By Mike Huckabee
April 4, 2019
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When then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid invoked the “nuclear option” to limit the GOP minority’s filibuster power, he never imagined that the Democrats would one day be in the minority. Well, now they are, and the nuclear door is open and they don’t have radiation suits.
Yesterday, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell instituted another change to rein in the minority’s delaying power, this time bringing back a rule from Obama’s first term. Since it was changed, any Senator could force 30 hours of debate on any nominee, even after the Senate had voted to end debate and vote on a nomination. Democrats had been abusing this power to delay Trump nominees indefinitely. The nominees may be perfectly well qualified and have bipartisan support, and the offices for which they were nominated have been empty for two years and are in desperate need of being filled, yet the Democrats just kept delaying for no reason other than they hate Trump and refuse to accept that he’s President and has the right to appoint people.
McConnell said, “The comprehensive campaign by Senate Democrats to delay Senate consideration of presidential nominations is now more than two years old. It's time for this sorry chapter to end."
So he did something he perhaps should have done over a year ago. While changing the rule would’ve required a two-thirds vote, McConnell used a point of order upheld by a 51-48 vote to restrict the debate from 30 to two hours. (All the Democrats plus Republicans Susan Collins and Mike Lee voted no.)
It doesn’t apply to Cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court nominations, and appeals court judges. But nominees to federal district courts and offices in DC can finally start getting confirmation votes, after cooling their heels since 2016.
While there will be much wailing and rending of garments over this in the liberal media, Dan Calabrese probably summed it up best: “There is no way the Undersecretary of Agriculture for Rutabaga Husbandry needs 30 hours of Senate debate.”
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Even though some votes in Chicago are still being counted (or “counted”) from Tuesday’s elections, it appears that there will now be far more socialists on the Chicago city council than there are Republicans. And as we learned from Cuba and everywhere else it’s been tried, there’s no place on Earth where crime, poverty, corruption and injustice are so bad that they can’t be made far worse by adding socialism.
This should also give a boost to another rising political group in Illinois: those who want the rest of the state to secede from Chicago (yes, that’s really a thing.)
There was better news for Republicans (and common sense) in Wisconsin, where conservative Appeals Judge Brian Hagedorn won a close surprise victory over liberal Appeals Judge Lisa Neubauer (there will likely be a recount, but Hagedorn believes his lead is insurmountable, a phrase you’d never hear in a Chicago recount.) The left won a court seat in 2016 with a 12-point victory, and visions of taking over the state Supreme Court in 2020 were dancing in their heads. But the conservative majority is safe for at least another four years.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2019/04/03/wisconsin-supreme-court-race-n2544189
As Guy Benson at Townhall.com notes in the linked article, liberals can’t blame their loss on money in politics, because they outspent Hagedorn 3-1. They also can’t blame low turnout, because turnout was up 16% over last year, which was the highest turnout since 2011. They tried defaming Hagedorn as a bigot and a religious zealot because he’s a traditional Christian, but that didn’t work.
The local GOP believes that what this signals is that after the “blue wave” gains of 2016, voters have seen to their horror what giving power to today’s radical-left Democrats means, and the conservative base has awakened and won’t let it happen again.
Well, the left wanted Americans to be “woke.” They’re wide awake now. Thanks for the wake-up call.
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There is a recently-elected female member of Congress who is young, dynamic, attractive, outspoken, a racial minority and she is saying things that should make her a rising leader of the Democratic Party. And no, it’s definitely not the person you’re thinking of.
This is someone who really deserves the attention being lavished on the other one, and for the sound future of both America and the Democratic Party, the media should turn its attention away from the Bronx socialist and toward Florida Rep. Stephanie Murphy.
She’s the first Vietnamese woman ever elected to Congress. Her family fled the Vietnamese communists when she was six months old and were rescued at sea by the US Navy. While there are a number of policy issues upon which we would disagree, she’s a more traditional Democrat than many of her Party’s younger generation whose only knowledge of socialism came from their leftist college professors. She’s seen Marxism in action, and you need to read what she has to say about it at the link.
https://www.westernjournal.com/lawmaker-turns-fellow-dems-socialism-conversations-offended/
In fact, all her Democratic colleagues and a big portion of their voters need to hear it, too. Let’s hope some of those hypocritical fashion magazine editors who give so much space to glamorous socialists in between ads for designer clothes and luxury goods will realize what socialism would mean for them and start putting Rep. Murphey on their covers instead.
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A Tale of Two Cities:
In Washington, DC, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos proposed cutting $18 million in funding for the Special Olympics. She said the organization already has plenty of financial support and didn’t need the federal money, and with a $20 trillion national debt, we’re doing young Americans no favors by borrowing against their future. The proposed cut was greeted with outrage and furious condemnation. President Trump replied that he would not implement the cut, but that didn’t stop the continuing outrage and condemnation of him as cruel and heartless. Special Olympics International President Tim Shriver gloated, “In some ways the most powerless, vulnerable, forgotten people in the country brought to their knees the most powerful people in the country.”
In Albany, New York, the Democratic legislature and Gov. Andrew Cuomo cut state funding for the Special Olympics by $50,000 (a 25% reduction) while giving themselves a lavish pay raise (Cuomo’s $70,000 raise will make him the highest-paid Governor in America.) After some mild protests, Cuomo reversed the cut and was showered with praise and thanks. Shriver declared, “Special Olympics New York is grateful to the Governor for his generous support during a difficult budget year.”
I guess the deference to Cuomo is because Albany is facing a difficult budget year and Washington isn’t.
Speaking of difficult budget years, all New Yorkers are going to be facing a lot more of those, thanks to that very same Democratic government in Albany. Michael Goodwin in the New York Post calls it “the slow-motion disaster undermining New York’s economy.”
https://nypost.com/2019/04/02/the-slow-motion-disaster-undermining-new-yorks-economy/
While Republicans still held the Senate, they were able to keep the brakes on some of the worst inclinations of the left. But New York voters, in their wisdom, handed the entire state government over to Democrats, and they just finished crafting their new economic plan. It includes fat raises for all of them, plus $100 million worth of public funding for political campaigns, and lots more spending (a 4% increase in an already-bloated budget), paid for by a host of new taxes and fees on just about everything they could think of.
With the new $15 minimum wage law causing the first drop in restaurant jobs in 20 years, and the already sky-high taxes driving high earners to move to other states, this will likely just accelerate the exodus of taxpayers and leave an even bigger budget shortfall, which the Dems will try to offset with even higher taxes and fees, which will drive even more people out.
Red states should start preparing for the New York tax refugees’ arrival now by creating newcomer welcome brochures that explain why this is a place you wanted to move to, so don’t come here and vote for people who espouse the same idiotic leftist policies that just caused you to leave the place you fled.
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Ominous news for Hillary Clinton: one of the most outspoken members of Congress pointed out the need for a serious investigation of the use of unsecure electronic communications that expose classified communications to our enemies. She said that “every day that there is an insecure line of communication that could be leaked, that could be hacked, that could be screen-shotted — without proper channels — is a day that we are putting our national security at risk” and “putting hundreds, if not potentially thousands of Americans at risk…I mean, really, what is next, putting nuclear codes in Instagram DMs? This is ridiculous.”
That Congress member was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and she thought she was blasting the Trump Administration, but what the heck? Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
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There are some things you can always count on in Washington. For instance, if it’s spring, the cherry blossoms must be in bloom again. And if Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats are back in charge of the House, we’re going to go without a budget again.
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In an attempt to appeal to Latino voters, the Democratic Presidential hopefuls are all putting up Spanish language versions of their campaign websites. But an analysis by Politico found that their mastery of Spanish leaves something to be desired. The really bad translation errors include Amy Klobuchar’s claim (in Spanish) that she “wasted” her life defending American democracy.
Politico says that most of the Spanish errors are minor typos but some sites include “truly incomprehensible passages.” Are they sure those aren’t accurate translations of “Beto” O’Rourke speeches?
https://www.westernjournal.com/2020-democratic-websites-crafted-latinos-botch-translations/
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