(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) If not for former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s dislike of satirical Japanese animation, Wednesday’s lead New York Times story might never have been about an against-all-odds underseas rescue mission.
Instead the Grey Lady would have blared headlines about how former special counsel John Durham privately confirmed the presence of a pee tape involving former President Donald Trump leading a throuple’s tryst with Stormy Daniels and E. Jean Carroll in the hidden sex-chamber at Mar-a-Lago, as Gen. Mark Milley’s handwritten plans to invade Canada unceremoniously propped up the wobbly leg of a solid-gold four-poster with mattress made from baby bald-eagle down.
“A source who spoke on deep background with no authorization to discuss the proceedings said that during the closed-door meeting with the House Intelligence Committee Tuesday, ostensibly to address reforming the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Durham let slip that Russian President Vladimir Putin was using the immense box-office returns from cinematic screenings of the newly disclosed pee tape to fund his ongoing assault on Ukraine,” the Times’s Maggie Haberman might have written.
But alas, it was not so, for the crucial informant—the liaison needed to transmit such privileged details to the newspaper—was nowhere to be seen.
Elsewhere, disgraced Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., found himself trying to fend off the imminent possibility of a censure on the very same House floor where he once held court so efficaciously—and affectatiously.
Rep. Luna just introduced a new censure resolution against me.
And Rep. Gaetz introduced one against Bennie Thompson.
Now Rep. Boebert has introduced articles of impeachment against President Biden.
MAGA Republicans will do anything to distract from Trump’s indictment.
— Adam Schiff (@AdamSchiff) June 21, 2023
Schiff—who reached the peak of his powers during the Trump impeachment hearings by hijacking the lead committee role that normally would have gone to dim-witted, beta-male Judiciary Chair Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y.—set himself up for a mighty fall after the GOP’s majority takeover this year.
But the moment of reckoning he now faces, due to his constant lying and leaking to the press, was facilitated by none other than his longtime mentor, Pelosi, after she controversially stripped two conservative House Republicans from their committees in a series of norm-violating acts that flouted conventional House rules and protocols.
Both Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., lost their committees not because they, like Schiff, had misrepresented the substance of classified hearings to paint a deceptive media narrative that benefited their political agenda. Rather, they engaged with Twitter users, posting content that was admittedly over the top but still protected under the umbrella of free speech.
In Gosar’s case, the offending tweet was a 90-second clip of Japanese anime that had the face of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez, D-N.Y., superimposed on a cartoon villain who was then decapitated by the heroes, representing Gosar and other conservative lawmakers.
Democrats moved with deliberate speed to ensure such provocation did not go unanswered.
“This is a dark and dangerous road the majority is going down,” said Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, the ranking Republican on the House Rules Committee at the time. “I urge you for the future of the chamber to rethink this course.”
ROE VERSUS REID
If it were not for former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, there might have been no Roe v. Wade overturn last year.
While the Dobbs decision was a 6–3 ruling, one has to wonder if frequently feckless Chief Justice John Roberts would have been comfortable upending the 50-year-old precedent knowing that he was the deciding vote in a 5–4 majority.
Such might have been the case but for Reid’s decision to go “nuclear,” ending the filibuster on federal judge appointments halfway through the 113th Congress, when then-President Barack Obama’s radical choices were being forestalled by the Republican minority under Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
Once it came McConnell’s time to wield the gavel a few years later, he recalled Reid’s partisan double-dealing as justification not to consider Obama’s nomination—none other than then-D.C. Circuit Judge Merrick Garland—to replace the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court.
Instead, McConnell waited until after the 2016 election and allowed the winner—Republican Donald Trump—to name the new justice, while also extending Reid’s “nuclear option” to lower the Supreme Court’s confirmation threshold from 60 votes to a simple majority.
Without Reid, Garland’s confirmation might have come before the Senate, and he would have proven to be as unabashedly partisan on the high court as he has been in the Justice Department, where he presently serves as the Biden administration’s attorney general.
Trump’s presidency (assuming that a left-skewed Supreme Court had not found a way to overturn it) would thus have netted only two conservative justices at best. However, it is unlikely that any of the three justices he appointed could have survived the Senate confirmation hearings—where abortion would have been a major point of discussion—enough to clear the 60-vote bar without the Harry Reid nuclear option in place.
AN INDELIBLE STAIN
Of course, there is one reason and one reason alone that can truly be credited with securing Trump’s 2016 presidential victory over Hillary Clinton, and that is Bill Clinton.
When the leaked 2005 audio emerged that found Trump boasting to Access Hollywood host Billy Bush about performing lewd sexual acts with available young women, sometimes without any implied consent, it would almost certainly have been a campaign-ender for any other candidate in any prior year.
But it just so happened that Donald Trump’s candidacy was, in many ways, a direct response to the immorality and impunity that Democrats—and the Clinton family in particular—had been able to exploit so brazenly in the years leading up to the election.
If Democrats were willing to turn a blind eye to the sex acts and dishonor that Bill Clinton had brought to the Oval Office, then the fed-up GOP’s answer was to respond in kind with a man who was the very antithesis of losing candidates like Bob Dole, Mitt Romney and John McCain—a man who would not let contrived and duplicitous left-wing shame attacks knock him down because he had no shame.
Conservative voters, including many women, felt confident standing behind Trump for his policies, despite his well-known moral shortcomings, because they had little doubt that Bill Clinton had carried on equally foul conversations in his private life and that Hillary and her media cohorts had not deemed those to be politically prohibitive.
Indeed, the righteous indignation coming from the newly pious Left over such a sex scandal only helped to fuel Trump’s momentum by reminding everyone of how dishonest and disingenuous the alternative was.
Once again, Democrats tried to change the rules mid-game but wound up hoisted with their own petard.
THE TIPPING POINT
These are lessons worth remembering as Democrats flagrantly abuse the justice system for their own benefit ahead of the 2024 election.
The Biden family has crafted a tangled web of lies, oftentimes with reckless disregard for the longterm implications and a cocksure certainty that it can escape any real damage.
When it comes to dealing with the systemically corrupt institutions meant to hold the political class accountable—the media, the legal system, academia, dark-money oligarchs and corporate special interests—too many have rallied around them as a form of mutually assured self-preservation and symbiosis.
But once a critical mass of outraged constituents aligns, the tables have a way of turning, the trade winds shifting, and the pendulum reversing.
At the risk of repeating another 2022 red-wave jinx, the feeling is more palpable than ever that a major shift is underway—and as usual, it has everything to do with Democrats’ failure to consider the unintended consequences of their callous actions.
As their party becomes more radicalized, and more obnoxiously demanding, a growing number of people seem to be moving in the other direction, defining themselves as social conservatives in contrast to the unpalatable option they see presented as liberalism’s “new normal.”
Divisive cultural issues championed on the Left, such as LGBT activism—once viewed as being nobly akin to the ’60s-era civil-rights movement—have insinuated themselves too far into the lives of everyday citizens and have become unwelcome houseguests.
Likewise, the Marxism-rooted “black liberation” agenda of groups like “Black Lives Matter” has lost its luster in the aftermath of the 2020 race riots, which did little to improve racial progress but did help to drive up violent crime in many urban areas. The preposterous reparations demands coming from California tell us exactly how serious we should take such debate.
At every turn, rational people are finding their most basic moral values assailed and their intelligence insulted.
PAYING THEIR DUES
Soon, it will be Republicans’ turn to hold these leftists accountable according to the new rules that they, themselves, have crafted during the Biden administration.
With the politicized attacks on Trump, the double-standard is obvious, yet again using the Clintons as the main precedent. Bill Clinton’s sock-drawer recordings and Hillary Clinton’s private bathroom server are both serious challenges that federal prosecutors will find themselves needing to explain.
Moreover, it is clear that the National Archives’s unprecedented step in drawing the Justice Department into an issue concerning the Presidential Records Act will not bode well for future ex-presidents, particularly Joe Biden, who already has demonstrated a track record of carelessly mishandling classified material.
Should the tables be turned, the rules that the Biden administration is now establishing for its own benefit can and will be used against them.
While the “Big Guy” may have spent years waiting for his retirement nest egg to finally mature in a Cayman Islands escrow account, he may find his final years spent instead wallowing in the D.C. gulag where his own gestapo has detained many Jan. 6 political dissidents.
As for Hunter Biden, who recently benefited from a sweetheart plea deal after seeing the five-year investigation into his damning criminal history get slow-walked by the FBI, he may find himself lucky enough to flee to one of the many countries where he has cultivated foreign business ties, but his status as a political-asylum claimant in China or Ukraine is likely to be far less comfortable than his lavish lifestyle as an influence-peddler.
And for Democrats everywhere who have found it convenient to simply not enforce the rule of law when it does not apply to their direct interests—be that keeping crime off the streets, protecting the innocence of children in schools, ensuring the sovereignty of our national borders or respecting the constraints on federal authority prescribed by the U.S. Constitution—if you do not stand up for equal protection under the law when the chips are with you, then be prepared for the unintended consequences that you are now setting in motion.
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/realbensellers.
