicans are yelling about a crisis at the border. But they’re also unwilling to do anything to address it for fear that it’d give Joe Biden a political win,” the subheading continued, taking its talking points straight from the president and Senate Democrats like Chris Murphy.
“Why Republicans Don’t Want To Solve the Border Problem — But do want to make deals to cut taxes,” read another headline in New York Magazine’s Intelligencer by Jonathan Chait.
“Republicans Who Screamed About A Crisis On The Border Now Oppose A Plan To Fix It,” said HuffPost, claiming Republicans oppose the border bill not because it’s nightmarish but because they want to hurt Biden. “Border Patrol Supports ‘Strong’ Immigration Deal. Republicans Don’t Care,” wrote Rolling Stone.
Vanity Fair claimed, “Republicans Don’t Want to Lose Their Favorite 2024 Talking Point,” with Bloomberg opting for a simple, “House Republicans Don’t Want to Fix the Border.”
Cable television has been as bad. A host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” said the “bipartisan border deal is doomed to fail … because Republicans have turned on it.” The “Today” show framed the gridlock as Republicans “threaten[ing] to block the border bill they negotiated,” as if McConnell and his sidekick colluding with Democrats behind closed doors amounts to a good-faith bipartisan negotiation.
This run-of-the-mill propaganda is to be expected from the corporate media, but it’s just so brazen considering Republicans’ efforts to secure the border earlier in Biden’s term and Democrats’ subsequent refusal to cooperate.
We’re all old enough to remember less than a year ago when the House passed a stronger border bill that would have restarted Trump-era border wall construction, required aliens to remain in Mexico while waiting out their usually fraudulent asylum claims, restricted asylum eligibility to legal ports of entry, enacted harsher punishments for overstaying expired visas, kept Title 42-esque “expulsion authority” in place, and supplied border authorities with additional grant funding. Senate Democrats wouldn’t lift a finger.
But sure. It’s Republicans “playing politics.”
Kylee Griswold is the editorial director of The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religion, and the media. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
Yesterday, a reporter standing outside the Senate chamber told me that after four months of secrecy, The Firm™️ plans to release the text of the $106 billion supplemental aid/border-security package — possibly as soon as today. Wasting no time, she then asked, “If you get the bill by tomorrow, will you be ready to vote on it by Tuesday?”
The words “hell no” escaped my mouth before I could stop them. Those are strong words where I come from. (Sorry, Mom.)
The reporter immediately understood that my frustration was not directed at her. Rather, it was directed at the Law Firm of Schumer & McConnell (The Firm™️), which is perpetually trying to normalize a corrupt approach to legislating, in which The Firm™️:
Spends months drafting legislation in complete secrecy
Aggressively markets that legislation based not on its details and practical implications (good and bad), but only on its broadest, least-controversial objectives
Lets members see bill text for the first time only a few days (sometimes a few hours) before an arbitrary deadline imposed by The Firm™️ itself, always with a contrived sense of urgency
Forces a vote on the legislation on or before that deadline, denying senators any real opportunity to read, digest, and debate the measure on its merits, much less introduce, consider, and vote on amendments to fix any perceived problems with the bill or otherwise improve it.
Whenever The Firm™️ engages in this practice, it largely excludes nearly every senator from the constitutionally prescribed process in which all senators are supposed to participate. By so doing, The Firm™️ effectively disenfranchises hundreds of millions of Americans — at least for purposes relevant to the legislation at hand — and that’s tragic. It’s also un-American, uncivil, uncollegial, and really uncool.
So why does The Firm™️ do it?
Every time The Firm™️ utilizes this approach and the bill passes — and it nearly always does — The Firm™️ becomes more powerful.
The high success rate is largely attributable to the fact that The Firm™️ has become very adept at (a) enlisting the help of the (freakishly cooperative) corporate media, (b) exerting peer pressure in a way that makes what you experienced in middle school look mild by comparison, and (c) rewarding those who consistently vote with The Firm™️ with various privileges that The Firm™️ is uniquely capable of offering, such as committee assignments, help with campaign fundraising, and a whole host of other widely coveted things that The Firm™️ is free to distribute in any manner it pleases.
It’s through this process that The Firm™️ passes most major spending legislation. And it’s through this process that The Firm™️ likely intends to pass the still-secret, $106 billion supplemental aid/border-security package, which The Firm™️ has spent four months negotiating with the luxury of obsessing over every sentence, word, period, and comma.
I still don’t know exactly what’s in this bill, although I have serious concerns with it based on the few details The Firm™️ has been willing to share. But under no circumstances should this bill — which would fund military operations in three distant parts of the world and make massive, permanent changes to immigration law — be passed next week.
Nor should it be passed until we have had adequate time to read the bill, discuss it with constituents, debate it, offer amendments, and vote on those amendments.
There’s no universe in which those things will happen by next week.
Depending on how long it is and the complexity of its provisions, the minimum period of time we should devote to this bill after it’s released should be measured in weeks or months, not days or hours.
Democrats have one huge, unavoidable problem. And his name is Joe Biden.
According to recent polls, GOP front-runner and former President Donald Trump would beat Biden if the 2024 election were held today. A Quinnipiac poll out Wednesday shows Biden with 46 percent and Trump with 48 percent among registered voters, still within the margin of error and too close to call. However, a new Fox News poll, also out Wednesday, shows that in a head-to-head, the former president would prevail with 50 percent to Biden’s 46 — a number Trump has never garnered in a Fox poll going back to October 2015.
Do these numbers and thin margins mean anything? Maybe not. We are still a year from the election. And if 2016 taught us anything, it’s that polls are traditionally garbage and are used far more often as tools to shape public opinion than to reflect it. But there are deeper and far more meaningful insights to mine from the survey, and they don’t spell good things for the Democrat Party.
For instance, it’s worth noting that not only does Biden appear to be losing generally to Trump, but the incumbent is losing his own dependable voters to his rival. Polls show Biden is hemorrhaging black, Hispanic, suburban, and young voters — all demographics that reliably vote Democrat. It could have something to do with how Biden has handled major crises he’s either caused or exacerbated. According to Quinnipiac, voters disapprove of his response to the Hamas attack and subsequent fallout (54 percent disapproval to 37 percent approval), his economy (59 to 37 percent), his foreign policy (61 to 34 percent), his border crisis (65 to 26 percent), and his response to the Russia-Ukraine war (49 to 47 percent).
The implications are simple. Voters are confronting a rare moment in U.S. history in which they can actually compare what it’s like to live under the leadership, or lack thereof, of the two major presidential candidates. Do they want Bidenomics or the affordable grocery and gas prices of the Trump era? Do they want war in the Middle East — or Eastern Europe or the South China Sea — or peace? Do they want an open border or national security? The Trump-Biden decision is an increasingly easy calculation for voters to make.
So, Democrats are stuck. And they did this to themselves, largely by closing off the possibility of a primary and instead committing to dragging Joe’s corpse across the finish line.
And yes, that really is the strategy. It’s not that Biden is a strong candidate by any measure, save for maybe his incumbency, but again, even that’s in doubt after his disastrous first term. He’s a demonstrably weak candidate, especially compared to Trump — another reality easily extrapolated from the polls.
On the Republican side — which, in contrast to Democrats, is still choosing to slog through primary election theatrics — the second-tier candidates are a notable governor and former governor, both beloved by their states and beyond. And Trump is still leading them by some 50 points. He’s got 48 points on Ron DeSantis and 51 on Nikki Haley. If prominent leftist governors such as Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer were to challenge Biden for the Democrat nomination, there’s no way he’d have that kind of lead.
This week there have been murmurs of a potential challenger — just maybe not who you would have expected. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was on Capitol Hill hobnobbing with Sen. Chuck Schumer on Wednesday and refused to answer reporters’ questions about whether he’ll run for president. This after he divulged last week that the parties did approach him last year. And you can see the twinkle in Democrats’ eyes at the thought of dumping weak, old Biden for his antithesis. Here’s Schumer flirting with The Rock on X after their meeting, posting cutesy little lyrics from one of the actor’s Disney roles.
But while Democrats might view The Rock as an exit strategy, they still have a monumental problem to overcome: Voters aren’t just fed up with Biden, they’re fed up with Democrat policies both foreign and domestic.
There’s no denying Democrats have become the party of mass illegal immigration. Every town is a border town, and even urbanites are done with the Democrat policies overrunning their cities with aliens who suck resources dry. Speaking of cities, left-wing policies have destroyed them, from Portland and Seattle to Washington, D.C. Democrats’ soft-on-crime policies have caused violence in these places to skyrocket, with carjackings up more than 100 percent since last year and violent crime up 40 percent in our nation’s capitol. In fact, just this week D.C.’s disaster of a mayor declared a state of emergency because youth violent crime has gotten so bad. Meanwhile, Democrats have also become the party of inflation, war, no-limits abortion, transing kids, weaponizing the federal government, terrorist sympathizing, and every other anti-America policy position you can imagine.
That takes a strong leader to overcome. Sure, The Rock does a magnificent job at the role he plays in every movie, but he’s not that leader. And besides, would today’s Democrat Party really vote for a candidate who’s a Joe Rogan bro and friends with Trump supporters?
So, Democrats are left to lie with sleepy Joe in the bed they made for themselves. It’s hard to feel sorry for them.
Kylee Griswold is the editorial director of The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religion, and the media. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
Congress averted a government shutdown this weekend, agreeing to 45 days of funding to give members time to pass appropriations bills for the full year. Incredibly, Democrats seemed prepared to shut down the government over their desire for increases in Ukraine war funding. Republicans, by contrast, bucked Senate leader Mitch McConnell to keep the government open without such funding.
While shutdown battles have become common, this one had absurd moments. Democrats tried to delay votes with everything from “magic minutes,” which allow party leaders to speak at length, to Democrat Rep. Jamaal Bowman pulling a fire alarm in the middle of a vote, forcing the evacuation of a House office building.
With hundreds of Jan. 6 protesters facing excessive sentences, which Department of Justice prosecutors say is because they attempted to delay or obstruct an official congressional proceeding, some Americans began demanding the elected member of Congress be held to the same excruciating standard. Bowman, a former school principal, later claimed he didn’t understand how fire alarms work.
Even after the House passed the bill, Democrat Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado further delayed the eventual passage by placing a hold on the bill. The procedural delays were partly a result of efforts to force a shutdown that could be blamed on Republicans. Conventional wisdom in Washington is that Republicans get blamed for government shutdowns regardless of who is responsible.
Democrats Willing to Shut Down over Ukraine
However, Democrats’ delays were also about a demand for additional Ukraine funding. Some Republicans, such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, also want U.S. taxpayers to finance even more of the war against Russia, which has descended into an expensive quagmire.
“Despite nine months of bloody fighting, less than 500 square miles of territory have changed hands since the start of the year. A prolonged stalemate could weaken Western support for Ukraine,” reported The New York Times last week.
“The press never even mentions that Ukraine war funding has become incredibly unpopular with actual Republican voters and an increasing number of independents,” one social media analyst noted. “It’s always framed on every network like some fringe position when it’s actually the majority of Americans.”
Democrats are enthusiastically adopting the Bush-era foreign policy of supporting lengthy U.S.-led wars with a tenuous or even deleterious effect on national security. These wars tend to have very little strategy other than avoiding quick resolution. Such long wars enable years or even decades of financing of the defense industry, which some Ukraine war supporters point to as a benefit for Americans. Democrats are even adopting the Bush-era claim that such wars need to be fought to advance “democracy.”
Partisan Divide On The Issue Rears Head
On Friday night, the lack of additional funding for Ukraine caused Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray, D-Wash., to object to Sen. Ron Johnson’s, R-Wis., request on the Senate floor to pass a clean two-week funding extension.
“The Dems are about to shut down the government over Ukraine. I actually can’t believe it, but here we are,” Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, said in a social media post.
The Senate then pushed a bill that would give an additional $6 billion to fund the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy dismissed it out of hand and said the House would propose something instead. A few days prior, House Republicans were able to strip $300 million in Ukraine funding from a bill that was being debated.
Back in the Senate, McConnell failed to get fellow Republicans to sign onto his plan to force Ukraine funding instead of allowing House Republicans to work on a funding bill without it. Punchbowl’s John Bresnahan and Andrew Desiderio had perhaps the most intriguing reporting of the weekend with this vignette:
Senate sources said it was the first time they could remember that Republican senators didn’t seem to fear repercussions for disagreeing with McConnell, particularly on a prominent issue on which he’d staked out a clear position. It was unclear whether senators overruled McConnell because his mental and physical weakness has left him vulnerable or simply because they recognize how strongly Republican voters feel about funding an expensive war without a clear strategy for success.
House Democrats dug in, passing around a one-page sheet lambasting McCarthy for his continuing resolution, almost all of which focused on Democrats’ desire for U.S. taxpayers to finance the Ukraine war.
The Senate prepared to hotline, or fast track, their vote on the House bill that did not include war funding. That’s when Bennett held it up over the Ukraine issue.
The pressure for funding could not have been more intense. “Senior administration officials” pressured McConnell, saying that Ukraine could not be sustained without funding in this weekend’s bill.
“It’s rumored that Pentagon officials are on their way over to the Capitol to lobby for Schumer-McConnell. The Military Industrial Complex™️ doesn’t like to lose,” wrote Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, on Saturday.
Russia-collusion hoaxer Michael McFaul trotted out the same type of argument that has been used to bully Americans to stay in drawn-out wars for decades. “If the US pulls back on our support from Ukraine now, we radically diminish our credibility to deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan,” he said.
Ukraine War Enthusiasts Pressure McCarthy
The Ukraine war enthusiasts only allowed the stopgap funding measure to proceed on the grounds they’d soon get a vote on whether to send another major aid package to Ukraine.
“We will not stop fighting for more economic and security assistance for Ukraine,”Schumer said.
“We cannot under any circumstances allow American support for Ukraine to be interrupted. I fully expect the Speaker will keep his commitment to the people of Ukraine and secure passage of the support needed to help Ukraine at this critical moment,”President Biden said in his announcement on the funding measure. He said he’d made a deal with McCarthy to vote on additional funding.
House Democrats said, “When the House returns, we expect Speaker McCarthy to advance a bill to the House Floor for an up-or-down vote that supports Ukraine, consistent with his commitment to making sure that Vladimir Putin, Russia and authoritarianism are defeated. We must stand with the Ukrainian people until victory is won.”
Nearly every Democrat and a fair number of Republicans want to continue funding the Ukraine war, despite the results of previous rounds of funding. They’ll likely succeed, but the vote will be harder.
Conservative Republicans such as Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., will be on guard. “When I said I’d do everything I could to stop the US government from being held hostage to Ukraine, I meant it. We cannot continue to put the needs of other countries above our own. We cannot save Ukraine by dooming the U.S. economy. I’m grateful to all Members of Congress who stood with me, but the battle to fund our government isn’t over yet — the forever-war crowd will return,” he wrote.
Democrats’ campaign strategy of emphasizing Ukraine war funding at a time of economic distress for many Americans will be interesting to watch.
While the Biden administration faces escalating calls for impeachment, either of the homeland security secretary, the attorney general, or even the president himself as evidence mounts over myriad scandals, Republicans’ top Senate lawmaker is distracted.
Instead of directing his ire at President Joe Biden for his influence-peddling schemes with corrupt overseas actors, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell piled onto the media onslaught against a freshman representative from Wisconsin who cussed out some teenagers at the Capitol. GOP Rep. Derrick Van Orden stirred up controversy last week when he went on a tirade against some interns with the Senate page program who were lying in the Capitol rotunda, which the congressman says he considered disrespectful.
“Wake the fuck up you little sh-ts. … What the f-ck are you all doing? Get the f-ck out of here,” Van Orden said, telling the group they were “defiling the space,” according to one page’s recollection of the incident. The Wisconsin lawmaker was defiant, explaining on a local radio show, “The people who have brought this up are not serious people.”
Nor are the Republicans who have remained silent on the administration’s series of scandals but have been quick to get behind the Democrats’ latest outrage circus.
The Van Orden outburst drew swift condemnation from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York. “I was shocked when I heard about it, and I am further shocked at his refusal to apologize to these young people,” Schumer said.
McConnell didn’t hesitate to make the outrage bipartisan. According to Politico, McConnell was clear to “associate myself with the remarks of the majority leader.”
“Everybody on this side of the aisle feels exactly the same way,” McConnell added.
If only Republicans had a leader in the upper chamber who dared stand up for Republicans. The problem is not that Van Orden’s eruption at a couple of teenagers is excusable. The problem is McConnell’s regular participation in Democrats’ smear campaigns against other Republicans while the GOP Senate leader remains silent on the administration’s corruption scandals. Last week, McConnell declined to comment at all on House Republicans’ impeachment push.
It’s far from the first time the Republican Senate leader has peddled the Democrats’ latest political narratives. In March, McConnell condemned Fox News for the network airing the Jan. 6 tapes presented by Tucker Carlson. The tapes undermined the Democrats’ narratives of a “deadly insurrection,” the basis for their snap impeachment of outgoing President Donald Trump.
“With regard to the presentation on Fox News last night, I want to associate myself entirely with the opinion of the chief of the Capitol Police about what happened on Jan. 6,” McConnell told reporters on Capitol Hill following Carlson’s first installment of the J6 tapes. Hours earlier, Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger had sent a memo to his department that called Carlson’s coverage “filled with offensive and misleading conclusions.”
The comments led even Elon Musk to begin to question whether McConnell was actually a Republican. “I keep forgetting which party he belongs to,” Musk wrote on Twitter.
After the FBI raid of former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence at Mar-a-Lago, McConnell didn’t condemn the weaponization of federal law enforcement. Instead, the Republican Senate leader endorsed more funding for the federal bureau. This followed the octogenarian lawmaker sabotaging Republicans’ midterm efforts to reclaim the Senate. McConnell was more interested in maintaining an establishment minority he could control than in achieving a GOP majority that aligned more with Trump’s vision for the party.
Republicans have a right to expect far better from their No. 1 leader in the Senate. Considering McConnell’s recent health problems, new leadership could come sooner rather than later. His successor would be wise to adopt a new approach that puts voters first.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
This week, Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., went back to work after spending several weeks away from Congress due to being hospitalized for severe depression. But while Democrats, who were sorely pressed to maintain their narrow majority in his absence, celebrated his return, C-Span video of him chairing a Senate subcommittee provided sobering evidence of the recovering stroke victim’s limitations. Much like his disastrous election debate last October, at the hearing, Fetterman’s halting speech, barely understandable comments, and inability to communicate without electronic aid illustrated his incapacity.
But while Democrats are quick to slam as bigots anyone who had the temerity to notice Fetterman’s problems, they are not feeling quite so generous about another member of their Senate caucus. The double standard creates an ominous precedent that ought to hang over the 2024 presidential election.
While they’ve been circling the wagons around Fetterman, Democrats have been pressuring Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., to resign due to the perception that she lacks the physical energy or the mental acuity to do her job. But unfortunately for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and the California Democrats who want to replace her, the ailing 89-year-old has refused to step down, though she has already announced she won’t run for re-election next year.
Feinstein vs. Fetterman
Feinstein was hospitalized for shingles in February and has remained absent since then. With no date set for her return, the vacancy on the Judiciary Committee, where her absence leaves the Democrats without a majority, has created a serious problem for the efforts of the Biden administration and Schumer to confirm federal judges. The duel between the ailing Feinstein and her party has, at least for the moment, benefited Republicans. But the implications of the controversy go beyond its impact on her desire to stay on until her term expires in January 2025.
There are currently four senators who are over 80, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who returned this week from an extended medical absence after a fall. Thirty senators are in their 70s. Whatever one thinks about the question of elderly senators serving, the campaign to push Feinstein out of her seat sets an interesting precedent.
Democrats have reacted to questions posed by Fetterman’s obvious limitations as a senator with both denial and an attempt to shame skeptics with pious rhetoric about ableism. They have attempted to depict him as a poster child for tolerance for those who suffer from mental health issues.
But they are indifferent to criticisms of their effort to push Feinstein out of her seat on the grounds of ageism, which have just as much validity as their defense of Fetterman.
Feinstein vs. Biden
Even worse, their belief that Feinstein’s diminishing capacities render her ineligible for a seat in the Senate stands in even starker contrast to the position President Joe Biden’s mental state has placed Democrats in.
Ever since Biden became their presumptive presidential nominee in March of 2020, ignoring his decline has become a political necessity for Democrats, and even more so with each passing month. At the very least, his never-ending stream of gaffes, frequent confusion in public, and erratic behavior raises questions about his mental acuity. Yet the corporate media treat questions about his health as off limits and proof of the bad morals of conservatives.
Still, as was the case with Feinstein until recently, the 80-year-old Biden remains fit enough to silence inquiries from Democrats. As president, it’s far easier to shield him from public scrutiny. More importantly, most in the party are coming to terms with the fact that they may be stuck with him for the 2024 election.
No matter his mental state, having spent his entire life working to become president, Biden clearly has no intention of giving up after only one term. He will have to be dragged from the White House kicking and screaming. The obvious alternatives — Vice President Kamala Harris or California Gov. Gavin Newsom — lack much appeal for the party’s grassroots or its donor class. So, many on the left are convinced Biden may be their best bet for victory next year, especially if the election is a rematch of the 2020 race against former President Donald Trump.
Double Standard
Yet whether you think Democrats’ decision to get rid of someone who can’t do her job is sensible or insensitive and nasty, it does raise questions about the same standard not being applied to Fetterman and most especially to Biden.
Feinstein has met her Democratic colleagues halfway by asking to be replaced on the Judiciary Committee so they can continue confirming leftist judges at an even faster pace than McConnell confirmed conservatives during the Trump administration. But replacing her on the committee requires GOP acquiescence and, for understandable reasons, Republicans are only too happy to let the current stalemate created by her absence continue. That’s led to mounting anger from Democrats, who think Feinstein is being selfish.
The empty seat on the Judiciary Committee has turned the issue into a crisis for Democrats, but many of them have been pushing for her resignation for years. Feinstein’s voting record can’t be criticized by the left, but she has at times engaged in collegial or commonsensical behavior that they regard as insufficiently woke.
Feinstein Too Reasonable for Some
In 2019, she enraged global warming extremists when she brusquely lectured a group of visiting schoolchildren about the importance of compromise when they began to virtue signal to her about not supporting the most alarmist environmental measures.
Just as bad from their point of view were allegations that she behaved decently toward conservative judicial nominees such as Justice Amy Coney Barrett, which some characterized as treating her with “kid gloves.” That’s despite the fact that Feinstein had intolerantly targeted her for her Catholic faith, saying that “the dogma lives loudly within you.”
That goes a long way toward explaining why Feinstein’s incapacity has been an issue for left-wingers who have no problem tolerating a leftist like Fetterman, who, leaving aside his hospitalization for depression, also still needs special equipment to be able to understand his colleagues and who appears to converse only with difficulty.
But there’s more at stake in this discussion than the Democrats’ hypocrisy on the question of fitness for office.
What if Biden’s Health Can’t Be Hid?
Democrats appear to be serious about asking the American people to re-elect an already diminished man who will be 82 in January 2025 and presumably serve until he’s 86. So, the idea that the questions they are currently raising about Feinstein can’t be raised about Biden ought to be a bridge too far even for inveterate Trump haters.
Just as important, they need to ask themselves in the coming year what they will do if Biden’s health continues to decline and ultimately puts him in the same position as Feinstein, where the problems can no longer be concealed. By declaring that questions about Biden’s mental acuity are off-limits or in bad taste, they are essentially setting up a situation where Harris being forced to step in and govern is a realistic possibility sometime in the next five years.
The only realistic alternative to simply hoping and praying Biden will continue to decline at a slow enough rate that his problems can continue to be concealed or smoothed over without political consequences is to begin asking the same hard questions about his health that they are currently posing to Feinstein. It remains to be seen whether anyone of consequence in the party has the guts or the wisdom to point this out before it is too late.
Jonathan S. Tobin is a senior contributor to The Federalist, editor in chief of JNS.org, and a columnist for Newsweek. Follow him on Twitter at @jonathans_tobin.
A New York City law firm with “strong ties” to Democrats and the Biden administration, and a big-time fundraiser for both, lent the Manhattan district attorney three lawyers to help him take down Donald Trump. This cohort included former Special Assistant District Attorney Mark F. Pomerantz, whose leaked resignation letter appears responsible for the Manhattan prosecutor’s decision to indict Trump.
Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg became the first prosecutor to bring criminal charges against a former president when he moved forward last week with the arraignment of Trump on 34 counts of falsifying business records. The pathetic, barebones indictment was quickly denounced by pundits on both sides of the political aisle. Then on Friday, the House Judiciary Committee raised additional concerns about the role Matthew Colangelo, the former No. 3 man in the Biden administration’s Department of Justice, played in the targeting of Trump.
While Bragg’s hiring of Colangelo to reportedly “jump-start” the investigation into Trump further indicates the indictment was politically motivated, the Manhattan D.A. office’s unprecedented use of outside, Democrat-connected lawyers to investigate Trump pre-dates Colangelo’s arrival by nearly a year.
A Pattern
In early to mid-February of 2021, Bragg’s predecessor, District Attorney Cyrus Vance, arranged for private criminal defense attorney and former federal prosecutor Mark Pomerantz to be a special assistant district attorney for the Manhattan D.A.’s office. Pomerantz, whom The New York Times noted was to work “solely on the Trump investigation,” took a temporary leave of absence from his law firm, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, where he had defended former Sen. Robert Torricelli, D-N.J., against alleged campaign finance violations. But even before being sworn in as a special assistant to the Manhattan D.A., Pomerantz had reportedly “been helping with the case informally for months…”
According to the Times, “the hiring of an outsider is a highly unusual move for a prosecutor’s office.” One must wonder, then, how much more unusual it is for the Manhattan D.A.’s office to receive the “informal” assistance of a private criminal defense attorney. The legacy news outlet, however, justified the hiring of Pomerantz based on the “usual complexity” of “the two-and-a-half-year investigation of the former president and his family business.”
A few months later, the D.A.’s office welcomed two more outsiders, Elyssa Abuhoff and Caroline Williamson, who also both took leaves of absence from the New York powerhouse Paul, Weiss to work on the Trump investigation as special assistant district attorneys.
For a law firm to lend not one but three lawyers to the Manhattan D.A.’s office seems rather magnanimous, until you consider Paul, Weiss’s previous generosity to Joe Biden. During Biden’s White House run, the law firm hosted a $2,800-per-plate fundraiser for about 100 guests.
The chair of the Paul, Weiss law firm, Brad Karp, also topped the list of Biden fundraisers, bundling at least $100,000 for the then-candidate. “As someone who cares passionately about preserving the rule of law, safeguarding our democracy and protecting fundamental liberties, I’ve been delighted to do everything I possibly can to support the Joe Biden/Kamala Harris ticket,” Karp wrote in an email.
Karp’s support of the Democrat presidential ticket isn’t surprising given that his fellow Paul, Weiss partner Robert Schumer is Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s brother.
Biden’s connection to the firm, however, dates much further back, with the former secretary of homeland security in the Obama-Biden administration, Jeh Johnson, also heralding from Paul, Weiss. Once elected president, Biden nominated Jonathan Kanter, a former partner of Paul, Weiss, to serve as the top antitrust enforcement official at the Justice Department. In fact, according to Bloomberg, Paul, Weiss has “emerge[d] as Biden-Era N.Y. Power Center.”
A Resignation
The three Paul, Weiss alumni sent to the Manhattan D.A.’s office to bolster the Trump investigations would all make news, but for different reasons. Pomerantz first garnered headlines when he resigned as a special assistant district attorney in early 2022, after Bragg became Manhattan’s D.A.
In his resignation letter, leaked to The New York Times, Pomerantz said that in late 2021, Bragg’s predecessor, Vance, had “concluded that the facts warranted prosecution, and he directed the team to present evidence to a grand jury and to seek an indictment of Mr. Trump and other defendants as soon as reasonably possible.” But after replacing Vance as D.A., Bragg decided “not to go forward with the grand jury presentation and not to seek criminal charges at the present time,” Pomerantz wrote, adding, “The investigation has been suspended indefinitely.”
What Pomerantz’s letter did not say, however, was that in late 2021, “at least three career prosecutors asked to move off the investigation,” reportedly “concerned that the investigation was moving too quickly, without clear evidence to support possible charges.” Instead, in his resignation, Pomerantz declared he believes “Donald Trump is guilty of numerous felony violations,” that “the public interest warrants the criminal prosecution of Mr. Trump,” and that “such a prosecution should be brought without any further delay.”
Pomerantz later rejoined Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and authored a book about the Trump investigation.
Pomerantz’s letter and his claims that Bragg had suspended the Trump probe triggered a political firestorm, which the Manhattan D.A. sought to quell by telling the public the investigation was ongoing.
Criminal Charges
Meanwhile, the Manhattan D.A.’s office pushed forward in its criminal case against the Trump Corporation. A grand jury had indicted the Trump Corporation in late June of 2021 on charges it engaged in a scheme to avoid paying taxes on the salaries of high-level executives by instead funneling compensation through perks, such as luxury apartments and cars. A second Trump corporation would later be added to the criminal case that went to trial in late 2022.
The trial team that prosecuted the case included the other two Paul, Weiss attorneys on loan to the Manhattan D.A.’s office: Abuhoff and Williamson. Bragg borrowed a third outside attorney, Gary T. Fishman, from New York’s Democrat Attorney General Letitia James. Along with three regular members of the Manhattan D.A.’s office, the three “special assistant district attorneys” helped convict the Trump-related business entities in early December 2022.
After securing convictions of the two Trump corporations, Abuhoff and Williamson ended their “special assistant district attorney” relationship with Bragg’s office in December 2022 and went back to Paul, Weiss — a return that would be short-lived. Abuhoff rejoined the Manhattan D.A.’s office in February 2023, and Williamson returned the next month, but now both as regular members of the staff.
So short was their time back at Paul, Weiss, in fact, that one must wonder if the firm paid them bonuses following their departure from the Manhattan D.A.’s office. The Federalist posed this question to Paul, Weiss, but the inquiry went unanswered. Paul, Weiss also did not respond to questions concerning whether the lawyers received any compensation or Paul, Weiss benefits while on leave to the D.A.’s office.
Abuhoff and Williamson’s return to the D.A.’s office followed the news that in early December, Bragg had hired Matthew Colangelo from the Biden DOJ to “jump-start” the office’s investigation into Trump. Upon his inauguration, Biden had appointed Colangelo to serve in the No. 3 slot at the DOJ, showing the trust Biden has in the lawyer now charged with taking down his opponent Trump.
Colangelo had also previously worked in the Obama-Biden administration and as chief counsel and executive deputy attorney general in A.G. James’ office, where he and Fishman reportedly investigated Trump. As noted above, James would later lend Fishman to the Manhattan D.A.’s office, keeping with her campaign promise to “be a real pain in the -ss” to Trump. It’s no wonder House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan is concerned about Colangelo’s role in the unprecedented indictment.
Connecting the Dots
But the issue goes much beyond Colangelo, for it seems likely Bragg never would have hired Colangelo had Pomerantz’s resignation letter never been leaked to The New York Times. It’s outrageous that Pomerantz was reportedly “informally” advising the former Manhattan D.A. while working for the “Biden-Era N.Y. Power Center” law firm with extensive connections to Democrats. Equally outrageous is the fact that the same law firm lent the D.A.’s office three lawyers to bolster the Trump investigation.
It seems Bragg was swayed by New York politics to alter the communist boast of Joseph Stalin’s secret police chief, Lavrentiy Beria: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” The Manhattan D.A. had the man but couldn’t find the crime.
“Lend me your top attorneys to show me a crime,” is the new motto of the political machine New York Democrats built to purge the country, communist style, of Trump. That should horrify every American.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Thanks to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Fox News host Tucker Carlson now has access to more than 40,000 hours of unreleased surveillance video from the Jan. 6 riot. It’s created quite a bit of consternation and anger in the media. Of course, if the Select Committee on the Jan. 6 Attack, handpicked by Nancy Pelosi, hadn’t withheld inconvenient evidence from the public in the first place, then McCarthy wouldn’t have had the chance to give the Fox News host anything. Republicans have Fox. The Jan. 6 committee has virtually every other outlet.
Mitch McConnell is also outraged by Carlson’s framing of the surveillance video. Perhaps if the Kentucky senator had voiced outrage when the committee handed unfettered access to a former producer of “Good Morning America” and “Nightline,” so he could create a slick, selectively edited program that made Jan. 6 look like the September Massacres of the French Revolution, we wouldn’t be here. It says a lot about McConnell that he’s more upset by a media personality sharing videos than he is about Chuck Schumer, a government official, demanding a private company censor journalism.
“I could take footage from World War II, find a little piece of it, and convince somebody it’s the moon landing,” former Jan. 6 committee member Adam Kinzinger told CNN’s Anderson Cooper last night. “There’s footage of soldiers [in Vietnam] at their bases hanging out in Saigon,” Cooper responded. “… You can take video of anybody in the course of a day.”
You can. And you can also take footage showing soldiers in Vietnam abusing civilians to create the perception that most servicemen abused civilians. The “mostly peaceful” formulation, typically used by liberals to whitewash leftist violence, is shameful. And so is the partisan fearmongering surrounding Jan. 6.
It’s difficult for me to muster any sympathy for the nutjobs who entered the Capitol building. It’s implausible that most of them didn’t understand what they were doing was wrong, dangerous, or illegal, whether they were just milling about or banging on doors or vandalizing offices. Many, of course, acted in threatening and violent ways. It was a national embarrassment.
None of that makes the dishonest political revisionism of the Jan. 6 committee any truer. It’s clear the QAnon Shaman wasn’t moments away from overthrowing the republic and declaring Donald Trump the king of America. It wasn’t anywhere close to “the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War” or the new Pearl Harbor or 9/11. Which is why Democrats conflate the actions of rioters with those of the thousands of people who protested the election results outside, the president who enflamed the crowd with conspiratorial rhetoric, and the politicians who were inside voting on certification. Wrong or right, conspiracists or not, the latter people did not do anything illegal.
Put it this way, the central difference between Jan 6, 2021, and the last day or two of May 2020, when Secret Service agents had to stick Donald Trump into a bunker for hours as a throng of “protesters” began overwhelming security at the White House, some throwing rocks and bottles and trying to break down barricades, was the effectiveness of the police.
Then again, QAnon Shaman, like anyone else accused of rioting, deserves a fair trial. If his lawyer is telling the truth, the defense had no access to video of cops peacefully escorting the man around the Capitol. We have no clue if that footage is exculpatory, but it is clearly relevant. QAnon Shaman was sentenced to over three years in prison, with another nearly three years of probation.
If Cooper were a member of a functioning press, he would have been grilling Kinzinger about his committee’s lack of transparency and denial of basic due process. Pelosi blocked members who could have asked for answers regarding security breakdowns or demanded the release of countervailing evidence or tempered the hyperbole and grandstanding that dominated the hearings.
Cooper knows that journalists “selectively” edit and cherry-pick video all the time. He knows that the Jan. 6 committee “selectively” edited and cherry-picked video, as well. Maybe seeing both narratives gives us a far better sense of what happened that day. There was a riot, not a coup d’etat. And the media should be elated that we have more footage for the historical record. Then again, that was never the point, was it?
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. He has appeared on Fox News, C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News and radio talk shows across the country. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.
Democrat Sen. Chuck Schumer is calling on the owner of Fox News to prevent network host Tucker Carlson from releasing any more footage from the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol that House Democrats hid from the public for two years. Carlson’s team reviewed more than 40,000 hours of video from that day and on Monday aired previously unseen footage that contradicts numerous falsehoods peddled by Democrat politicos and corporate media.
On Tuesday, Schumer melodramatically told reporters that Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch “has a special obligation” to bar Carlson from airing more unedited footage from Jan. 6 “because our democracy depends on it.”
Schumer: "Rupert Murdoch has a special obligation to stop Tucker Carlson from going on tonight [and] from letting him go on again and again and again [because] our democracy depends on it." pic.twitter.com/uld6eaCl3C
The comments echo remarks Schumer gave during a temper tantrum on the Senate floor earlier in the day, in which he accused Carlson’s Monday night program of being “one of the most shameful hours … ever seen on cable television” and similarly called on Murdoch to prohibit the release of more Jan. 6 footage.
They're Freaking Out Big Time
Senator Schumer Went Down To The Senate Floor This Morning To
-Condemn Tucker Carlson's January 6th Tapes Segment Last Night -Call For Fox News And Rupert Murdoch To Stop Tucker Carlson From Releasing Another Report On The January 6th Tapes… pic.twitter.com/e3z3YBwTFR
— The Columbia Bugle 🇺🇸 (@ColumbiaBugle) March 7, 2023
Why the demand for censorship? According to White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, Jan. 6 was supposedly“the worst attack on [American] democracy since the Civil War.” If the country were as close to forfeiting democracy as Democrats often claim, don’t the American people deserve to see as much footage as possible from that day? Not according to Democrats. That’s because the footage Carlson released shows their J6 narrative was not only overblown but in some instances completely false.
Within the footage Carlson released on Monday night were clips showing Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who died of natural causes the day following the J6 riot, walking around the complex “after Democrats and the media claimed he was brutally murdered” by supporters of then-President Donald Trump. The New York Times, for example, claimed in its original report on Sicknick’s death that he died — right there, big and bold in its headline — “From Injuries in Pro-Trump Rampage.”
As The Federalist’s Tristan Justice reported, Democrats’ House select committee, which was used as a political show trial to their benefit, also helped fuel such conspiracies over Sicknick’s death.
In addition to surveillance footage of Sicknick, Carlson also released clips showing Capitol law enforcement giving VIP treatment to Jacob Chansley, known as the “Q-Anon Shaman.” As The Federalist separately reported, the footage shows Chansley being escorted by Capitol Police officers “to multiple entrances throughout the building,” with some clips appearing to show officers checking “for unlocked doors.”
“They helped him. They acted as his tour guides,” Carlson said. “We counted at least nine officers who were within touching distance of unarmed Jacob Chansley. Not one of them tried to slow him down.”
Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Republican voters are desperately concerned about the country and are looking for bold and persuasive leadership instead of comfort with a few small, intermittent successes.
Comments Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell made on Tuesday show why he has become the single biggest obstacle to GOP success.
The Kentucky Republican claimed giving more money to Ukraine is “the No. 1 priority for the United States right now, according to most Republicans.” The new $1.7 trillion Democrat spending bill he enthusiastically supports would give Ukraine another roughly $45 billion in assistance, bringing the total over the past eight months to more than $100 billion, a staggering figure even if it weren’t happening during a time of inflation, looming recession, and other serious domestic problems.
McConnell: "Providing assistance for Ukrainians to defeat the Russians is the number one priority for the United States right now according to most Republicans. That's how we see the challenges confronting the country at the moment." pic.twitter.com/NPmzWRzoz1
The comment about Republican priorities is so false as to be completely delusional. Among the many concerns Republican voters have with Washington, D.C., a failure to give even more money to Ukraine simply does not rank.
Many Republican voters support helping Ukraine fight Russia’s unjust invasion, but it is absolutely nowhere near their top issue, contrary to McConnell’s false claim. It ranked higher as a priority before American taxpayers gave Ukraine more than was given to their war effort by nearly every other country in the world combined. But even at the height of support for the effort, before it turned into a massive proxy war with an unclear relationship to the U.S. national interest, it was not the top issue for Republicans, coming behind the economy and the U.S. border.
A majority of Americans polled a few months ago said more money should be given to Ukraine only after wealthy European countries match what Americans have already sent — something nowhere near happening.
Republicans care deeply about borders and national sovereignty, but they rank the protection of their own open border far above the protection of the borders of other countries. It is worth remembering that the longest government shutdown in U.S. history occurred in 2019 over a fight between Congress and President Donald Trump over whether to commit a relatively paltry $5 billion to protect our country’s southern border, which Congress had refused to fund.
About that $1.7 Trillion Spending Package
Another comment from McConnell also shocked Republicans. Of the $1.7 trillion left-wing spending spree McConnell is working so hard to help Democrats pass, he said, unbelievably, that he was “pretty proud of the fact that with a Democratic president, Democratic House, and Democratic Senate, we were able to achieve through this omnibus spending bill essentially all of our priorities.” As an indication of how deeply sick and broken and unserious the Senate is, no one had even begun to read the lengthy bill, which was put forward just hours before votes began.
McConnell: "I'm pretty proud of the fact that with a Democratic president, Democratic House, and Democratic Senate, we were able to achieve through this Omnibus spending bill essentially all of our priorities." pic.twitter.com/RuVcsvNX0B
The American people voted for Republicans to take over control of the House of Representatives, and House Republicans had begged McConnell to push for a smaller, short-term bill to keep the government funded while also giving them a rare opportunity to weigh in on Biden’s policy goals. McConnell allies dismissed House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy and other House members who tried to persuade Republican senators not to support Democrats’ spending frenzy.
Budgets are policy documents, and the only leverage Republicans have is to wait a few weeks for when they will have a much stronger hand to weigh in on every issue that matters. By ramming through the $1.7 trillion package during the lame-duck session, Republicans will have significantly less ability over the next year to fight against Democrats’ destruction of rule of law in the Department of Justice, the failure to protect American borders, the destruction of the military, and Democrat collusion with Big Tech to suppress conservatives and their ideas.
The spending bill McConnell asserted was good for all of his priorities rewards the FBI with brand new headquarters and ups the funding for the DOJ to enable it to go after even more of its political opponents while protecting its political allies.
It’s perhaps worth remembering that during the 2020 Georgia runoff campaign, McConnell blocked efforts to increase funding for Americans who had their businesses and jobs shut down by government mandate during the response to Covid-19. Spending is not a problem for him, so long as the right people receive the funds.
Republicans Need a Leader Who Shares Their Goals
What support McConnell has from Republicans largely comes from doing his job well when it comes to judicial nominations. I myself co-wrote a book on the topic. He is rightly praised for his work in getting conservative judges and justices confirmed and for stopping one liberal judicial nominee, Merrick Garland. It is not praiseworthy, however, that he encouraged President Trump to nominate Garland as attorney general and voted to confirm him when President Biden did nominate him.
It is noteworthy that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has matched McConnell’s record on judges, and with far less fanfare from his allies. Perhaps Democrats demand more of their leaders than competence at only a few aspects of their job. That Schumer is capable of doing what McConnell has done shows it’s not a particularly unique skill set.
McConnell allies also like to say McConnell is good at stopping Democrat legislation. Indeed, McConnell did contribute to what few successes there were in the last two years, such as stopping the poorly named Equality Act. Certainly, he played small ball well enough to keep Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona from voting to get rid of the filibuster. Again, whatever frustration Republican voters have with McConnell should not keep them from acknowledging these limited successes.
However, Republican voters are desperately concerned about the country and are looking for bold and persuasive leadership instead of comfort with a few small, intermittent successes. They also seek leaders who don’t hate them. Frustration with McConnell’s well-known and long-established disdain for Republican voters is becoming a serious problem.
The politically toxic McConnell has continuously ranked as the country’s least popular politician, well behind Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. He is so disliked by Americans that he is underwater by an average of 35.3 points in polls gauging his favorability.
Unfortunately for Republicans, he has been the top elected Republican in the country for the last two years, a period marked mostly by inexcusable impotence, fecklessness, and muddled messaging from the GOP.
Rather than present a coherent and persuasive vision of what Republican control of the Senate might look like, or even demonstrating consistent opposition to Democrat policies, too often McConnell overtly or covertly helped Democrats pass their signature policy goals. He had his deputy Sen. John Cornyn negotiate a bill to restrict Second Amendment rights. He notoriously and embarrassingly caved on a promise to help Democrats get huge numbers to pass their CHIPS subsidy, giving Biden a huge win he could celebrate with Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo two weeks before the midterm elections.
McConnell also famously trashed Republican candidates and the voters who selected them, refused to advocate strenuously for the candidates, and failed to develop or pursue a persuasive message to Americans for voting to give Republicans control of the Senate.
When Democrats poured $75 million — not even counting the outside spending — into defending Mark Kelly’s Senate seat in Arizona, McConnell left Republican challenger Blake Masters high and dry. Masters had only $9 million. Instead, McConnell interfered in Alaska’s Senate race even though the top two contenders were both Republican. He gave his valuable cash to weak Republican Lisa Murkowski, the candidate who did not even win the Alaska Republican Party’s endorsement! Murkowski is known for not voting to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, among other notable decisions.
After the disappointing midterm loss, McConnell blamed others. He also allowed a dozen Republican senators to vote for a bill that would enable assaults on Republican voters who, on religious grounds, oppose redefining marriage.
So long as Mitch McConnell is the top elected Republican in D.C., eagerly trashing Republican voters, vociferously advocating for Democrat policy goals, pushing $1.7 trillion Democrat spending packages, and weakly fighting for whatever Republican goals he can be bothered to pursue, Republicans have a major problem. This is beyond obvious.
Everyone outside D.C. knows this even if few inside D.C. are willing to acknowledge it. Until they do, the Republican Party will continue to suffer.
The Senate passed the $740 billion Inflation Reduction Act on Sunday afternoon after an all-night session lasted more than 15 hours. The package, negotiated by Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Chuck Schumer of New York, passed along party lines, with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking the upper chamber’s 50-50 tie. The bill includes nearly $370 billion in green energy subsidies and tax credits, nearly $80 billion in funding for the Internal Revenue Service and a drug price setting mechanism for Medicare. It also establishes a 15% tax on corporations with market caps higher than $1 billion.
Although Democrats have repeatedly argued that the bill will reduce inflation, the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton Budget Model has “low confidence that the legislation will have any impact on inflation.” In addition, the bill will likely raise taxes for Americans in every bracket, despite President Joe Biden’s pledge to not raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year. The Inflation Reduction Act will pay down the federal deficit by more than $300 billion, the non-partisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget found.
Senators voted down 35 amendments and passed two, with the 48 Democrats and Independent Angus King of Maine agreeing that they would oppose all amendments offered during vote-a-rama to offer the legislation its best chance of passing. Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders objected to the agreement, offering amendments that would restructure the child tax credit, but his proposal failed 97-1.
“They’re great amendments. I’m very happy and I think it says something that every Democrat and Republican voted against them. It says I’m doing something right,” Sanders complained, according to Politico. “I’m fighting for you. I think that should be the message — not to come up with a convoluted reason you can’t vote for it.”
“Today, Senate Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act, siding with American families over special interests, voting to lower the cost of prescription drugs, health insurance, and energy and reduce the deficit while making the wealthiest corporations pay their fair share,” he said in a statement.
Today, Senate Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act, siding with American families over special interests, voting to lower the cost of prescription drugs, health insurance, and energy and reduce the deficit while making the wealthiest corporations pay their fair share.
The House of Representatives will take up the legislation when it gets back from recess on Aug. 12, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer announced. The bill is expected to pass the lower chamber along party lines.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
When Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., announced Senate Democrats’ New Year’s resolution to abolish the filibuster and ram through a partisan federal takeover of election administration, he framed it as an attempt to protect “free and fair elections,” the “foundation of our democracy,” from state governments. In reality, it is the leftist elites and their corporate allies, not the states, that pose the greatest threat to our constitutional system.
Free and fair elections are the foundation of our democracy, but the Democrats’ concerns about election rights are totally baseless. Progressives from all over the country — from President Joe Biden to Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams and Schumer — claim that Republicans are passing “voter suppression laws” to exclude their political opponents from the vote.
In reality, it is easier to vote in 2022 than it ever has been. Voter registration has been streamlined, and record turnouts show that Americans of all backgrounds are freely exercising their rights.
The left’s proposed reforms would restrict Americans’ freedom, not expand it. Legalizing ballot harvesting, for instance, would present more opportunities for corruption.
More generally, taking election administration powers away from the states and handing them to the federal government would not eliminate the potential for abusing those powers, it would just make it easier for officials in Washington, D.C., to abuse them — and it would further undermine our system of federalism.
In 2020, when election integrity fears swept other parts of the country, the state of Florida conducted its elections with peace, security from interference, and respect for all citizens, all in the midst of a worldwide pandemic. This is proof that with strong leadership, state governments are perfectly capable of holding the responsibility of election administration. Ironically, this year will be the first time that the president’s home state of Delaware allows in-person early voting, whereas Florida has had it for years.
Left’s Broader Effort to Consolidate Power
Democrats’ campaign to centralize elections is part of a broader effort to consolidate power in the hands of a leftist elite class. This class wants to use that power to silence and disempower anyone who dissents from their radical progressive agenda.
Case in point: the very same people who said in 2005 that restricting the filibuster would mean losing to “the passions of the moment” and spell “doomsday for democracy” — Biden and Schumer — want to eliminate the rule now that they are in power.
This power grab masquerading as democracy reform is bigger than just what goes on in the Senate. In 2020, leftist politicians closed churches and restricted in-home religious services while they let political protests, and eventually full-scale riots, go unnoticed. In 2021, critical race theory advocates indoctrinated our children and tried to remove parents from our schools. And this year, the Biden administration will begin forcing millions of Americans to get a Covid-19 vaccine to keep their jobs.
Collaboration from Communists and Corporations
In this movement, the political left has been aided by social media giants and mega-corporations. To gain favor with the Marxists in Washington, D.C., Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter censor dissenting voices, labeling unpopular views as “misinformation.” Amazon blacklists conservative authors. And banks that taxpayers bailed out in 2008 cancel accounts based on Orwellian “reputational risk.”
Of course, behind closed doors many of these same companies are in bed with a genocidal regime, the Chinese Communist Party. While they are eager to appear human rights champions, they lobby for trading goods made with slave labor and protect communist propaganda from negative customer reviews. It makes sense that corporations comfortable with totalitarianism abroad would be happy to silence dissent in the United States.
Those of us who are not on board with the progressive agenda should take note. America is still a free nation, and it will take some time before the situation here begins to resemble the dystopia that is communist China. But if it can happen anywhere, it can happen here, and censorship and consolidation of power are two important steps on the road to tyranny.
Americans need to remember where the greatest threats to our democracy really lie. If we focus our attention on exaggerated problems and imaginary fears, rather than the leftist elite power grab unfolding before our very eyes, we do so at our own peril.
Marco Rubio is a U.S. senator from Florida. MARCO RUBIO MORE ARTICLES
Members of Congress in both parties are demanding that President Joe Biden respond to the ISIS-Khorasan Province terrorist attack that has killed at least 12 Americans.
The attack outside Hamid Karzai International Airport made Thursday the deadliest day for Americans in Afghanistan since Aug. 6, 2011, and the third-deadliest day throughout the 20-year-long war. Two ISIS-Khorasan Province suicide bombers detonated explosive vests before gunmen opened fire on a crowd, U.S. Central Command Commander Gen. Kenneth McKenzie told reporters.
“This murderous attack offers the clearest possible reminder that terrorists will not stop fighting the United States just because our politicians grow tired of fighting them,” Senate Minority Leader and Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell said in a statement. “I remain concerned that terrorists worldwide will be emboldened by our retreat, by this attack, and by the establishment of a radical Islamic terror state in Afghanistan. We need to redouble our global efforts to confront these barbarian enemies who want to kill Americans and attack our homeland.”
McConnell’s counterpart, Democratic New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, declared that “it must be made clear to the world that the terrorists who perpetrated this will be sought and be brought to justice.”
“The U.S. cannot and will not be silent in the face of these attacks – we must bring to justice the terrorists who committed these heinous acts as we work to extract others from harm’s way,” Democratic Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen added. “We must work to establish stability on the ground and remain focused on securing the safety of U.S. citizens, our troops, and our Afghan partners.”
House Minority Leader and Republican California Rep. Kevin McCarthy called on Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to “bring Congress back before Aug. 31 so we can be briefed thoroughly by the Administration and prohibit the withdrawal of our troops until every American is safely out.”
House Republicans were briefed by Biden administration officials on Tuesday.
Pelosi did not commit to bringing the House back from recess, but she did say that “Committees of Jurisdiction will continue to hold briefings on Afghanistan.”
Democratic New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez appeared to take a shot at the Biden administration’s withdrawal policy, declaring, “We can’t trust the Taliban with Americans’ security.”
Republican Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse urged Biden to “rip up the Aug. 31 [withdrawal] deadline and defend evacuation routes by expanding the perimeter around the Kabul airport or by retaking Bagram” Air Force Base.
Four Republicans, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn, Georgia Rep. Mark Green and North Carolina Rep. Mark Walker called on Biden to resign.
The Senate on Tuesday passed its bipartisan infrastructure bill, moving what would be the largest public works package in decades one step closer to becoming law months after negotiations first began. The bill, which advocates praised as the largest investment in America’s infrastructure since the construction of the interstate highway system in the 1950s, passed 69-30. Nineteen Republicans joined every Democrat in voting for the package.
The legislation, titled the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), was on a glide path to passage after beating a Senate filibuster Sunday night, when 68 senators voted to end debate.
Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, the bill’s lead Democratic negotiator, said Monday on the Senate floor that the bill would “make America stronger and safer, create good-paying jobs and expand economic opportunities across the country,” and praised her colleagues for their commitment to reaching an agreement. “This is what it looks like when elected leaders take a step toward healing our country’s divisions rather than feeding [them],” she added.
The IIJA costs $1.2 trillion over eight years, $550 billion of which is new government spending, and puts hundreds of billions of federal dollars toward roads, bridges, ports, broadband and more. It was led by Ohio Sen. Rob Portman on the Republican side, and was the product of negotiations among 22 senators and President Joe Biden.
“[This is] landmark and needed legislation in fixing our roads, railroads, our ports, electrical grid and more,” Portman said on the floor. “I’m proud of what was done on that … It will improve the lives of all Americans. It’s long-term spending to repair and replace and build assets that will last for decades.”
Talks first began with West Virginia Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, but collapsed after she and the White House could not agree on the overall size and scope of the bill. Negotiations then shifted to the bipartisan group, but remained precarious for weeks as they struggled to compromise on how to finance the new spending and what it should cover.
It was late July when Portman announced that the group had reached agreement on the “major issues,” and that Republicans were ready to move forward.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema speaks after the bipartisan bill cleared its first procedural vote in July. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
The bill cleared its first procedural vote hours later with the support of 17 Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a clear indication that it had the necessary support to beat a filibuster and pass. Two days later, 16 Republicans joined Democrats in officially voting to begin debate.
Senators originally sought to pass the bill last week or over the weekend, but were blocked from doing so by Tennessee Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty, who refused to forgo hours of scheduled debate. He cited the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate that the bill would add $256 billion to the deficit over the next 10 years, arguing that the legislation was not fully paid for, unlike what its negotiators previously said.
Hagerty’s delays earned praise from former President Donald Trump on Sunday, who had repeatedly tried to intimidate Republicans into opposing the package. In multiple email statements he disparaged McConnell for supporting the bill, calling it a “disgrace” and the “beginning of the Green New Deal,” and floated backing primary challengers against other Republicans who backed it.
With the IIJA’s passing, senators are now set to take up their budget resolution, keeping them in Washington for another marathon session with dozens of politically tricky amendment votes and eating into their prized August recess. The mammoth resolution, unveiled by Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday, addresses priorities omitted from the infrastructure bill including health care, climate change and immigration and as outlined costs $3.5 trillion.
“This legislation in so many ways begins to address the working families of our country,” Sanders said on the Senate floor Monday. “But in one important way, maybe the most important, is as we address the needs of our people in health care and education and climate, we are going to create many millions of good-paying jobs that the American people desperately need.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders authored Democrats’ $3.5 trillion budget, which he has acknowledged will likely pass on party lines. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
While Republicans unanimously oppose the reconciliation package, Senate rules allow for Democrats to pass it with just a simple majority vote, meaning that it could pass strictly along party lines if their caucus all votes for it.
McConnell on Tuesday accused Democrats of playing “Russian roulette with our country” and said the budget would be the “largest peacetime tax hike on record.”
“This new reckless taxing and spending spree will fall like a hammer blow on workers and middle-class families,” McConnell said. “If all 50 Democrats want to help [Budget Committee] Chairman Sanders hurt middle-class families … well, that’s their prerogative, but we’re going to argue it out right here on the floor at some length.”
Several progressives, however, have sought to tie the bipartisan bill with the reconciliation package, with some in the House hinging their support for the former on Senate Democrats passing the latter. In an attempt to hold her narrow majority together, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said that she will not bring the bipartisan bill up for a vote until the Senate passes the reconciliation package as well, despite moderates urging her to bring up the infrastructure package as soon as possible.
Others have also been critical of the infrastructure bill, which was adopted as a substitute for the $715 billion surface transportation bill that the House passed in July, arguing that it inadequately invests in climate, housing, child care and more.
Oregon Democratic Rep. Peter DeFazio, the chair of the House Transportation Committee, reportedly called the bill “crap” after a deal was reached, lamenting the fact that it omitted large swaths of the transportation bill he authored and disregarding the White House’s endorsement of it.
“I could give a damn about the White House. We’re an independent branch of government,” he told reporters in July. “They cut this deal. I didn’t sign off on it.”
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell urged his colleagues to vote to override President Donald Trump’s veto of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on Tuesday.
Trump vetoed the NDAA last week, and the House of Representatives has already voted to override the veto with a two-thirds majority, making the Senate the final hurdle for approving the funding. The NDAA passed the Senate originally with a 84-13 majority on December 11, but the grounds have shifted somewhat.
Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has vowed to filibuster any attempt at an override on the NDAA bill until McConnell allows a vote on the $2,000 COVID-19 direct relief payments. Trump called for the increase from $600 to $2,000 last week, a proposition Democrats have endorsed but many Republicans have not. (RELATED: The Numbers In Georgia Point To Two Tossup Races)
“McConnell and the Senate want to expedite the override vote and I understand that,”Sanders told reporters Monday evening. “But I’m not going to allow that to happen unless there is a vote, no matter how long that takes, on the $2,000 direct payment.”
The House voted in favor of the increase to $2,000 on Monday, leaving McConnell and the Senate as the final obstacle. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer attempted to pass the $2,000 increase by unanimous consent during Tuesday session, but McConnell blocked the move.
Trump originally objected to the NDAA because Congress refused to include provisions in the bill that would dismantle Section 230, the law that governs how internet companies moderate third-party content. Trump also objected to provisions in the bill seeking to rename military bases currently named after Confederate figures.
One way to keep anyone interested in politics is free money. Granted, such a thing doesn’t really exist, but — and this is particularly true when it comes to liberals — if you promise people you’ll transfer enough of someone else’s hard-earned wealth to them, their ears will remain perked-up.
This was especially evident in the 2020 election cycle when millennial and Gen Z voters weren’t particularly thrilled with Joseph Robinette Biden as the Democratic Party nominee. It wasn’t just that he came across as a cadaver-in-waiting who made strange references to record players and didn’t know where he was on not infrequent occasions, he also didn’t seem to be the kind of left-wing candidate that would fit the moment.
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Polling showed both groups had a negative opinion of Biden as late as September, which didn’t bode well for voter excitement — even if younger voters preferred Biden to President Donald Trump.
And yet, according to an analysis by Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, millennial and Gen Z voters pushed Joe Biden over the top in key swing states and had a high voter engagement rate. Why, you might ask?
I’m not saying that it was necessarily a September proposal floated by Democratic leadership that stated the president and secretary of education could cancel up to $50,000 in student loan debt via executive order, but let’s face it — younger voters were pretty certain that with Biden in the White House, student loan forgiveness was going to be a top priority.
Well, at least when it comes to that executive order proposal, it seems younger voters may soon be feeling a bit of buyer’s remorse.
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According to The Washington Post, Biden was speaking with a select group of columnists last week when he said he’d be unlikely to pursue any kind of executive order that involved forgiving student loans, inasmuch as he’s going to be very careful not to test the limits of rule by fiat.
“Biden also said that, as a president who wants to avoid inflaming a closely divided Congress, he plans to tread lightly when it comes to using his executive power — a declaration that no doubt will cause some heartburn on the left, where such caution is considered naive,” The Post’s Karen Tumulty wrote.
Upon his inauguration, Biden says he plans to issue executive orders to undo some of what Trump has done. He will instruct the United States to rejoin the 2015 Paris climate agreement, to protect immigrant ‘dreamers’ whose parents brought them to the United States as children, and to reinstate environmental regulations that Trump did away with.
C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he’s written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal for four years.
House Speaker Pelosi And Senate Minority Leader Schumer Hold Media Availability On Capitol Hill
Key Democrats came out in support of President Donald Trump’s last-minute demand that $2,000 in direct payments to Americans be included in the coronavirus stimulus bill. Trump declared in a video posted Tuesday that he would not sign the recently passed bill in its current form, instead demanding the extra payments along with the elimination of several items he considered “wasteful.”
Responding to Trump’s video Tuesday night, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi supported the idea while also pointing out that the president never called for a specific payment amount during months of negotiations.
“Republicans repeatedly refused to say what amount the President wanted for direct checks,” Pelosi tweeted. “At last, the President has agreed to $2,000 — Democrats are ready to bring this to the Floor this week by unanimous consent. Let’s do it!”
“That’s great!”Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders responded, including Pelosi’s tweet. “I first introduced a bill to provide a $2,000 direct payment with @SenKamalaHarris & @EdMarkey 7 months ago. Now, Mr. President, get Mitch McConnell and your Republican friends to stop opposing it and we can provide working class Americans with $2,000. Let’s do it.”
Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote that an amendment to include the payments is “ready to go.”
To which Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer responded, “I’m in!”
Schumer had initially seemed to support passing the bill as-is, but appeared to change his mind.
After months of negotiations, Congress on Monday passed the sweeping $2.3 trillion package that includes $900 billion in coronavirus stimulus as well as $1.4 trillion to fund the government through October. If he changes his mind, Trump has until December 28 to sign the bill.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Activists Call On The Republican Senate To Delay The Confirmation Of Amy Coney Barrett / Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Care In Action
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer predicted Monday night that “generations yet unborn will suffer” from confirming Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court of the United States.
Schumer spoke Monday night on the Senate floor where he condemned Barrett’s confirmation, saying that his colleagues “may regret this for a lot longer than they think.”
“Here at this late hour, at the end of this sordid chapter in the history of the Senate, the history of the Supreme Court, my deepest and greatest sadness is for the American people,”Schumer said.
“Generations yet unborn will suffer the consequences of this nomination,” he continued, “as the globe gets warmer, as workers continue to fall behind, as unlimited dark money floods our politics, as reactionary state legislatures curtail a woman’s right to choose, gerrymandered districts and limit the rights of minorities to vote, my deepest, greatest, and most abiding sadness tonight is for the American people and what this nomination will mean for their lives, their freedoms, their fundamental rights.”
The senator concluded by predicting that this day would go down “as one of the darkest days in the 231-year history of the United States Senate.”
His comments on the unborn come amidst Democratic anxieties that Barrett’s confirmation will result in overturning Roe v. Wade. Liberal groups, Democrats and abortion advocates also predicted that appointing Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court would result in dangerous limits on abortion access and other prominent political issues.
But those warnings didn’t come to fruition after the Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana law that would have significantly restrict abortion access. In the case of June Medical Services v. Russo, an abortion provider challenged a law requiring abortion providers to have admitting privileges to a hospital within 30 miles of the abortion facility.
The Senate voted to confirm Barrett to the Supreme Court 52 – 48 Monday night.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and the left-leaning media have been blaming Trump and Republicans for the gridlock over the relief package. Millions of Americans need relief in the form of unemployment and checks. But Republicans refuse to cave to Democrats and their expensive demands.
So now President Trump is laying out what he thinks is going on:
And he’s letting everyone know that he is ready to help in 3 different tweets, in 3 different ways:
I have directed @stevenmnuchin1 to get ready to send direct payments ($3,400 for family of four) to all Americans. DEMOCRATS ARE HOLDING THIS UP!
I am ready to send more money to States and Local governments to save jobs for Police, Fire Fighters, First Responders, and Teachers. DEMOCRATS ARE HOLDING THIS UP!
I am ready to have @USTreasury and @SBA send additional PPP payments to small businesses that have been hurt by the ChinaVirus. DEMOCRATS ARE HOLDING THIS UP!
President Trump took to Twitter to explain that he has directed his administration to send out relief and support to the country. That includes checks to families, funds for first responders and teachers, and more cash for the PPP.
Why isn’t the money on its way? President Trump says the Democrats are holding up the progress. Republicans in Congress are willing to pass legislation that provides relief for American families, small businesses, and those who keep us safe. Democrats appear unwilling to negotiate because they want trillions to bail out in-debt blue states.
These Democrat-run states have been losing money for years, long before the pandemic. On top of that, these are the same states overrun with rioting, with local leaders cutting funds for police. Why should Americans fit the bill for Democrats who can’t even run their states properly? While so many Americans struggle to recover from lockdowns these same Democrats forced?
It seems like if Democrats want to help Americans, they would be willing to negotiate with Trump and Republicans. Instead, they demand reparations, tax increases, and bailouts for rich Democrats. Yet they continue to accuse Trump of not putting Americans first.
Should Trump give in to Democrat demands, or keep pushing for affordable help for Americans?
Key Takeaways:
An additional COVID relief bill has been held up by Congress, thanks to gridlock.
President Trump called out Democrats for refusing to negotiate and make a deal.
Democrats want to spend trillions to bail out blue states.
Adam Casalino is a freelance writer, cartoonist, and graphic designer. He is a regular contributor for the Patriot Journal. Find his other work: http://www.talesofmaora.com
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and has had his toons tweeted by President Trump.
Soros Fund Management Chairman George Soros attends a meeting with finance and development ministers, international partners and the presidents of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea about the ongoing efforts to recover from the Ebola outbreak in West Africa during the World Bank- International Monetary Fund Spring Meetings April 17, 2015 …/Chip Somodevilla/Getty
Left-wing billionaire George Soros is set to double his 2016 election spending in an effort to remove President Donald Trump from the White House, according to public records. The Washington Free Beacon, which was the first outlet to report Soros’s 2020 spending, stated that Soros has poured money “into the coffers of the Democracy PAC, a super PAC that passes money to other liberal PACs working to defeat Trump and congressional Republicans.”
According to public records, the PAC has received $40 million, double the $20 million it received in 2016 throughout the presidential election.
While Democrats across the country sanctimoniously rail against the influence of dark money in politics, their party’s largest donors are bankrolling a massive web of liberal organizations to get them elected. George Soros’s unprecedented spending further highlights just how dependent Democrats are on contributions from billionaires, despite their hypocritical rhetoric.
Directly, Soros has put $5.5 million into his Super PAC. Fund for Policy Reform, a nonprofit in Soros’s Open Society Foundations network that is reported to have in the bank $750 million on its latest tax forms, also gave $35 million. In doing so, Soros’s name is kept from appearing amongst those that give millions to political committees.
Democracy PAC, known for making large donations to far-left candidates, has given more than $25 million to other PACs, including a $7 million to the Senate Majority PAC, which has close ties to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). It also gave $5 million to Priorities USA Action, a large outside PAC which supports Joe Biden, and $2.5 million to the left-wing Win Justice coalition.
Many of the groups that receive money from Soros are top spenders backing massive anti-Trump campaigns. Priorities USA is the biggest outside spender this cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, having spent more than $28 million. Its efforts include anti-Trump advertisements focused on criticizing the president’s response to the coronavirus pandemic in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
In addition to his overwhelming PAC donations. Soros has also given $2 million to committees directly without going through his PACs. Those donations include $500,000 to the Democratic Grassroots Victory Fund, a committee to raise funds between the Democratic National Committee, all 50 state Democratic parties, and the D.C. Democratic committee.
Soros has also given thousands to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) victory fund, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Similar to Soros, former presidential hopeful Tom Steyer has also poured into the 2020 election and is ranked among the highest of donors.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and has had his toons tweeted by President Trump.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, the great El Rushbo, and has had his toons tweeted by President Trump.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, the great El Rushbo, and has had his toons tweeted by President Trump.
While much of the art world and entertainment industry leans decisively to the left, there are those among them who hold a more conservative ideology, and some of those are increasingly speaking out about their beliefs through the use of their own talents.
One of those is conservative artist Jon McNaughton, a Utah-based artist who over the years has painted a number of compelling portraits that were first exceptionally critical of former President Barack Obama and are now supportive of President Donald Trump.
McNaughton’s latest work of art centers around the current sharp divide between Trump, who aims to secure the nation by securing the southern border, and numerous prominent Democrats who have staunchly opposed and obstructed those efforts.
The painting is titled “National Emergency,” and it features a number of prominent Democrats standing atop a tattered American flag — while holding various flags representing other nations or groups — as the president looks sadly upon the lost doll of a little immigrant girl forced to make the dangerous and illicit cross-border journey into the U.S. … as a caravan of countless illegal migrants approach the border in the distance behind them.
In McNaughton’s description of the work, he wrote, “In my new painting, the Democrat establishment declares victory against President Trump as he announces a national emergency to secure the border. They proudly hold the flags they represent and cherish.
“Our politicians have become traitors to this country, in most cases they are more loyal to whichever country, lobbyist, corporation, or special interest group that will keep them in office and line their bank accounts. I’m sick of how they trample our flag and do not seek America’s interests first,” he continued.
McNaughton added, “Trump stands apart from them with his head bowed contemplating the state of our border situation. He sees a lost doll left behind by a little girl forced to make the dangerous journey. To not build the wall is to allow people on both sides of the border to suffer needlessly.”
As can be seen in the painting, McNaughton provided great detail in his representation of those who currently stand most opposed to his border security efforts, and shows by way of the flags they are holding where their interests lie, ahead of those of the American people.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is holding the flag of communist China, while Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren holds one for the European Union. They stand beside Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who are holding a Mexican flag together.
To the other side of Pelosi and Schumer stand failed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton with an Iranian flag and former President Obama with a United Nations flag.
In the background stands New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with a New York flag alongside Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib and Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, who hold up a Palestinian flag. California Reps. Adam Schiff and Maxine Waters can also been seen holding a California flag.
Meanwhile, a veritable horde of people are crossing through the desert toward the border in the far distance behind all of them, as the Democrats cheer about blocking Trump’s efforts to halt that flow of humanity.
President Trump made numerous efforts to reach out and negotiate with a Congress to find an agreeable solution to the ongoing crisis at the border, to no avail.
As a result of the decided lack of cooperation from Democrats, Trump finally fell back on congressionally authorized presidential powers to declare a national emergency to directly address the situation himself.
Of course, the Democrats are fighting that, too, and have refused to relent in their incessant opposition to everything done by Trump, up to and including stomping on the desires and interests of the American people who voted to elect the president that is so despised by the left.
This painting beautifully, if quite tragically, sums up the current situation in a rather stark, but necessary, manner.
Ben Marquis is a writer who identifies as a constitutional conservative/libertarian. His focus is on protecting the First and Second Amendments. He has covered current events and politics for Conservative Tribune since 2014.
Because Schumer, Pelosi, and the Democrats continue to fight against protecting the lives U.S. citizens Trump is forced to declare a National Emergency at our southern border.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been seen all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, and even the great El Rushbo.
The saga continues; Speaker Pelosi and Senator Schumer are blinded by politics and their hate for President Trump in regard to border security and Protecting U.S. citizens.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been seen all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, and even the great El Rushbo.
Democrats are more worried about Government workers getting their checks on time than they are about American citizens being killed and victimized by criminals coming across the border.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been seen all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, and even the great El Rushbo.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been seen all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News” and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, and even the great El Rushbo.
Democrats were for the wall until Trump made it a campaign promise. Now they ignore the death and destroyed lives illegal immigration is bringing on American citizens.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been seen all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News” and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, and even the great El Rushbo.
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American Family Association
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