(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) As I have noted in the not-too-distant past, Democrats should learn to be careful what they wish for.
This week alone, some of their most odious policies truly began to bear harvests.
In separate, unrelated incidents on consecutive days, two outspoken far-left activists, Josh Kruger and Ryan Carson, were brutally murdered after having mocked, celebrated and sympathized with such lawlessness when heaped upon others.
Both of their respective cities fell under the protection of George Soros-funded, pro-criminal district attorneys—Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner and New York City’s Alvin Bragg—who have callously and flagrantly ignored the rule of law.
So has Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in allowing an estimated 7 million illegals into the country as part of an open-border policy that most asume is by design and not incompetence.
This week, however, citing an “acute and immediate need,” the Biden administration backpedaled on seven years’ worth of rhetoric that equated the construction of a border wall to literal racism and a litany of other nasty things.
They offered no explanation for the total reversal, of course, nor did they need to.
Democrats everywhere have begun demanding that they close the border, and President Joe Biden’s poll number’s remain deep underwater, with murmurs of a possible mutiny against the soon-to-be-81-year-old incumbent and presumptive 2024 nominee.
Nonetheless, his method of doing so, by validating the much-reviled centerpiece of former President Donald Trump’s immigration plan, caught a few off-guard. The surprise border-wall announcement helped to spark the term #BlueMAGA trending on Twitter.
UNLOCKING THE GAETZ
Despite their own disarray, Democrats still found time to point fingers across the aisle following the removal of Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., as House speaker in what seemed to be an impromptu revolt early this week brought on by Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla.
For weeks, Gaetz, who emerged as one of the biggest holdouts during McCarthy’s marathon speaker election in January, had been sabre-rattling about the possibility of exercising the “motion to vacate” concession that the Freedom Caucus had secured in exchange for supporting McCarthy after 15 rounds of voting.
Although the pressure from Gaetz may have helped force the reluctant “Young Gun” to proceed with an impeachment inquiry against Biden, McCarthy promptly capitulated to Democrats in a stopgap funding agreement to forestall a government shutdown.
Gaetz and others saw it as a betrayal and noted that McCarthy had violated another newly implemented House rule that allowed sufficient time for members to read all legislation.
That’s the official story. However, one has to wonder what sort of moves were happening behind the scenes considering the context in which all of this was unfolding—namely the growing acceptance that Trump remains firmly entrenched as the party leader and presidential nominee heading into the 2024 election.
Accepting that as fact, the outrageous lawfare attacks being waged against him by the Left are not Trump’s and Trump’s alone to bear as the entire fate of America hangs in the balance.
TRIAL AND ERROR … AND EVIL
On Monday, Trump’s trials ceased to be an abstraction, negotiated largely on paper by teams of lawyers, when the clearly unqualified New York Judge Arthur Engoron flashed his butter-toothed grin toward MSNBC’s cameras at the start of Trump’s civil trial in New York.
The trial got the go-ahead to proceed last week after Engoron arbitrarily ruled, without any testimony or jury, that the former president had overvalued his properties and thus committed fraud—giving the state of New York the authority to seize Trump’s corporate assets in an inherently spurious case stemming from state Attorney General Letitia James’s politically motivated fishing expedition.
Even so, it remains a civil trial and can ultimately be reversed on appeal with limited damage apart from the inconvenience.
There is something far more deeply sinister about the first of his criminal trials, the D.C. District trial currently set for March 4, 2024—just a day ahead of the Super Tuesday primaries.
The combination of Special Counsel Jack Smith and Judge Tanya Chutkan—a Marxist subversive whose goal is not to do her job but to fundamentally transform America into a banana republic—screams corruption. Undoubtedly both are working in cahoots with operatives from whatever leftist cabal has mapped out the lawfare strategy for neutralizing Trump.
Not only could Trump face incarceration in the D.C. gulag as the result of a predetermined guilty verdict—at least until the Supreme Court reverses Smith’s egregious overreach, as it has been known to do in the past—but Chutkan could decide at any point along the way to hold the GOP presidential candidate in contempt for violating a gag order if he dares to defend himself against the baseless claims that Smith insists on leaking to the media.
AN EQUAL AND OPPOSITE REACTION
To counter such a stacked deck, one can only fight the full force of government with the full force of government, and it is clear that Kevin McCarthy was not the man for the job.
To begin with, despite their best efforts to form an alliance, there was no real bond between the him and Trump
As Politico reported, McCarthy did not even bother to ask the man who once referred to him as “My Kevin” to step up to bat in his defense after Gaetz introduced the motion to vacate.
“McCarthy’s decision not to ask Trump for a hand was driven by the belief that he didn’t have the political capital to make the request,” the outlet wrote, citing Sam Geduldig, a top GOP lobbyist and close McCarthy ally, as its source.
“While Trump had demanded that Republicans shut down the government if they didn’t get major spending cuts, McCarthy had forged a deal only to fund the government at current spending levels for 45 days,” Politico continued. “And, more significantly, while Trump’s orbit had been expecting McCarthy to endorse him in the presidential primary, the speaker had so far kept his powder dry.”
But in all likelihood, Trump’s involvement behind the scenes in helping to usher out the McCarthy era was greater than it seemed.
Appropriately, one member of Congress had introduced a motion back in August to censure Chutkan. It was Matt Gaetz.
Meanwhile, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who had been so close to McCarthy that it was rumored the two had been physically intimate, was quick to move on and show where here true allegiances lay.
And Trump himself, while offering to serve as the short-term speaker, threw his clout behind Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, the House Judiciary chairman who had been the champion fighter of his own first impeachment trial.
Jordan had been duly loyal to McCarthy during the January standoff. However, that may have been a strategic move so as not to ruffle feathers within the GOP caucus, and it may now enable him to form a sort of consensus he could not otherwise have achieved among both the Freedom Caucus Trump loyalists and the rank-and-file McCarthy supporters.
In fact, Jordan has kept a remarkably low profile throughout the first nine months of the GOP majority, allowing Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., to take the lead on the impeachment inquiry into Biden. That could be a red flag that something is amiss or an indicator that Jordan has been waiting for his cue to step back into the limelight.
If Trump addresses the GOP caucus as he is expected to do next week, perhaps his true purpose is to lay out a broader game plan for achieving party unity and cohesion in order to effectively counter what may well be the last hope of having a country like the one those of us ages 3 and up were born into.
A POSITIVE ‘NANCY’?
Republicans must have someone leading the House who approaches it with the same ruthless spirit as did former Democrat leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
With little more than a razor-thin majority and an iron fist, she was able to fully weaponize her branch of government in 2019, even spinning a legitimate phone call about investigating a Biden family bribery scandal in Ukraine into a knock-down, drag-out effort to delegitimize Trump.
Two years later (after a bit of help from the pandemic and George Floyd), her party had full control of two branches and was on its way to drastically reshaping the country in its own image.
A recent tweet thread from pundit and former political candidate Robby Starbuck laid out just how well the Left has succeeded—as well as the serious work that must now be done.
“Republicans have one shot to get this right. … If you aren’t as ruthless as them, we will lose this country and if you bristle at the word ruthless—remember that there’s a difference between ruthlessness after you’re attacked and ruthlessly attacking,” Starbuck wrote.
“You’ve been attacked, your country has been attacked, your children have been attacked and your faith has been attacked,” he added. “Righteous ruthlessness to save the values and people you love IS the virtue and legacy you should be chasing.”
Up until now, Democrats—who cannot even keep their own members from pulling the fire alarm, much less hold them accountable for doing so—have been gleeful in declaring that the GOP is in a state of disarray after ousting McCarthy.
When asked why Democrats had refused to back McCarthy, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., offered a predictably smug and divisive reply, characteristic of the party line: “House Republicans have done nothing but feed Trump derangement and MAGA extremism three meals a day… [W]hy do we suddenly have to become their babysitter?]
Once again, though, they may soon have to live with the folly of yet another miscalculation. This time, though, instead of contributing to the further destruction of our nation, the end result will be a resurgent and more focused GOP, united in its effort to undo the damage that the Left has done and to make America great again.
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/realbensellers.
