Tag Archives: Republicans

Sometimes A Big Tent Is Nothing More Than A Site For A Brawl

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Establishment Republicans are always expressing their desire for a ‘big tent’ where everyone is welcome. Maybe they should consider who they are inviting in. Some of the Republicans are so offended by the fact that President Trump is President (he is not one of their club) that they are willing to throw the country to the wolves to get him out of office. We all understand that if the Democrats win Congress in the mid-term elections, President Trump will be impeached and all of the positive things that he has done for the average American will go away. Congress has not passed into law most of his Executive Orders, and those Orders will go away–energy independence will be one of them. But the Establishment Republicans don’t care about that, and they are working hard to make sure they lose the mid-term elections.

On Wednesday, The Federalist reported:

You almost have to admire how far some Republicans are willing to go to lose the 2026 midterms — and ultimately, the country.

Throughout their recent two-week vacation, several GOP lawmakers have been making the media rounds to tout “bipartisan” legislation they claim will finally solve America’s broken immigration system. There’s just one teensy-weensy important detail that somehow gets brushed aside: The bill would allow millions of illegal aliens to continue living in the United States.

Sponsored by Reps. Maria Elvira Salazar, R-Fla., Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., and other lawmakers, the so-called DIGNIDAD (Dignity) Act permits “certain long-term undocumented immigrants to earn legal status, without amnesty or a path to citizenship” so that foreign nationals who broke U.S. immigration law can have an “opportunity,” according to a Salazar press release. The measure would notably create a “Dignity Program,” which the Florida congresswoman’s office described as a “7-year earned legal status program allowing undocumented immigrants to live and work legally, with renewable status based on good conduct and restitution.”

The article notes:

Such a proposal isn’t just asinine because it cripples America’s sovereignty and long-term survival as a nation. It’s also incredibly moronic from a political standpoint.

Aside from the “One Big Beautiful Bill” that they never effectively sold to voters, Republicans have virtually nothing to show for their congressional majorities. The Senate GOP still hasn’t passed the SAVE America Act, rogue judges continue to go unpunished, many of Trump’s executive orders haven’t been codified into law, and other conservative priorities remain untouched.

So, exactly what are voters — including those who identify as Republicans — supposed to vote for this fall? Amnesty? More GOP obstruction of the conservative policies they were promised but are now told aren’t possible with Republican majorities?

The Grand Old Party doesn’t have an answer — and it shows.

I don’t know if the Republicans are stupid or just want to lose.

It Is Being Reported That Elon Musk Has Changed His Mind

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On Wednesday, The New York Post posted an article updating Elon Musk’s plans to create a third party. Although I often share his frustration with today’s two political parties, I am glad that he is moving away from that idea. It would be at least ten years before a new political party to become competitive, and I am hopeful that the current leadership in the Republican party is moving toward sanity making a new party unnecessary.

The article reports:

Elon Musk is reportedly putting the brakes on launching his new political party in order to maintain ties with prominent Republicans — especially Vice President JD Vance, whom the billionaire is eyeing to back in 2028.

Musk had vowed that his “America Party” would challenge the two-party system, but he told those close to him that he’d rather focus on his businesses than pull voters away from his Republican allies in Washington, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The Tesla CEO is particularly keen on maintaining ties with Vance, who, it has been widely speculated, will inherit the MAGA movement after President Trump completes his second term.

The article concludes:

Trump and Musk appear to have squashed their beef — at least for now — as Musk has refrained of late from criticizing the president or other Republican politicians.

Vance could massively benefit from Musk’s money and influence if he’s tapped to succeed Trump.

When reached for comment by the Journal, Vance’s team pointed to an interview from earlier this month with conservative outlet the Gateway Pundit in which the vice president said it would be bad for conservatives to break with MAGA and hoped Musk would “come back into the fold” by the midterm elections.

Musk, without commenting further on the Journal’s report, posted on X, “Nothing @WSJ says should ever be thought of as true.

Meanwhile, where are the spending cuts?

Waking Up

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On Friday, The New York Post posted an opinion piece by California Democrat Gloria Romero who has walked away from the Democrat party.

The opinion piece states:

I walked away from the Democratic Party and joined the Republicans.

I will vote for Donald Trump for president.

I’ve been a true-blue Democrat, a former California state senator who chaired its Senate Democratic Caucus and served as Senate Majority Leader.

I was a Democratic National Convention delegate for Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama, and state co-chair for President Obama’s re-election.

But I’ve said goodbye, adios, I’ve had enough.  

This is not the Democratic Party I once championed. I don’t recognize it anymore.

The so-called “party of democracy” eradicated 14 million votes, including mine, to install Vice President Kamala Harris as its nominee.  

Just for the record, the reason those 14 million votes were eradicated was that the party had been totally dishonest about the mental state of the candidate for the past three years. They didn’t eradicate the votes as much as they refused to give the voters a choice.

The piece continues:

Like a banana republic, the dedazo was used by political elites to tap the candidate they chose.  Essentially, they executed a political coup. 

As California’s attorney general, Harris was unimpressive.

She made an intentional choice to hitch herself to the powerful teachers’ union and was clearly being coddled by a power elite that was even then shaping her political future.

Her manipulated rise is in line with the Democratic Party’s giant leap toward authoritarianism and censorship.  

President Ronald Reagan warned that if fascism comes to America it will come as liberalism, and he was right: I have witnessed individual freedoms being trapped, silenced, censored. 

The piece concludes:

I watched the Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel with horror. 

The Democratic Party has forsaken our ally to placate the pro-Hamas wing and win a swing state.  

I have seen the best of America: a nation that went to the moon and beyond. 

But our American landing has become like quicksand under a Democratic Party that is sinking the hopes and lives of Americans.

So I finally walked away. I stayed for as long as I could: I tried reforms, I spoke out, I voted. 

Today, I turn toward the future — an America that still shines, despite inequities that need change; a blessed land of opportunity — and join the party of the greatest American, Abraham Lincoln. 

The challenges of rebuilding our republic will take all of us.

I join the Republican Party to make America great again.

I am free at last.

We CAN rebuild our republic, but we won’t be able to if Kamala Harris is elected.

There Is A Legal Aspect To Changing The Democrat Candidate For President

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On Saturday, Fox News posted an article about some of the legal problems involved in replacing President Biden as the Democrat presidential candidate.

The article reports:

A major conservative activist group is preparing for legal battles in case the Democratic Party chooses to pull President Biden out of the running before or after he becomes the nominee.

The Heritage Foundation, one of the United States’ most prominent and well-connected conservative activist groups, is laying the groundwork in case a sudden switch-up in the Democratic roster sparks a legal war.

“We are monitoring the calls from across the country for President Biden to step aside, either now or before the election, and have concluded that the process for substitution and withdrawal is very complicated,” Executive Director of The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project Mike Howell said in a statement. “We will remain vigilant that appropriate election integrity procedures are followed.”

Heritage has already identified multiple states in which a switch away from Biden before or after the nomination could mean serious trouble for the Democratic Party.

In a separate statement, the Oversight Project warned, “If the Biden family decides that President Biden will not run for re-election, the mechanisms for replacing him on ballots vary by state. There is the potential for pre-election litigation in some states that would make the process difficult and perhaps unsuccessful. 

Theoretically, the Democrats can change candidates only if their candidate is ruled mentally unfit or dies. Otherwise, the results of the primary elections have to be respected. Putting a new candidate in at the last minute disenfranchises the primary voters. There was a time in America not too long ago when candidates were chosen by the party elite in smoke-filled rooms. Sometime in the last century, it was decided to let people vote in primary elections. In 1972 that was a problem for the Democrats–George McGovern won the primaries, but he was unelectable–he won only Massachusetts and Washington, D.C. At that point the Democrats put in place a policy of naming enough superdelegates to their conventions that the party (rather than the voters) controlled the nomination.

I think it is possible that President Biden will withdraw from the presidential race. I am not sure it is likely. Stay tuned.

Follow The Money

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In recent years, there have been multiple efforts to turn North Carolina into a ‘purple’ state. In 2011, the Republicans took control of the North Carolina legislature. That has been a good thing for the state–we are now ranked by Forbes as Number 5 in their list of the best states to start a business in America. We had a Republican Governor from 2013 to 2016. Other than that, North Carolina has been a Democrat state. Obviously, the Democrats would like to take the state back.

In the June/July issue, The Carolina Journal posted an article about the money coming into North Carolina to fund the 2024 election campaigns. It is very obvious that the Democrats are attempting to make serious inroads in the state.

The article reports:

The balance of fundraising from in-state versus out-of-state donors starkly differs between the two parties. North Carolina State Board of Elections reports indicate that about 40% of the NC Democratic Party’s funds are coming from out-of-state sources. In 2014, only 2% of their funding was from outside North Carolina, rising to well over a third of total contributions to the NC Democratic Party so far in 2024.

A snapshot of fundraising data for the North Carolina Republican Party shows a very different picture, with Republicans sporting a higher percentage of in-state funds since 2014. Support for the NCGOP from within North Carolina has increased to 94%, while out-of-state contributions have not exceeded 12% of all state party funds raised at any point in the last 15 years.

The following chart is included in the article:

The fact that North Carolina has remained a red state is interesting when you consider all of the people from Democrat states who have moved here in recent years.

According to USAFact.org.:

North Carolina’s population grew 11.7% from the 9.6 million people who lived there in 2010. For comparison, the population in the US grew 7.7% during that period.

Many of the people who have come to North Carolina in recent years have come from Democrat states (my husband and I moved here from Massachusetts). It is interesting (and helpful) that many of them chose to leave the tax-and-spend mentality behind.

Where Are The High-Speed Internet Connections?

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On Saturday, Breitbart posted an article about one of the provisions in the bipartisan Infrastructure Bill. The Bill included $42.45 billion from Congress to deploy high-speed Internet to millions of American.

The article reports:

“In 2021, the Biden Administration got $42.45 billion from Congress to deploy high-speed Internet to millions of Americans. Years later, it has not connected even 1 person with those funds. In fact, it now says that no construction projects will even start until 2025 at earliest,” the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) commissioner wrote.

“Meanwhile, the Biden Admin has been layering a partisan political agenda on top of this $42.45B program – a liberal wish list that has nothing to do with connecting Americans. Climate change mandates, tech biases, DEI requirements, favoring government-run networks + more,” he continued.

Carr is specifically slamming the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, which allocated $42.45 billion to support broadband infrastructure and adoption.

The program was established by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), otherwise known as the so-called bipartisan infrastructure bill. The bill had no conservative victories and had many leftist carveouts, as Breitbart News detailed.

The article concludes:

Carr continued, saying that the BEAD program fails to close the “digital divide,” or the gap between with those with high-speed internet and those without.

“The Biden Administration is barreling towards a broadband blunder. Congress has appropriated enough money to end the digital divide, but the Biden Administration is squandering the moment by putting partisan political goals above smart policy,” the FCC commissioner explained. “It is doing so through rate regulation, through union, technology, and DEI preferences, and through a thumb on the scale for government run networks. All of this threatens to leave rural communities behind.”

You would think that at some point the Republicans in Congress would learn that the bills that the Democrats want bi-partisan support on are never what they appear to be. This was another spending boondoggle that the Republicans stupidly endorsed. We need new Republicans who won’t be fooled (or bribed) by the Democrats.

The Basic Goals Have Been Met

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On May 14th, Newsmax posted an article about the true purpose of the trial of President Trump that is currently taking place in New York City.

The article notes the three purposes:

“The purpose of this trial is three-fold,” Dershowitz, professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, said on “National Report.” “No. 1, to convict him down and dirty before the election, although it will get reversed after the election. No. 2, to have a gag order on him, and No. 3, to keep them locked up in the courtroom, so he can’t campaign, and those goals may very well be accomplished.

“This is election interference at its most obvious, and every American, no matter whether you’re for Trump or against them … I voted for [President Joe] Biden … whatever your political affiliation is … I’m a Democrat … you should be equally concerned about how this legal system is being weaponized and abused for partisan purposes.”

It is becoming obvious that if President Biden remains as the Democrat candidate in 2024, he is going to have a problem being re-elected. His approval ratings are very low, and any public event he holds has an attendance problem–no one wants to come. There is definitely an enthusiasm gap. It’s going to take an awful lot of computer manipulations and mail-in ballots to steal the upcoming election, and the only way the Democrats can win it is to steal it. I don’t think the American people would believe a President Biden victory.

There is also the question of the precedents being set. Do we really want to live in a country where a political party freely uses the justice system to go after its opponents? This is an awkward question because if the Republicans take Congress and the White House, there are going to have to be some people held accountable for the weaponization of the justice system. I hope that there are some Republicans who care enough about equal justice to hold people accountable. Based on the lack of outrage over the unconstitutional treatment of the January 6th political prisoners, I am not sure Republicans are any more concerned about our Constitution than Democrats.

Jonathan Turley Comments On The Hearings

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On Tuesday, Red State posted an article about the hearings yesterday in the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee. The article included some interesting comments by Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School.

The article reports:

While Republicans continued to stress the two-tiered justice system in the case of Biden’s classified documents vs. those of Donald Trump, Democrats continually tried to put words in Hur’s mouth that neither he nor his report said. 

So how bad were the Democrats? George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley said the Democrats’ questioning of Hur “seemed almost to border on the delusional.”

During an appearance on Fox News’s “America Reports,” Turley gave a perfect example.

Well, I thought the Republicans did a particularly good job today. Often the Democrats are way ahead in framing of hearings, but at points the Democrats seemed almost a border on the delusional. 

When you had Hur say ‘I did not exonerate the president’ and then Democrats would say ‘OK, so you exonerated the president’ and he would say ‘No, I didn’t’ and they would say ‘Thank you for that, with that exoneration.’ 

So for a lot of people watching, they probably kept on having to sort of reverse and see if they missed something here.

The thing to remember when Democrat politicians play this kind of nonsensical game is that they’re playing solely to their base — low-information voters who don’t give a damn about the facts. 

The article also notes:

Turley continued:

The fact is that Hur tried over and over again to distinguish between his findings, which is that he was not confident he could convict if he did bring any charges, and the statement of Democrats that the president was cleared.

Like most people who aren’t Democrats, Turley remains shocked that no charges were brought against Biden, particularly given the charges against Trump.

But out of this hearing, it came really some quite shocking observations. I mean, at the end, you’re sort of still wondering why he wasn’t charged, including Hur saying ‘Look, we have audio tape of the president referring to the fact that he found classified evidence in his basement.’ Well, okay, that seems like full knowledge. But he kept on coming back to the fact that I think a jury might have been persuaded that this is a nice, elderly man with a faulty memory.

There have been four people that I am aware of in the past few years that have been charged with mishandling classified information. Two of them have had very few consequences–Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. When does this tell us about our justice system?

“Get Off My Lawn,” He Shouted

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Last night I watched the State of the Union Address. I watched the entire speech and the rebuttal. I learned that to our ‘representatives’ and the elites in Washington, the most most important issues are Ukraine and January 6th. In the rebuttal, I learned that the four things important to Republicans are our southern borde5r, conflicts overseas, inflation, and crime–not necessarily in that order. When the State of the Union Address was over, I felt like someone had yelled at me for an hour and a half. The speech proved that President Biden does have the energy to give an hour and a half speech. It also left many Americans wondering if there were drugs involved.

In his speech, the President needed to allay doubts about his cognitive abilities. He also needed a reset from his image as a tired old man. He did a reasonable job on both counts as long as you ignored the yelling and the slurred speech near the end of the address.

There were a number of lies told during the speech. January 6th was not an insurrection–there were no guns involved and no one has been convicted of insurrection. The President did not inherit a struggling economy–he inherited low inflation, low interest rates, energy independence, and an economy on the rebound from the Covid lockdowns. A large number of the jobs he claims to have created were simply people returning to the jobs they held before the Covid lockdowns. I would also like to note that many of the jobs currently being created are part-time jobs. During the past two months, the number of full-time jobs has significantly decreased. The President also claimed that crime is down under his administration. That is simply not true, although much of the increase in crime is due to Democrat-run cities who have eliminated bail and are not keeping criminals in jail. In New York, the National Guard has been called up to patrol the New York City subways because crime has become a serious problem there.

Also, why was there a fence around the Capitol, but not a wall at our southern border? Do fences and walls work or do they not work? There was also a comment about increasing taxes on corporation and on the wealthy. Corporations do not pay taxes–they pass them on to their customers, fueling inflation. “Taxing the rich” is a proposal that simply feeds class envy. If you want to see the results, look at the Laffer Curve. I would also like to note that during the Obama administration, General Electric paid no income taxes. Why weren’t they sharing the burden?

The speech was loud, inaccurate, and divisive. The tone was not attractive. I do wonder if this speech, which seemed more like a campaign speech than a State of the Union Address, actually won over any undecided voters.

Beware of Wolves In Sheep’s Clothing

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I am on Facebook. There is also a Right Wing Granny group on Facebook (that anyone can join) where I place articles that I may later write up for the blog. Recently there has been a group on Facebook claiming to be mainstream Republicans (they are actually never-Trumpers) posting things saying that the Democrats want President Trump as the candidate because they know Joe Biden can beat him. They have also recently posted that if President Trump is the nominee, the Republicans will lose their majority in the House and will lose Senators. They have the freedom to post whatever they want, but let’s look at this more closely.

First of all, when you see a post similar to the ones mentioned above, find out who is funding the group. There are a lot of uni-party groups claiming to be Republican that are being funded by groups that we know do not want Republican success—or at least the success of Republicans who are not part of the uni-party.

I want to address the claim that if President Trump is the nominee, the Republicans will lose their majority in the House and will lose seats in the Senate. Frankly, if the Republicans in Congress don’t start acting like Republicans, they deserve to lose both the House and the Senate. Whatever happened to closing the southern border? Can’t they find any Democrats who are willing to work with them on closing the southern border? What about cutting spending? What about sending money we don’t have overseas and refusing to audit how that money is being spent? Can’t the Republicans at least make these things an issue every day? Shut down the government if you have to—there are worse things. I believe that the dumbest thing America ever did was air condition government buildings in Washington—if we had not done that, the politicians would have gone home during the summer! That would have been good for the country.

At any rate, don’t believe the trolls on Facebook. Anyone can form an organization and claim to be something they are not. If the Republicans don’t start acting like Republicans, none of them deserve our vote.

Sometimes Congress Actually Does Something When It Directly Impacts Them!

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On Tuesday, The Daily Wire posted an article about the Department of Justice’s spying on members of Congress.

The article reports:

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) announced on Tuesday that he subpoenaed Attorney General Merrick Garland for information on alleged efforts to surveil members of Congress and congressional staff — including during the Russiagate controversy that rocked former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and administration.

In a cover letter to Garland, which noted potential legislative reforms could follow, Jordan said his panel “must resort to compulsory process” because of the “inadequate response to date” by the Department of Justice (DOJ) following his request for details about the apparent use of subpoenas to obtain private communications of Legislative Branch employees.

The DOJ previously informed the committee that the legal process it used related to an investigation into the “unauthorized disclosure of classified information in a national media publication,” the letter said. Jordan cited news reporting that indicated the inquiry pertained to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) surveillance of one-time Trump campaign associate Carter Page, reliant on an effort to get FISA warrants that the DOJ inspector general heavily criticized and the DOJ itself later conceded had relied on “insufficient predication” to last as long as it did.

The article concludes:

The Executive Branch appears to have used its “immense law-enforcement authority to gather and search the private communications of multiple Legislative Branch employees who were conducting Constitutional oversight of the Department’s investigative actions — actions that were later found to be unlawful,” Jordan wrote.

“Because the Department has not complied in full with our requests, we cannot independently determine whether the Department sought to alleviate the heightened separation-of-powers sensitivities involved or whether the Department first sought the information through other means before resorting to legal process,” Jordan added. “The Committee also has concerns that aspects of the Department’s investigation may have been a pretext to justify piercing the Legislative Branch’s deliberative process and improperly access data from Members and staff involved in conducting oversight of the Department.”

After watching the Department of Justice in recent years, I have concluded that the upper management of the Department has very little respect for the rule of law. They need to be replaced.

The Ever-Changing Narrative

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Yesterday, instead of complying with the subpoena issued by Congress, Hunter Biden held a mini press conference outside the Capitol building. When Republicans are in contempt of Congress (which Hunter Biden now is), they get arrested. It will be interesting to see what happens to Hunter Biden.

The Daily Caller posted an article about the statement made by Hunter Biden when he gathered the press together yesterday.

The article notes:

Republican Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan said six words that Hunter Biden told reporters on Wednesday represent a “huge change” in the ongoing impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.

Hunter defied republicans’ subpoena for closed-door testimony on Wednesday, saying he would only testify publicly. House republicans have threatened to hold Hunter in contempt of Congress.

The article includes the following statement by Representative Jordan:

“The White House’s story has changed multiple times, the Justice Department story has changed multiple times how they handled this investigation. But the story that hasn’t changed, the testimony that has been consistent and stood up to cross examination is the two whistleblowers. Their story has not changed and frankly it’s been buttressed and reinforced by – we’ve done eight different depositions of people involved in the investigation at the Justice Department…None of them have refuted what those guys say. So over time it just keeps changing from the White House. This statement today I think is the biggest news of the morning I guess along with the fact he didn’t show up which he’s supposed to do.”

In September I posted an article about the changing narrative on Hunter Biden’s business dealings (article here). The narrative has evolved as evidence has been uncovered. It began with ‘President Biden has no knowledge of his son’s business dealings, evolved into ‘there is no direct evidence Hunter Biden did anything wrong’ and now has become ‘my father was not involved in any of the financial transactions that I was involved in.’

The next iteration will be, “Joe Biden was in business with his son, but they didn’t do anything illegal.” They need to come up with more Trump drama to see if they can distract people from the truth.

More Spying On American Citizens

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Periodically I highlight an article I don’t fully understand. This is one of those times. On Saturday, The Conservative Treehouse posted an article about the changes made to  HR 6611, the 2023 FISA reauthorization bill. The changes don’t protect innocent Americans from being spied upon–they make things worse. The article includes a link to the bill.

The article reports:

House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) Chairman Mike Turner is celebrating the passage of HR 6611, the 2023 FISA reauthorization bill.

Chairman Turner would have granted a clean FISA renewal, he’s that kind of Republican; however, several Republicans demanded changes to the FISA-702 authorities that capture the data of American citizens without a warrant.  Thus, the HPSCI modified the authorities within HR 6611, but they made it worse.

(Via CDT) (Center for Democracy & Technology) – Tucked away near the end of the bill the House Intelligence Committee reported on December 7 (H.R. 6611, the “HPSCI bill”) is a provision that would dramatically expand surveillance under the controversial Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA 702”), which sunsets on December 31 unless reauthorized. Section 504 of the bill, innocuously captioned “Definition of Electronic Communications Service Provider,” would expand the types of entities that can be compelled to disclose internet communications whether in storage or in transit.

FISA 702 permits the U.S. government to compel communication service providers to disclose for foreign intelligence purposes the communications of persons reasonably believed to be non-U.S. persons abroad. No warrant is required; a belief that the communications relate to U.S. foreign affairs or national security is sufficient.  Under current FISA 702, only entities that provide communication services like email, calls, and text messaging can be compelled to disclose these communications. 

As FISA Court amicus and longtime practitioner Marc Zwilligener and his colleague Steve Lane have already noted, the HPSCI bill would upend the current system, enabling the government to compel anyone with mere access to the equipment on which such communications are stored or transmitted to disclose those communications.  That could include personnel at coffee shops that offer WiFi to their customers, a town library that offers public computer internet services, hotels, shared workspaces, landlords and even AirBNB hosts that offer WiFi to the people who stay there, cloud storage services that host but do not access data, and large data centers that rent out computer server space to their clients.

At this point, the only way to stop the formation of a full-scale Stasi in America is to vote all Democrats out of office and drain the swamp. President Trump is the only person who even remotely has a chance of draining the swamp–that’s why the deep state is coming against him so hard.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. Our privacy as Americans is at stake.

Inquiring Minds Want To Know

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Every now and then a Senator has the nerve to actually ask a question that the American public wants answered. Generally, efforts will then be made to either marginalize or remove that Senator. Sorry for the cynicism, but I have been watching Republicans for years and wondering if they actually had spines.

On Tuesday, Townhall reported the following:

Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn cornered FBI Director Christopher Wray Monday afternoon about the failure of the Bureau to release the client list of convicted sex trafficker and abuser Jeffrey Epstein. Wray was also pressed about why the FBI ignored accounts of victims. The exchange took place during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on oversight of the FBI. 

…Last week Democratic Committee Chairman Dick Durbin blocked the release of the flight logs to Epstein’s famous island where women and underaged girls were sex trafficked to high profile men. Former President Bill Clinton was a longtime friend of Epstein before he “committed suicide” in a New York City prison. 

“They don’t want to have a conversation about the estate of Jeffrey Epstein to find out the names of every person who participated in Jeffrey Epstein’s human trafficking ring,” Blackburn released in a statement. 

We can all draw our own conclusions as to why the list has not been released. I am sure that the fact that Ghislaine Maxwell is serving her prison time in a luxury prison in Florida is in no way connected to the fact that the list has not been released.

Please follow the link to the article–it includes the exchange between Senator Blackburn and Director Wray.

 

Regaining Our Rights Guaranteed By The Fourth Amendment

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The U.S. Constitution was not written to give Americans their rights. It was written to insure that the government respected the God-given rights of Americans. The Constitution was written to limit the rights of the government–not the rights of Americans. That concept seems to have gotten lost in recent years.

The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The government in recent years has violated that amendment by spying on Americans without cause or has invented causes (see Carter Page). Now that it has come to light that some Congressional staffers were spied on, Congress has decided to do something about it.

On Friday, Just the News reported:

House Judiciary Committee Republicans are pressing ahead with sweeping reforms to the government’s FISA surveillance powers that among other things would would prohibit the FBI from searching through Americans’ phone records without a court-approved warrant. 

The effort is on track to be wrapped up by the end of the year when several Patriot Act powers expire. Republicans and Democrats are coming together on this matter in rare bipartisan cooperation, lawmakers told Just the News.

“We’ve got, I think, strong agreement amongst members of the Intel Committee and members of the Judiciary Committee. And frankly some Democrats as well, that there needs to be stronger penalties if you abuse the system,” Judiciary Committee Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told the “Just the News, No Noise” television show in an interview aired Friday night.

Jordan said he was focused on what is known as the Section 702 system “where they can create this database” of phone communications metadata that currently can be searched by agents without a warrant. 

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court earlier this year declassified a report revealing that FBI agents had inappropriately searched Americans’ phone records more than 270,000 times over a two year period, alarming civil liberty experts and generating bipartisan condemnation.   

I hate to be cynical, but it seems that Congress is only getting around to dealing with this problem when it affected them. That’s okay. I just hope they successfully end unwarranted government spying on American citizens.

This Could Get Very Interesting

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On Friday, The Gateway Pundit posted an article about the upcoming trial of President Trump regarding the events of January 6h.

The article reports:

Former President Donald Trump’s defense team filed a new motion on Thursday indicating that the former president will present classified information exposing foreign interference in both the 2016 and 2020 U.S. Presidential elections.

The article includes an excerpt from one of the court documents in the case:

The Indictment in this case adopts classified assessments by the Intelligence Community and others that minimized, and at times ignored, efforts by foreign actors to influence and interfere with the 2020 election.

President Trump will offer classified information at trial relating to foreign influence activities that impacted the 2016 and 2020 elections, as well as efforts by his administration to combat those activities.

President Trump will also present classified information relating to the biased and politicized nature of the intelligence assessments that he and others rejected during the events in question.

Collectively, this evidence will undercut central theories of the prosecution and establish that President Trump acted at all times in good faith and on the belief that he was doing what he had been elected to do.
The article concludes:

According to Halper-Hayes ( Dr. Jan Halper-Hayes, a former Global Vice President of Republicans Overseas UK), Trump had chosen not to disclose such evidence early to prevent civil unrest, believing it could lead to a civil war.

“I sit on a task force at the Department of Defense, and the thing is, they’ve got the goods. They’ve got the goods. And Trump knew that if he presented any of the goods early on, we’d have a civil war, that he really felt that the people needed to see how bad it could get,” said Halper-Hayes.

“See, the thing is, think about Edward Snowden and all the information he had. Think about the fact that our military, our Department of Defense Space Force, if you think that they don’t have the actual real results from the election, then you’re fooling yourself,” said Halper-Hayes.

Dr. Halper-Hayes further delved into Executive Order 13848,” enacted by Trump on September 12, 2018, arguing that it was designed to combat foreign interference in U.S. elections, with a focus on the 2020 elections.

“Now, let me say something about this 2020 election, is that Biden is the legitimate president, but he’s the legitimate president of what is now the bankrupt US. Corporation and that was a treaty in 1871,” said Halper-Hayes.

She continued, “Well, on September 12, 2018, Trump created an executive order. Within that, he outlined in future elections any kind of foreign or domestic interference specifically for the 2020 election. So we say, how did he know some of these things were going to happen? Election integrity on both sides of the aisle is tough. It’s really tough. But what this has done is it opened the door for Trump to present his case.”

It will be very interesting to see if this case ever makes it to trial.

 

Why The Red Wave Was A Trickle

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On Friday, The American Thinker posted an article explaining the forces that blocked the overwhelming Republican victory that should have happened in the mid-term elections.

The first headwind that the red wave encountered was the Republican Elites who do not want to give up their power (despite the fact that they have not used their power to help average Americans in any way).

The article notes:

What response did the Republicans make to the Dems’ constant drumbeat about Republican fascism leading up to the election? As far as I can tell, it was mostly crickets. They were overconfident and complacent. They spent three weeks beating their chests about the “red wave” and talking big about what they’d do when they took control of Congress. While they were doing that, the Democrats and their media allies were scaring the bejesus out of their base and, as a result, they turned out in droves.

When I read that Mitch McConnell called Joe O’Dea, a Colorado Senate candidate, “the perfect candidate,” I shuddered because conservatives dislike McConnell almost as much as they dislike Nancy Pelosi. That statement probably cost O’Dea support among rural conservatives.

There was also the matter of denying money to candidates that McConnell knew would not support him as Senate majority or minority leader.

The second headwind was the garbage the media was constantly feeding Americans.

The article reports:

…Americans don’t see the threat to our freedoms that vaccine and mask mandates and lockdowns were and are. They also don’t understand that someone must pay the bill for government handouts, either directly as confiscatory taxes or indirectly as rampant inflation or hyperinflation.

As a result, they tend to vote for the person who promises them something for nothing. Many are mush-heads who will be gobsmacked with the business failures, job losses, foreclosures, bankruptcies, shortages, and other chaos that will inevitably result from the Biden administration’s policies.

The third headwind was early voting. It skews the results by letting those who engage in stuffing ballot boxes how many ballots they need to create.

The article notes:

Early voting is the sleeper contributor to last night’s losses. It gives both parties an advance detailed picture of how many people voted, who voted, who is likely to vote but hasn’t yet, and what party voters support or belong to. With all the massive databases out there and modern computers, they have a pretty good idea of how many votes they need to produce to win an election and where to go to get them, days before election day.

The Democrats have turned early voting and stuffing drop boxes into a science.

Please follow the link to the article to read the details. The Republicans who still believe in the Republican platform need to get their heads out of the sand and change their Washington leadership.

This Sounds Good, But It Is A Mistake

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If a camel’s nose gets under the tent, the rest of the camel will soon follow. That is actually a good warning. It’s a shame our Republican legislators in Washington have either not heard it or choose to ignore it. They are also choosing to ignore the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution which states that ‘the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.’

On Sunday, NewsMax reported the following:

A bipartisan group of U.S. senators, including enough Republicans to overcome the chamber’s “filibuster” rule, on Sunday announced an agreement on a framework for potential gun safety legislation.

The bill included support for state “red flag” laws, tougher background checks for firearms buyers under 21 and a crackdown on a practice called “straw purchases” but not other limits Democrats and President Joe Biden had advocated such as raising the age for buying semiautomatic rifles to 21 or new limits on assault-style rifles.

Ten Republicans signaled their support for the preliminary deal, indicating the measure potentially could advance to a vote on passage and overcome roadblocks by other Republicans who oppose most gun control measures.

The talks that led to the framework followed a series of high-profile mass shootings in the United States, including one at a school in Uvalde, Texas, last month that killed 19 young children and one also in May in a Buffalo, New York, supermarket that killed 10 Black victims.

What the Senators do not seem to realize is that people who are intent on breaking the law (murder is, after all, against the law), do not follow gun laws. All that will happen as a result of this bill (assuming it will be passed) is that it will be more difficult for law-abiding citizens to get guns. That is the scenario the Second Amendment was passed to prevent. Red flag laws are unconstitutional because they do not allow for due process. They are also very easily abused. This is a bad bill.

The article continues:

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, issued a statement calling the plan “a good first step” and one that would “limit the ability of potential mass shooters to quickly obtain assault rifles by establishing an enhanced background check process for gun purchasers under age 21.”

Schumer said that he wanted to move a bill quickly to a Senate vote once legislative details are worked out.

The United States has the highest rate of firearms deaths among the world’s wealthy nations. But it is a country where many cherish gun rights and its Constitution’s Second Amendment protects the right to “keep and bear arms.”

According to a Politifact post of March 20, 2018:

The main study of intentional homicides is performed by the United Nations’ Office of Drug Control. The UN warns against cross-national comparisons because of the differences in legal definitions of intentional homicides and recording practices.

Our count of the UN’s data placed the United States ninth in intentional homicides. We used the most up-to-date count for each country and territory, which included data anywhere from 2007 to 2015.

As the country with the third-highest population size, however, experts told us the number of people killed is not a very useful metric.

Controlling for population size, most criminologists use the per 100,000 metric. By that standard, we found the United States ranked 94th.

When we counted only the countries for which the UN had 2015 data, the United States ranked 73rd. That’s still far from the top ten.

Lied to again.

 

Our Southern Border

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On June 2nd, Breitbart reported the following:

U.S. border officials are quietly bussing a vast flood of wage-cutting, rent-spiking migrants into Americans’ towns and cities, despite the court-ordered preservation of the Title 42 barrier.

“It’s like 8,000 to 9,000 a day now,” and there are more on the way, migration monitor Todd Bensman told Breitbart News.

U.S. border chief Alejandro Mayorkas and his pro-migration deputies are using the Title 42 barrier to send some Central American single men and families back to Mexico. But Mayorkas is cutting loopholes in the barrier to place everyone else on government-funded buses to cities and towns around the United States, said Bensman, who works for the Center for Immigration Studies.

They’re [letting in] people from the Middle East, Asia, Africa — the extra-continentals — and also from Cuba and South America. They’re letting in Peruvians — about 500 a week now. They’re letting in Ecuadorians and tons and tons of Venezuelans.

The article describes the shelter system that has been set up in America for these illegal immigrants:

The U.S. shelter network is a northern mirror of the cartels’ southern network of camps, bus stations, and housing created to transport migrants up through Mexico to the U.S. border.

The northern-side network has been created by a variety of U.S. nonprofits that are funded by donations from pro-migration business elites, progressive charities, and government contracts. They form a nationwide catch-and-release network that helps the U.S. government and cartels smuggle the indebted migrants into Americans’ jobs without exposure from national TV broadcasters.

The number of illegal immigrants coming across the border has a detrimental impact on the wages of Americans:

The elite-delivered flood of migrant workers aids employers, investors, and wealthy professionals. But it imposes much damage on many millions of working-class Americans, who are forced to accept lower wages, higher rents, crowded schools, and lower political status in their own homeland.

That wage loss has been lauded by business interests, such as Goldman Sachs, and is acknowledged by many business groups and even by Biden’s White House advisors. The flood of cheap labor is expected to reinflate the post-1990 Cheap Labor Bubble that has suppressed wages for tens of millions of ordinary Americans. The Wall Street-boosting bubble was deflated by President Donald Trump’s low-migration/high-wage policies in 2020 and 2021.

Migration advocates also celebrate the displacement of Americans in their own country. “The phenomenon of [population] replacement, writ large, is America, and has been from the beginning, sometimes by force, mostly by choice,” said a May 17 op-ed in the New York Times. “What the far right calls “replacement” is better described as renewal.”

Progressives claim that the migrants will offset the economic damage to ordinary Americans by buying food and services from Americans — despite the evidence of minimal wage growth since 1990. ‘The average effect, at all skill levels, is nothing in the short term,” said Michael Clemens, a migration expert at the Center for Global Development.

Please follow the link to read the entire article.

This is not a problem created by one political party–the Republicans are as guilty as the Democrats. The Chamber-of-Commerce Republicans love the cheap labor that the illegal immigrants provide. Open borders is a policy supported by people in both political parties who are part of the Washington swamp. The Republicans (and the Democrats) have had multiple opportunities to solve the crisis at the southern border AND the illegal immigration crisis. Both parties have chosen not to solve the problem.

Questions About The Laptop

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One of the problems with the age of electronics is that there is a digital record of everything you say or do. If that digital record has questionable information on it and falls into the wrong hands, your life could become complicated.

On Wednesday, The New York Post posted an article detailing the avenues that the Republicans in Congress want to investigate regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop.

The article reports:

The minority members of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform are laying the groundwork for a probe that would get underway if the GOP gains subpoena power by wresting control from Democrats in the November elections, as many political experts expect.

Topping the list are the first son’s controversial overseas business dealings — some of which involved the state-controlled Bank of China and other companies tied to the Chinese government — and their potential impact on national security, a spokesperson said.

These are the items:

These are legitimate questions that need to be answered.

The article concludes:

Meanwhile, in a Wednesday letter, the House committee’s ranking member, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), and 14 colleagues asked former Rosemont Seneca Partners president Eric Schwerin to hand over records of all his all communications involving President Biden and Hunter Biden since 2009 — when Joe Biden became vice president — and a list of Schwerin’s positions in Biden family companies.

The move came after The Post exclusively revealed this past weekend that Schwerin visited the White House at least 19 times between 2009 and 2015 — and even sat down with then-Vice President Biden in the West Wing.

 

Subsequent reporting uncovered at least eight more Schwerin visits, including two meetings with Steve Ricchetti, who at the time was Joe Biden’s chief of staff and is now his White House counselor.

The House Republicans’ letter signals that if Schwerin doesn’t comply voluntarily, he could get slapped with a subpoena next year.

“We expect Eric Schwerin to provide us with answers to our questions,” a GOP committee aide told The Post.

“If Americans entrust Republicans with the majority in 2023, we will use tools at our disposal to ensure we get to the truth about whether Joe Biden has financially benefited and helped facilitate Hunter Biden’s business dealings.”

The letter cites a June 10, 2010, email that Schwerin sent Hunter Biden regarding Joe Biden’s Delaware state tax refund check, which Schwerin said he was “depositing…in his account and writing a check in that amount back to you since he owes it to you.”

“This email shows an intertwined financial relationship between President Biden and his son, the latter of whom has profited from America’s losses to foreign adversaries,” Comer and the other Republicans wrote.

” If President Biden and Hunter are sharing funds or if President Biden is in debt to his son — the American people deserve to know it especially in light of the millions of dollars Hunter’s businesses have received from countries adversarial to U.S. interests.”

Neither Schwerin nor the White House responded to requests for comment.

If the Republicans become the majority after the November election, there will be a serious investigation into the finances of the Biden family. You can expect the Democrats to do anything and everything to prevent that from happening.

Please remember Journalist Matt Stiller’s report on Hillary Clinton’s reaction on election night 2016:

Journalist Matt Stiller shared in a recent report that during the 2016 presidential election Hillary Clinton was unhinged, and that various NBC insiders can substantiate his account.

According to Still, during last year’s presidential campaign at the Commander-In-Chief Forum on September 7, 2016, moderator Matt Lauer went “off script” and asked Hillary about her using an illegal, private email-server when she was secretary of state.

According to Bill Still’s source — an unnamed “NBC associate producer of the forum” — Hillary was so enraged that, after the forum, she went into a ballistic melt-down, screaming at her staff, including a racist rant at Donna Brazile, calling Brazile a “buffalo” and “janitor”. Brazile recently turned against Hillary — now we know why.

…She screamed she’d get that f**king Lauer fired for this. Referring to Donald Trump, Clinton said, ‘If that f**king b***ard wins, we all hang from nooses! Lauer’s finished, and if I lose, it’s all on your heads for screwing this up.’

You don’t normally hang from a noose when you lose an election. What was she referring to?

It’s Time To Bring Back The Tea Party

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The Conservative Treehouse is reporting today that the House Republicans have voted to reinstate earmarks. An earmark is defined as a provision inserted into a discretionary spending appropriations bill that directs funds to a specific recipient while circumventing the merit-based or competitive funds allocation process. In plain English, it is a bribe inserted in a bill to get the vote of a specific member of Congress. Earmarks are one of the things that are responsible for the bloated federal spending that characterizes Washington. Instead of crafting bills that everyone in Congress can support, Congress resorts to earmarks to buy the votes of their members. Eliminating earmarks was one of the goals of the Tea Party.

The article reports:

When earmarks exist, the crap legislation passes because individual votes can be purchased through the earmark process.  Remember: “The Cornhusker Kickback”; “The Louisiana Purchase”; or “Gator-Aide”; those were legislative earmarks to get Obamacare passed in the Senate.

Obamacare was the sh!t sandwich the American people were forced to eat, the earmarks just gave senators some justification for their votes.

Bottom line.. it is the earmark process that makes crap legislation pass.  Confront any politician and they will admit this.

The most brutally honest answer to the question of earmarks is this: If the legislation sucks and will not pass on its own (hence the need for earmarks), then why would adding some expensive ice-cream make the sh!t sandwich better?

Remember, the originating legislation doesn’t come from inside congress.  The K-Street lobbyists are the ones writing the legislation; the earmark process only arms congressional leadership with an enhanced tool to sell the K-Street construct. {Go Deep}

Every Republican Congressman who voted to bring back earmarks needs to be voted out of office as soon as possible.

The End To Honest Elections

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The Democrats in the House of Representatives have passed HR1. There were no Republican votes for the bill. That is the bill that will fundamentally change American elections to the point where honest elections will become a thing of the past.

The Federalist posted an article yesterday listing fifteen of the major problems with the bill.

This is the list. Please read the entire article for details:

1. Openly Breaks the Constitution

2. Set Up Star Chambers to Intimidate Judges

3. Mandate Mail-in Ballots, 10-Day Delay in Results

4. Eliminate Voter ID Election Security

5. Register Millions Of Criminally Present Foreign Citizens to Vote

6. Explode Opportunities for Election Cheating

7. Prevent Cleaning Up Voter Rolls

8. Unleash Mobs on Political Donors

9. Gerrymander Districts to Favor Democrats

10. Make Vote Hacking Easier

11. Let Former Felons Vote Before They’ve Completed Their Sentences

12. Help 16- and 17-Year-Olds Vote Illegally

13. Bans Keeping the Records Necessary for an Election Audit or Recount

14. Mandates Ballot Drop Boxes

15. Giving U.S. Territories Extra Democrat Seats in Congress and the Electoral College

I honestly don’t know if the Republicans can stop this disaster from passing in the Senate. If it becomes law (and survives the court challenges that will follow because it is unconstitutional–states control their own elections), we will have lost our republic.

About That Unity Thing

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Yesterday Bloomberg posted a very interesting article about bipartisanship. Despite President Biden’s claim that he seeks unity, there seems to be very little unity in Washington these days. I should mention that bipartisanship is not a requirement. The Democrats control the White House and the House of Representatives and essentially the Senate. There is no requirement that they work with Republicans. However, the article points out that the Republicans are not solely responsible for the lack of bipartisanship.

The article notes:

During the Obama years, Democrats cited incidents like this one to cast Republicans in a bad light. Obama and several other Democrats also complained bitterly that Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell had announced at the start of his first term that his top priority was preventing a second one. Democrats said they tried again and again to meet Republicans halfway on health care, too, and were rebuffed.

With President Joe Biden in the White House, Democrats are saying that the Republicans’ behavior then justifies ignoring them now: There’s no point wasting time trying to negotiate with them.

The incidents didn’t actually happen, though, or at least didn’t happen the way Obama related them. Before he met with House Republicans in January 2009, House Democrats had already introduced a stimulus bill without any of their input, and Republicans had already made public statements of opposition. In his meeting with the Republicans, Obama reportedly said he was open to changing the bill; the Republicans then voted against the unchanged bill; and Boehner issued a statement saying he would still like to work with Obama on the issue.

McConnell’s remark, meanwhile, was made well into Obama’s term, right before the midterm elections of 2010. He said in the same breath that he would work with Obama if he moderated the way the previous Democratic president, Bill Clinton, had: “I don’t want the president to fail; I want him to change.”

Part of the problem right not is that we really don’t know who is making the decisions in the White House.

The article concludes:

Republicans and Democrats worked together to pass a large Covid-relief bill last spring, and did it again just a few weeks ago. The second one was passed after Biden had won the election and the Electoral College had met. Republicans knew that any positive effect it had would buoy Biden politically, and did it anyway.

There’s no moral or constitutional obligation for Democrats to bargain with the Republicans. Obama came into office with large Democratic majorities in Congress, and had the votes he needed to pass the stimulus and his health-care bill without Republicans.

Maybe they will have the votes they need in Congress this time, too. It would be nice, though, if they would stop pretending that they have no other choice.

If you are going to talk about unity, it would be nice if you did something to promote it.

Two Patriotic Democrat Senators Helped Save The Republic

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One America News is reporting today that at least for now, the filibuster will remain in the Senate.

The article reports:

Top senators from both sides of the aisle are laying down their arms and moving forward with talks over sharing power.

On Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell signaled an end to the fight over the Senate filibuster. He credited the truce to Democrat lawmakers Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who McConnell said sided with the GOP.

“Senator Manchin, yesterday, made it clear he was not going to support getting rid of the legislative filibuster under any circumstances for the duration of this Congress,” McConnell stated. “I talked to Senator Sinema last night, she said the same thing, so the issue as far as I’m concerned is resolved.”

On Monday, McConnell said he would drop his push to get official confirmation that the upper chamber would keep the filibuster. He indicated the flipping of Sinema and Manchin waned Democrats’ power to kill the controversial practice.

There is another aspect to this. Historically Republicans are quite happy to be the minority in Congress. They don’t seem to know how to lead when they actually have power. Possibly because they don’t seem to be able to work as a team–even with each other. There were many opportunities for doing good things for the country while President Trump was in office that were lost because some Republicans didn’t like his tweets, or his hair, or his tie, or some other foolishness. The Republicans as they are currently in Congress do not deserve to be in leadership. They don’t know how to lead, and they have lost touch with the average American. There are a few exceptions to that, but only a few.

Actions Have Consequences

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Unfortunately it appears that the Democrat’s definition of unity is to silence any dissenting views on their policies. The idea of compromise and debate seems to have vanished somewhere in the recent election. This is not the way our country was set up, and many Americans are unhappy with the direction the Democrats are already taking us.

Just the News posted an article yesterday about the approval ratings of some of our Congressional leaders.

The article includes the following screenshot:

The article concludes:

Less than a majority of Republican voters (45%) expressed approval for McConnell, showing a growing divide within the Republican party. Meanwhile, a majority of Democrats (67%) still approve of Pelosi, who was recently elected Speaker of the House by a slender margin.

This survey polled 1,200 registered voters and was conducted by Scott Rasmussen from Jan 7-9, 2021.

The poll’s cross-demographic tabulations can be found here and here.To see the poll’s methodology and sample demographics, click here.

The Republican Party does not easily unify. It is made up of people who do not naturally fall into lock step. There are many Republicans (myself included) who would like to see the Republican Party actually lead instead of sitting back and playing the victim. Mitch McConnell has done a good job of confirming judges, but he has not always been on the President’s team. That is unfortunate because the President is the highest elected official in the Republican Party–he should be considered its leader. It is unfortunate that the Party has not been willing to unite behind him to get things done. Had the members of the Party been willing to take a strong stand, they might have been able to work out an infrastructure bill and get it passed despite the Democrats’ objections. Had the party stuck together instead of playing their ‘never Trump’ games, they might have been able to overcome Democrat resistance to policies that would have moved our country forward. I believe the approval ratings above reflect the frustration of the American people that the two parties have not been able to work together for the good of the country. Based on their actions so far, I don’t see that changing under a new Congress and administration.