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Donald Trump has HAD IT with Mitch McConnell’s bucket of suck


Posted August 10, 2017 03:39 PM by Chris Pandolfo

 

President Donald Trump meets Mitch McConnell after his first speech to Congress

 

 

Is the time of Senator Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., as majority leader in the U.S. Senate coming to an end? If not an end, certainly a turning point.

The American people believe, rightly, that the Congress under the leadership of McConnell and Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., hasn’t done much. Nearly seven in 10 Americans (68 percent) judge the Republican-controlled Congress a failure, according to a new CNN poll. The approval rating of Republican leadership has fallen to a dismal 24 percent.

And why shouldn’t Americans think Congress has failed? The Republicans broke their number one campaign promise from the past seven years in their unwillingness to repeal Obamacare. In more than six months of unified Republican government, the GOP has yet to deliver on the core pieces of President Trump’s legislative agenda.

President Trump has noticed. As McConnell chastised the president for having unrealistic expectations of what the Senate could accomplish, Trump took to Twitter to remind Senator McConnell that he only expects Republicans to keep promises they’ve made for years.

And it wasn’t just on Twitter:

Can McConnell do it? Even as the president criticizes Sen. McConnell’s lame excuses, other Republicans are beginning to show signs of irritation with the majority leader.

“I like Mitch, but for eight years, we’ve been saying we’re going to repeal and replace Obamacare. It’s not like we made this up overnight. We have been working on repealing Obamacare all year,” Senator Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. told Fox News Radio’s “The Brian Kilmeade Show” Wednesday.

“There is no way to sugarcoat this. The Republican Party promised for eight years to repeal and replace Obamacare, we failed, and if we give up, shame on us,” Graham said.

Dissatisfaction with the process leading up to the GOP’s failed attempt at the fake repeal of Obamacare brought together Sens. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, Lindsey Graham, Mike Lee, R-Utah, Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., and John McCain, R-Ariz. in criticism of McConnell’s leadership.

Candidates for the U.S. Senate Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., and former Judge Roy Moore have both taken shots at McConnell, with Moore blasting “Mitch McConnell’s D.C. slime machine” and Brooks calling for McConnell to step down from leadership.

McConnell’s failures are demonstrable, and his plan for future legislative success is unclear. This fall, Republicans in Congress will face several challenges as the debt limit, funding for the government, and tax reform dominate the business of the Senate.

What is McConnell’s plan?

So far, it seems Republicans will pass a clean debt limit increase without extracting a single policy concession from the Left. And as long as McConnell adamantly refuses to consider a government shutdown, Democrats hold all the negotiating power over the budget. President Trump and the Republicans capitulated once already on government funding back in April — what is McConnell’s plan to secure funding for Trump’s priorities in the face of Democratic obstruction? And where does tax reform fit between what will be long, protracted fights on government spending and the debt limit as conservative opposition to growing government mounts?

If McConnell doesn’t come up with answers to these questions fast, he may find President Trump calling for him to step down. As the president himself said Friday when asked if he thinks McConnell should go:

“Well, I’ll tell you what, if he doesn’t get repeal and replace done, if he doesn’t get taxes done, meaning cuts and reform, and if he doesn’t get a very easy one to get done, infrastructure, if he doesn’t get them done, then you can ask me that question.”

Chris Pandolfo is a staff writer and type-shouter for Conservative Review. He holds a B.A. in politics and economics from Hillsdale College. His interests are conservative political philosophy, the American founding, and progressive rock. Follow him on Twitter for doom-saying and great album recommendations @ChrisCPandolfo.

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Lawmaker pushes to sue Obama for Internet ‘surrender’


waving flagBy Joel Gehrke (@Joelmentum) • 9/9/16 Politics Reporter, The Washington Examiner

 URL of the original posting site: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/lawmaker-pushes-to-sue-obama-for-internet-surrender/article/2601440

Some groups want the House GOP to sue President Obama over transitioning Internet control away from the U.S. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Some groups want the House GOP to sue President Obama over transitioning Internet control away from the U.S. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

A Pennsylvania Republican and some outside groups want the House GOP to sue President Obama to prevent the transition of the Internet away from U.S. government oversight.

Rep. Mike Kelly filed a resolution Friday that, if adopted, would allow Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., to ask a judge to block the Obama administration from proceeding with the Internet transition, which is supposed to take place at the end of the month. Conservative groups and activists asked House and Senate leaders to consider such a lawsuit last month, citing provisions in recent appropriations bills that banned the Commerce Department from spending taxpayer money on the transition.

“The American people’s Congress has prohibited this hasty surrender in law and the administration must follow it,” Kelly, a three-term Republican, said Friday.

Congressional Republicans have been increasingly frustrated with President Obama‘s decision to relinquish federal control over ICANN, the California-based nonprofit that manages the databases that underpin the Internet. Kelly has previously warned that the transition might allow foreign governments to take over the .gov and .mil domains used by the federal government, while several Senate Republicans worry that the proposed alternative would allow authoritarian regimes to censor Internet websites in the United States and around the world.

“Such a rushed transition puts the Internet at serious risk of falling under the influence of bad actors abroad who despise the free flow of information,” Kelly said.

The idea of a transition has been popular in some quarters of the tech community for years, but it didn’t become U.S. policy until President Obama‘s team decided to endorse the proposal in the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks. Foreign governments were outraged to learn the extent of the National Security Agency’s surveillance apparatus and the decision helped mollify some of that anger.

“The trust in the global Internet has been punctured,” Fadi Chehade, then-CEO of ICANN, said following a 2014 meeting with then-Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. “Now it’s time to restore this trust through leadership and institutions that can make that happen.”

Senate Republicans fear that the handoff will allow other countries to dominate, and even censor, the functioning of the Internet.OH HELL NO

“The proposal will significantly increase the power of foreign governments over the Internet, expand ICANN’s historical core mission by creating a gateway to content regulation, and embolden [its] leadership to act without any real accountability,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, wrote in a letter to the Commerce Department last month. “We have uncovered that ICANN’s Beijing office is actually located within the same building as the Cyberspace Administration of China, which is the central agency within the Chinese government’s censorship regime.”

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., wants at a minimum to delay the transition, to allow for further testing, but proponents of the transition say that’s not possible.

“We can’t test extreme emergency measures such as we’ve built over any period of a few months or even a few years,” Netchoice executive director Steve DelBianco argued in a Senate hearing in May. “The notion of a delay simply sends the signal that the U.S. believes that the role we hold is so valuable that we’re not giving it up, and we’ve reiterated to China, Russia and the United Nations that they want to step into those shoes. And that’s the biggest danger of the delay.”

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