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Dems Scripted Their Response To Trump’s Speech Before Hearing It And They Don’t Care If You Know


By: Elle Purnell | March 04, 2025

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2025/03/04/dems-scripted-their-response-to-trumps-speech-before-hearing-it-and-they-dont-care-if-you-know/

Senate Democrats
Senate Dems are doing roughly the equivalent of those ‘copy and paste this or something bad will happen to you’ emails from middle school.

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Elle Purnell

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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.

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Rather Than Smearing Justices, Democrats Should Be Asking Them For Ethics Lessons


BY: DAVID HARSANYI | MAY 02, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/05/02/rather-than-smearing-justices-democrats-should-be-asking-them-for-ethics-lessons/

Dick Durbin
The hearing is a transparent effort to delegitimize the Supreme Court.

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The concerted effort by the media and Democrats to delegitimize the Supreme Court is the most consequential attack on our institutions in memory.  Make no mistake. Today’s “Supreme Court Ethics Reform” hearing is meant to discredit the high court and slander justices with innuendo. Nothing else. Democrats are angry because the court happens to occasionally uphold basic constitutional principles of American governance. Democrats are nervous that originalist justices are going to weaken the administrative state or hand power back to localities or protect religious liberty or gun rights.

The recent hit pieces on Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch were shoddy and transparently partisan. They did not uncover any conflict of interest nor corruption. They exist to give politicians fodder and hackish outlets like The Washington Post the freedom to contend that the Senate is “consider[ing] strengthening ethics rules for the Supreme Court in response to a cascade of revelations about unreported lavish travel and real estate deals.”

Most Post readers will, no doubt, be unaware that there has been no “unreported” lavish travel or real estate deals. There is one amended note in a financial disclosure by Thomas — who had no ethical or legal obligation to check in with Democrats whenever he travels. In Politico’s Gorsuch hit, the reporter didn’t even know how to read a basic disclosure form. Everything, including a real estate deal that Gorsuch was allegedly attempting to conceal, was reported.

The fact that the same histrionic coverage did not accompany Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s amended financial disclosures in 2022 nor Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s amended financial disclosures in 2021 nor Justice Stephen Breyer’s long-term travel arrangements, which were often reimbursed by the wealthy Pritzker family, is no accident.

The committee chair, Dick Durbin, contends he merely wants the justices to abide by the ethics rules that Congress has drafted for itself. If they did, it would mean a complete degradation of standards in the court.

Because while there has not been a scintilla of evidence offered by anyone that the originalist justices have altered their judicial philosophy or approach for personal benefit, one could not say that same thing about the leader of the delegitimization effort, Durbin, who, according to a 2014 Chicago Tribune investigation, used his office and power to help enrich his lobbyist wife:

Among the areas of overlap in the Durbins’ careers: her firm getting a one-year contract with a housing nonprofit group around the time the senator went to bat for the organization and others like it; a state university receiving funds earmarked by Durbin when his wife was its lobbyist; and Durbin arranging federal money for a public health nonprofit when his wife was seeking state support for the same group.

Durbin did not pay a fine or face any repercussions for this conflict of interest. Then again, do you know how many officials the Senate Select Committee on Ethics has issued disciplinary sanctions to since 2007? Zero.

  • Not Judiciary Committee member Dianne Feinstein, whose husband Richard Blum, an investment banker, made some amazingly prescient trades in the biotech sector during Covid-19.
  • Not Judiciary Committee member Richard Blumenthal, D-Stolen Valor, and his wife, who happened to trade shares of Robinhood before calling for an investigation and then lie, not surprisingly, about the family’s significant stock ownership.
  • Not Judiciary Committee member Sheldon Whitehouse, who not only traded health care stock through his and his family’s accounts while pushing to pass a medical bill directly related to that sector but also used his seat to prop up a green energy concern that supported his campaign.
  • Nor Judiciary Committee member Peter Welch, who was buying stock in a German coronavirus test producer after hearing intelligence briefings on the matter.
  • Nor Durbin himself, who unloaded investments right after a private meeting with the then-Treasury secretary and Federal Reserve chairman during the 2008 financial collapse.

Remember that Durbin has been a central figure in the corroding Senate decorum and public confidence in the court for decades. In 2003, for the first time in history, a filibuster was used to stop an appeals-court nomination. Miguel Estrada, a talented Honduran immigrant, was targeted for much the same reason Democrats have targeted Thomas: he refused to adhere to the left’s stereotypes. We know this because in leaked memos from Durbin’s office, Estrada is identified “as especially dangerous, because he has a minimal paper trail, he is Latino, and the White House seems to be grooming him for a Supreme Court appointment.”

Durbin supported Harry Reid’s efforts to get rid of the judicial filibuster. When it was gone, he demanded Republicans rubber stamp left-wing nominees. When unable to stop appointments with votes, Durbin engaged in ugly smear campaigns.

In 2017, it was Durbin who asked Amy Coney Barrett to answer for her Catholicism. The implication, of course, was that orthodox Catholics are unable to uphold the law. In 2020, he would announce his “no” vote on Coney Barrett’s SCOTUS nomination before ever meeting with her. During the Brett Kavanagh hearings, Durbin did his best to portray the nominee as a gang rapist.

After years of slandering members of the court for the purpose of delegitimizing them, Democrats will bring up the fact that the polls show a diminishing trust in the Supreme Court as if it happened in a vacuum or as if they did not intend for this to happen. This is their doing. They are the ones creating the perception of corruption where there is none. And why? Because the Constitution is a hindrance to their agenda. It’s that simple.  

Durbin tried to get Chief Justice Roberts to participate in his partisan clown show, claiming it was time “for Congress to accept its responsibility to establish an enforceable code of ethics for the Supreme Court, the only agency of our government without it.” The Supreme Court is an equal branch of the government, not an agency for Durbin to bully. And, outside of impeaching someone, Congress has no power to dictate how it conducts business. If anything, Congress should be looking to the justices to learn how to act decently.

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.

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Nobody ‘Implied’ Ketanji Brown Jackson Was Nominated Because Of Her Race. Biden Stated It Proudly


REPORTED BY: KYLEE ZEMPEL | MARCH 22, 2022

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/nobody-implied-ketanji-brown-jackson-was-nominated-because-of-her-race-biden-stated-it-proudly-2657019067.html/

Ketanji Brown Jackson and Joe Biden

During opening statements of the Senate confirmation hearings for Biden Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, which began on Monday, Democrats (one in particular) went into spin mode by testing out a talking point that went a little something like this: Republicans are saying you were nominated because of your race.

It was Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, who said it most plainly:

“My Republican colleagues and public figures have attempted to undermine your qualifications through their pejorative use of the term ‘affirmative action,’ and they have implied you were solely nominated due to your race. … Let me be clear: Your nomination is not about filling a quota.”

Al Sharpton employed a similar deflection on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “I salute President Biden in this case. He made a commitment, and I don’t think it was based on some tokenism. I think it was based on him saying that the court ought to reflect the country, and a black woman has never been on the court, and you couldn’t get one more qualified,” Sharpton said, before implying that it was racist for GOP lawmakers to inquire about the nominee’s law school admission test score.

It’s an odd basket of claims: that it’s Republicans who made Jackson’s nomination all about race, that anything was “implied,” that describing the race-based selection as “affirmative action” is out of bounds, and that this has nothing to do with tokenism. They’re strange claims because most Americans are old enough to remember just two months ago when President Joe Biden himself stated clearly and plainly that his pick would be “the first Black woman ever nominated to the United States Supreme Court,” after making a similar promise on the campaign trail. It was the Democrat president, not Republican cynics, who announced that race and sex were deciding factors in the selection. “Y” chromosomes and fair skin were disqualifying attributes before any merits could be considered.

Other Democrats couldn’t help themselves, playing into the identity politics game and marveling at the “historic” nature of nominating a black woman to the high court — and all the while undermining Hirono’s claim that it’s Republicans who have centralized race in Jackson’s nomination.

“The appointment of a Black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court — let’s be very blunt — should have happened years ago. This day is a giant leap into the present for our country and for the court,” gushed Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.

“The Senate is poised right now to break another barrier. We are on the precipice of shattering another ceiling,” said New Jersey Democrat Sen. Cory Booker, who is known for breaking Senate rules during the confirmation hearings for now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh with his cringe “Spartacus” moment. “I just feel this sense of overwhelming joy as I see you sitting there.”

Despite Hirono’s attempted deflection to her GOP colleagues and empty media assurances that tokenism is nonexistent here, it was Democrats who fixated on Jackson’s race and sex.

Now when Republicans inquire about her academic achievements and judicial record, it’s branded as veiled racism and sexism. Jackson proponents treat it like unjust scrutiny, as if a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing is supposed to be for grandstanding about “historic” moments and not for judicial vetting.

Try as they might to turn Jackson criticism on Republicans, this one is on Biden. He’s the one who announced in other terms that Jackson is an affirmative action pick, just as he did with his vice president (and we’ve seen how that’s turned out). He’s the one who invited intensified scrutiny of Jackson’s merits and ideology. He reduced Jackson’s qualifications to the color of her skin and the pairing of her chromosomes.

Nobody “implied” that Jackson was nominated because of her race. The president announced it proudly.

Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at 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, religious liberty, and criminal justice. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.

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