Joe Biden had a teen-girl hissy fit yesterday over House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s debt ceiling proposal. In his histrionics the president - who once promised to unite the country - again refused to negotiate on the debt ceiling, while accusing Republicans of wanting to cut taxes for the rich and cut gaping holes in the social safety net (with children going hungry, the elderly thrown out on the street, and kittens dying).
So you know McCarthy must be doing something right - and we’d say VERY right.
We haven’t always agreed with McCarthy - and we’re still angry that he allowed the GOP to bring back earmarks - but his plan is wise: it would suspend the debt ceiling for one year in exchange for common sense fiscal reforms we’ve been urging at CTUP since January.
They are:
One percent cap on domestic spending
No funding for 87,000 IRS agents
Cancel the hundreds of billions of unspent Covid money (the green new deal)
Repeal Biden student loan bailouts
Enact Reins Act requiring federal reg agencies to get congressional approval for new regulations
There’s much more to be done, but these are all popular reforms that are worth going to the mat over.
We view it as ESSENTIAL that all House Repubs - including our friends in the Freedom Caucus - unify behind this plan, pass it forthwith, and then let Chucky Schumer and Biden holler, pout, and squirm. If they won’t agree to this debt ceiling extension - all the carnage they are falsely claiming about “defaulting on the debt” is on them.
Remember: Republicans aren’t fiscal angels by any means, but they aren’t the ones who ruinously voted to raise debt spending by $6 trillion over the last two years - they are.
We don’t want to jinx things, but things are looking good for an expansion of education freedom in Tennessee.
An Education Savings Account expansion bill - where the dollars follow the students for public or private school options - has passed the House and Senate in Nashville. Governor Bill Lee is strongly supportive.
The good news: eligible families will receive ESA funding worth $7,500 to start and up to $8,700 in future years. This is less than half what the public schools spend per child.
We are disappointed that the ESAs are capped at 15,000 families and to a few counties and only to the lowest income families.
That’s a good start. But why not give EVERY child a choice?
3) Gold Coast Lexus Liberals Elected the New Leftist Chicago Mayor
We are all still scratching our heads and bandaging our wounds as we try to figure out the catastrophe of the Chicago mayoral election. We’ve mentioned before that Brandon Johnson won an overwhelming share of the Black and youth vote. Vallas won big time with the Hispanic vote.
But here is the biggest surprise of all? The millionaire liberals who live in the penthouse suites on upscale Michigan Avenue voted for Johnson, according to an analysis by the Illinois Policy Institute (See the diagram below). The yellow areas are clusters of voters for Johnson. The area on the right along Lake Michigan and Lincoln Park (upper right) are the most affluent areas of the city, and these voters went for Johnson.
Chicago is a microcosm of the political divide in the nation. Government employees and the very affluent - who are gated off from the decay of rotten schools and the terror of rampant inner-city crime - are the base of the Democratic Party. The working class is voting mostly Republican.
For two years now, we’ve been updating readers on the Hunter Biden scandal that the media has mostly ignored – even as they like bloodhounds investigated every financial transaction by Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. and his son-in-law Jerad Kushner.
Things are about to get ugly for the Biden family, with a credible whistleblower stepping up to say the Biden DOJ directly interfered with an investigation to protect Hunter. Worse, AG Garland lied to Congress.
John Solomon reports:
The whistleblower alleged that Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney David Weiss could not legally bring charges in Delaware. Because of where Hunter Biden lived at the time his tax returns were filed, Weiss needed the permission of Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys in other districts to bring charges outside of Delaware. The agent alleges two such U.S. attorneys appointed by Biden declined his requests, according to interviews.
In testimony as recently as last month, Garland told Iowa GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley that Weiss had full authority to bring charges in any district he needed. "If it's in another district, he would have to bring the case in another district," Garland said. "But as I said, I promise to ensure that he's able to carry out his investigation and that he'd be able to run it. And if he needs to bring it in another jurisdiction, he will have full authority to do that."
The IG has obtained contemporaneous government emails and memos in DOJ files documenting to IRS leadership what the agent believed was evidence of political interference and biased behavior by DOJ employees. The agent is willing to make the same evidence available to Congress, according to Lytle's letter.
It’s looking more and more that way. The chart below from Rep. Marcy Kaptur with data from Ballotpedia suggests that the Democrats do far better in rich districts and the Republicans do better in the middle class districts.
