Jan. 2, 2024
Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.
Three words House GOP should forget in 2024: Vacate the Chair
By Rick Manning
2024 promises to be an opportunity for Republicans in Congress, particularly in the House of Representatives, to stymie the Biden administration's multi-front onslaught against America.
But this can only occur if the House GOP can focus on what brings them together rather than what drives them apart. After the Dec. 31 departure of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the expulsion of former U.S. Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) and the anticipated early March retirement of U.S. Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio) cut the Republicans’ razor thin majority in half. While the GOP is expected to hold the McCarthy and Johnson seats, governing in 2024 requires virtual unanimity in the House GOP Conference, something in short supply.
This is not a philosophical debate but one of numbers.
The House of Representatives is a majority rule body. Whoever can get a majority on the floor, controls the debate and wins the day. The bloodletting of the last year has had some positive impacts on limiting the power of the Speaker in the House, opening up opportunity for more members to get their ideas considered for inclusion in legislation. This expanded voice of individual House members has taken power from a very few members and staff and dispersed it is a very good thing.
What isn't a good thing and is not sustainable is the constant knife at the throat of the Speaker, who was just elected by the House GOP a couple of months ago, known as a motion to vacate the chair. The motion to vacate is an important safeguard to prevent a run-away speakership, but in a historically narrow majority it threatens to become Robespierre's guillotine once again sending the House into anarchy.
The House GOP needs to draw together right now to stop the Biden administration's refusal to enforce our nation's laws at the border allowing an estimated eight plus million illegals to enter out country in just three years. Congressional Democrats hope to use the border crisis to create a pathway to citizenship for millions of the nearly 30 million who now have taken up residence in our country. The House GOP and their Senate colleagues need to say no to the Democrats on their created crisis. They need to unite to say no special funding to sanctuary cities and states like California which is now ignoring its own $60 billion plus debt to provide free health care to illegals. They need to unite to say no special funding for cities and states which refuse to allow the deportation of criminal illegals. And they need to unite to force the Biden administration to seal the border.
The ugly fact is that since Joe Biden has become president, Border Patrol reports that there have been more than 8 million illegal aliens encounters at the border and this does not include 1.5 million or more 'gotaways' who the Border Patrol observed but were not able to detain.
This is an existential crisis for our nation, and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is focused on it like a laser beam. But he cannot lead with the guillotine being dragged behind him everywhere he goes. The presumption that he could lose power at any moment neuters his ability to lead, and that is dangerous for our nation.
Our nation has big, real crises, which cannot wait for President Biden's defeat and replacement in January of 2024. The House GOP has a majority. It is time they pick one or two issues they can come together on, and get some wins. The border, exposing Biden's corruption and abuse of power in office through unconstitutional regulations and at least enforcing the debt ceiling level of spending should be three that can be agreed upon.
With a three-vote majority facing a narrow Senate Democrat majority and a far-left White House, it is unreasonable to expect massive wins across the board, but if they come together, they can put some temporary 2024 patches on some big problems. It won't be easy, but it must be done.
Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.
To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2024/01/three-words-house-gop-should-forget-in-2024-vacate-the-chair/
Removing Trump from the ballot is not helping Biden or Trump’s GOP opponents in the polls as constitutional crisis looms
By Robert Romano
Attempts to remove former President Donald Trump in Colorado, Maine and other states does not appear to be helping President Joe Biden in the polls, the latest results of the USA Today-Suffolk University poll show, with Trump leading Biden 37 percent to 34 percent in the hypothetical four-way race between Biden, Trump, Robert Kennedy, Jr. and Cornell West.
Similarly, Trump still leads his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination in the same poll following the attempts to remove him from the Colorado and Maine ballots, Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Republican Gov. Nikki Haley, with 62 percent for Trump, 13 percent for Haley and 10 percent for DeSantis.
When USA Today-Suffolk University took the poll in October, Trump was leading his GOP opponents by 46 points. Now he’s leading by 49 points.
This might indicate that voters don’t think too much of the efforts to remove Trump from the ballot under the allegation he had “committed” insurrection by giving the speech at the National Mall on Jan. 6, 2021 preceding the riot at the U.S. Capitol, when he told supporters to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard”. That is, voters are not taking the attempted removals too seriously (perhaps because he neither been charged nor convicted of insurrection and only ever acquitted by the U.S. Senate in 2021 in the shotgun impeachment trial) and perhaps are expecting the Supreme Court to simply overturn it.
Or, it might actually be helping Trump by making his principal opponents, Biden and the Democrats, look like they are abusing the nation’s justice system to prevent the opposition party, the Republicans, from choosing their own nominee and competing in the general election. In other words, they look like tyrants, because suppressing opposition parties is in fact tyrannical.
In 2016, before he ever took office, at the Republican National Convention, Trump initially rejected the convention’s chants of “lock her up” referring to Hillary Clinton’s keeping classified documents on her private server at home and instead implored “Let’s defeat her in November.”
But by the time he got to the second presidential debate against Clinton in Oct. 2016, he threatened to do the same thing to her: “I tell you what, I didn’t think I would say this, but I’m going to and I hate to say it. But if I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation. Because there has never been so many lies, so much deception. There has never been anything like it. And we’re gonna have a special prosecutor.”
Of course, he never did.
In response to Clinton’s own problems, Democrats and other anti-Trump officials in the federal government used the nation’s security apparatus to launch a counterintelligence and then criminal investigation of Trump on false charges conjured by his opponent that he was a Russian who had conspired with Moscow to hack the DNC and John Podesta emails and put them on Wikileaks.
Now, Trump is vowing to fight fire with fire.
Trump told his supporters in Bedminster, N.J. on June 13, 2023 following his arraignment in federal court in Miami, Fla. for alleged violations of the Espionage Act over documents that Trump retained following his presidency that he says he declassified that he would in turn appoint a special prosecutor to go after Biden, whom he blamed for the indictment, “In addition to closing the border and removing all of the criminal elements that have illegally invaded our country, making America energy independent and even dominant again, and immediately ending the war between Russia and Ukraine — I will have it ended in 24 hours — I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family, name a special prosecutor, and all others involved with the destruction of our elections, our borders and our country itself.”
Trump said that a line had been crossed that never should have been, stating, “Now that the seal is broken, so important… the seal is broken by what they’ve done, they should never have done this. This was an unwritten rule: you just don’t, unless it’s really bad, but you just don’t. But the seal’s now broken.”
Underscoring the issue, on TruthSocial.com on Jan. 1, Trump reiterated that prosecutions can go in both directions, warning the same could be done Biden, too, stating, “REMEMBER, if I don’t have Presidential Immunity, then Crooked Joe Biden doesn’t have it either, and he would certainly be Prosecuted for his many ACTUAL CRIMES, including illegally receiving massive amounts of money from foreign countries, including China, Ukraine, and Russia, paying off Ukraine to fire an unfriendly prosecutor, allowing millions of people to illegally Enter and Destroy our Country, SURRENDERING in Afghanistan, with Hundreds Dead, many Americans Left Behind, and handing over Billions of Dollars Worth of the Best Military Equipment anywhere on Earth, the Decimation of American Wealth through the Green New Scam, and so much more.”
The difference, at the moment, is that Biden is in office and his Justice Department is actively pursuing prosecutions of Trump, whereas Trump is the outsider running for president who cannot presently do the same thing. The situation would be put to the test, politically, if Trump were to return in kind the weaponization of government.
Put another way, if Trump had attempted to prosecute Clinton in 2017, it might be just about as popular as Biden now attempting to prosecute Trump. Which is to say, not at all.
That is the constitutional and political crisis we find ourselves in, in a nutshell. For the rest of the country that does not want to see the country spiral towards civil conflict, the American people had better hope that locking up your political opponents remains deeply unpopular, or we’ve got much larger problems on our hands.
The options appear to be to somehow restore the civil society, or to lose it potentially forever — and time is running out.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.