by Bob Maistros
The restored Bourbon dynasty is said to have “learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.” But Louis XVIII’s posse had nothing on Republican “moderates” in the recently (barely) restored House majority.
Check out this choice tidbit, in the wake of Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) bruising, begrudging battle for the speakership, from Representative Nancy Mace (R-S.C.):
I am concerned that common-sense legislation will not get through to get a vote on the floor . . . [F]or example, we have 12 bills that we’re supposedly going to be voting on in our first week in office . . . [Three pro-life bills] are not legislation . . . that can pass the Senate and get onto the desk for the president to sign into law.
Puh-leeze.
Pummeling by progressive radicals. Outright embarrassment in November voting. Five days, 15 ballots and hours of nonstop, no-holds-barred negotiations and concession-coaxing to elect a Speaker.
And Mace – likely reflecting the views of many equally clueless colleagues in the Stupid Party – still thinks the GOP’s Job One is “legislation that can pass the Senate and get onto the desk of the president”?
Does the gentlelady mean legislation like the amnesty con a feckless faction of Senate Republicans tried to foist on America? The federal codification of make-believe matrimony 12 of them waved through? The $1.7 trillion lame-duck appropriations leviathan that trampled the incoming House majority’s prerogatives in instilling fiscal discipline?
One supposedly unpassable bill she definitely referred to would require lifesaving care for aborted children born alive. Perhaps Mace prefers chloroform?
And does the Charlestonian believe that the usurper in the Oval Office gave one thought to her party’s priorities in affixing the John Hancock she covets to a typhoon of “pen-and-phone” executive orders trashing major Trump accomplishments?
The good news: in contrast to Mace and her fellow travelers on the Good Ship GOP’s port side, the hard nudge from his hard right appears to have instilled some useful forgetting and learning in Kevin McCarthy.
He’s taking, temporarily at least, a mental Bleach Bit to old ways of go-along, get-along, tax-along, spend-along in an age when the scorched-earth opposition – and some on his own side of the aisle – have put aside Sleepy Joe’s treasured “norms” and think nothing of:
- aiding, abetting and institutionalizing election fraud;
- solitary confinement for non-violent protesters and congressional show trials to advance a fictitious Big Lie narrative inoculating against future such fraud;
- abusing power to perpetuate the Russian collusion whopper, entrap a sitting national security advisor, and sic the feds on concerned, anti-woke parents
- canceling ideological adversaries as irredeemably racist, transphobic, or climate deniers, and
- raiding a former president’s home and releasing his private records.
Moreover, the speaker has seemingly absorbed the three Rs that must shape the Republican agenda for this Congress:
Reset. As previously maintained here, mimic the Green New Deal’s success in “stak(ing) out territory beyond rational hopes of capturing in the current environment – aspiring, ultimately, to re-reshape the battlefield.”
Revelation. Use every available platform – including the appropriations process, hearings, events, and a 24/7/365 “tweet storm” – to lay bare not just Bidenite corruption, incompetence, and coverups, but also every dollar of misspent and misappropriated funds in the omnibus(t) bill forced down the new majority’s throats.
Retribution. Not “score-settling,” as Democrats charge. Rather, make malicious malfeasants pay a political price for skyrocketing spending and prices; ceding hard-won energy independence; surrendering the southern border; freedom-sapping COVID mandates; promoting sexual perversion and child mutilation; emboldening America’s enemies, and most of all, weaponizing the government against political rivals and the very people it ostensibly serves.
Thus far, the Californian has wildly exceeded this commentators’ expectations to earn solid “As” across the board:
- Advancing bills not only to defund the Democrats’ new army of nearly 90,000 tax harassers, but, incredibly, to pull the plug on the entire IRS and the income tax itself.
- Establishing a select committee to investigate the wide-ranging misdeeds of America’s arch-foe, China – as a precursor to keeping the speaker’s pledge to move against the Middle Kingdom’s economic, trade and human rights violations, military aggression, and “theft of Americans’ personal information, intellectual property, and jobs.”
- Setting up a subcommittee to investigate and demand accountability for the “weaponization of the federal government” against political foes and private citizens alike.
- Releasing 14,000 hours of January 6 security videos to undercut the “insurrection” deception.
- Further pledging to investigate “Biden’s border crisis, pandemic relief fraud, (the) Afghanistan withdrawal, (the) energy crisis, COVID origins, (and) Biden family’s influence peddling.”
- Promising votes on separate appropriations bills instead of opaque annual funding monsters.
- Best of all, booting perpetual Pinocchio Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and compromised China boy toy Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) from the intelligence committee and terrorist-touter-cum immigration-fraudster Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) from the Foreign Affairs Committee.
Yes, it’s just a start and largely symbolic. But all in all, plaudits for McCarthy’s interim report card.
Now, to reinforce his gains in learning – and forgetting – as a recharged majority forges forward, this commentator suggests one additional exercise for the lower chamber leader: write on the office whiteboard 100 times, “Nancy Mace is not the base.”
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Bob Maistros has spent the last three decades putting words in the mouth of luminaries at the highest levels of the worlds of business and politics around the globe. The chief writer for the Reagan-Bush ’84 campaign, a former Senate subcommittee counsel and a longtime public relations advisor for companies ranging from AOL to MTV to XM Satellite Radio.
Photo “Kevin McCarthy” by Kevin McCarthy. Background Photo “U.S. Capitol” by Thomas Lin.
