Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) was elected House speaker after midnight Saturday on the 15th round of voting, marking the conclusion of an intense week of negotiations with Republican defectors and a dramatic Friday night packed with tension and a physical altercation.
McCarthy received 216 votes, House Democrat Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) received 212 votes, and six Republican members voted “present.”
No speaker race had lasted 15 rounds or more in 163 years, according to House records. The last race to take more than one ballot occurred in 1923, when reelecting then-Speaker Frederick Gillett took nine ballots. The roughly 20 members who had been voting against McCarthy throughout the week — many of whom are in the House Freedom Caucus — sought various structural changes to the House and other commitments from the leader, aiming to shift power away from leadership and to rank-and-file members and Freedom Caucus members specifically.
Their asks included, among many items, bringing the motion to vacate down to a one-member threshold and putting more members of the Freedom Caucus on the Rules Committee, as well as budgetary provisions and vows to bring votes on certain legislation to the floor. . . .
In a sign that members were nearing an agreement, more than half of the holdouts changed their vote to McCarthy Friday morning, leaving the pressure on six members who could derail McCarthy’s speakership should they continue to refuse to vote for him.
Those six members, Reps. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Lauren Boebert (R-CO), Bob Good (R-VA), and Matt Rosendale (R-MT), and Rep.-elect Eli Crane (R-AZ), voted “present” in the 15th round, meaning their vote would not count toward the final tally, effectively assuring McCarthy the gavel. . . .
In a stunning turn of events after Gaetz cast his vote, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL) appeared to yell at Gaetz and lunge toward him, and he was physically pulled back by another member before Rogers stormed out of the chamber.
Among the major factors in McCarthy losing more than a dozen speakership ballots, people familiar with the matter say, was the severity of Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz’s enmity toward the Republican leader. Gaetz’s intense and personal distaste for McCarthy has been an open secret in Washington political circles for years, so much so that Gaetz and McCarthy’s colleagues would argue it isn’t even a “secret” at all.
But Gaetz’s hatred curdled into something even more powerful after it was revealed in early 2021 that the MAGA congressman was the target of a federal investigation into the sex trafficking of a minor. (No charges were filed against Gaetz, but his “wingman” Joel Greenberg was sentenced to 11 years in prison.) McCarthy, in Gaetz’s opinion, failed to mount a forceful enough defense on his behalf. According to two sources familiar with the matter, Gaetz has been furious at McCarthy for the perceived lack of support ever since — despite the fact that McCarthy did not strip him of any committee assignments during the probe.
So says Rolling Stone, anyway, and while I’m skeptical that this left-wing publication has informed sources inside the GOP caucus, at the same time I don’t like Republican sex scandals. Republicans should be the party of boring middle-class married life. Let the Democrats have a monopoly on sex scandals. It’s an American tradition.
Last week, Tucker Carlson bid a mocking farewell to Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger who, like Liz Cheney and many others, wrecked his career by succumbing to Trump Derangement Syndrome. As much as I enjoyed Carlson’s mockery — and as much as Kinzinger deserved to be mocked as a “male menopause” sufferer — it does not fully explain what happened to Kinzinger, and mockery will not prevent others from emulating such errors in the future. A “teachable moment” was missed.
Begin with this: You and I are different from those who harbor political ambitions. For most of us, political parties are a matter of choosing between two different policy agendas; we may not like everything that our party does, but in general we think our party represents our interests and ideals better than the other party does. In point of fact, most conservatives are more or less permanently exasperated with Republican politicians, who seem like a gang of bumbling clowns, cowards and knaves. But then we look at the Democrats, who are even worse, and figure we’ve got no other choice. Republican voters are like fans of a lousy NFL franchise — the Cleveland Browns or Detroit Lions, for example — who suffer endless disappointment, but nevertheless continue showing up at the stadium and rooting for the home team.
Most of my readers have been voting Republican all your adult lives, and don’t ever expect to stop voting Republican, no matter how futile and frustrating your experience may be. You are a loyalist, and consider it a duty to vote for the GOP, and that’s why people like Adam Kinzinger piss you off so much. If you can be loyal to the team, despite so many years of disappointment and frustration, why can’t Republicans like Kinzinger reciprocate your loyalty? Why can’t they be “team players”?
Ah, but politicians are different from you and me. For them, a political party is a machine by which to advance their own ambitions. And while they speak with apparent sincerity of their “principles,” it should be observed that these are difficult to distinguish from their career interests. Once upon a time, in the earliest era of our Republic, political careers were not particularly lucrative, and our legislatures were not occupied by careerists without any other employment opportunities. Being a state legislator or even a congressman or U.S. Senator, was not a full-time job, and these seats tended to be filled by wealthy landowners or prosperous lawyers, for whom serving a few years as a legislator was a sort of social obligation, as leading citizens of their communities.
As politics has become a full-time career, however, the character of our legislative representatives has changed, and thus we have such personalities as Adam Kinzinger, a former wunderkind who first got elected to Congress during the Tea Party year of 2010 and thus instantly became part of the governing GOP majority in the House of Representatives, when he was still just 32 years old. Republicans won a landslide in 2010, gaining a net 63 seats for a 242-193 majority, with John Boehner replacing Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House. Kinzinger had first won office as a county commissioner while a 20-year-old college student and then amid the patriotic fervor of the “War on Terror” in 2003, joined the Air Force, becoming a pilot flying aerial refueling planes. Endorsed by Tea Party darling Sarah Palin, Kinzinger easily won the 2010 GOP primary in the 11th District of Illinois, then won the general election by a 15-point margin. He was a young superstar.
Alas, things immediately started going downhill for the GOP, as Mitt Romney won the 2012 Republican presidential nomination and thus helped reelect Barack Obama. Meanwhile, Kinzinger got redistricted. As recently as 1990, Illinois had 22 House seats, but they lost two seats after the 1990 Census, and have lost one seat in every subsequent census, so that when Congress convenes next January, Illinois will have only 17 representatives in the House. When Kinzinger was first elected in 2010, Illinois had 19 congressional districts, but in the next election, that number shrunk to 18 and, in the ensuing game of “musical chairs,” Kinzinger ran in the 16th District, defeating fellow Republican Rep. Don Mazullo in the 2012 primary, then cruising to a 62%-38% win in November. So far, so good for Kinzinger, but in the aftermath of Obama’s reelection, Boehner went sideways in budget negotiations with the White House, pissing off the fiscal conservative Club for Growth.
Kinzinger had supported Boehner’s deal with Obama and, subsequently was faced with a Club for Growth-backed challenger in the 2014 GOP primary. Kinzinger had no trouble fighting off that challenge and was reelected, but this seems to have been the pivotal episode that turned Kinzinger — originally elected amid a populist Tea Party surge — into an enemy of conservatives. After all, self-declared conservatives had tried to prevent his reelection and this threat to his personal ambition was intolerable to Kinzinger: How dare they oppose him?
Things then went bad to worse. As the Republican field began assembling for the 2016 presidential campaign, Adam Kinzinger endorsed . . .
Go ahead, take a wild guess.
Betcha can’t guess, but give it a try.
I’ll wait.
If you guessed Jeb Bush, you’re a winner!
Was there ever any campaign more obviously doomed from the outset than the 2016 Jeb Bush campaign? America had gotten thoroughly sick of Bushism, and Jeb’s performance in the GOP primary campaign was a sort of asterisk in the final result. Jeb got less than 3% of the vote in the Iowa caucuses, getting exactly one delegate of the 30 chosen. In New Hampshire, Jeb got a whopping 11% and three delegates out of 23. Then came South Carolina, a winner-take-all primary where Jeb got less than 8% of the vote and then quit the race, at which point Kinzinger jumped ship to endorse Marco Rubio, but it was already too late to stop the Trump juggernaut. With the benefit of hindsight, everyone has since realized what I foresaw from the beginning: There were too many candidates vying to be the anti-Trump in that crowded primary field. If you go back to the New Hampshire primary, you see that the combined votes of the three “moderates” — Jeb (11%), John Kasich (16%) and Chris Christie (7%) — were nearly equal to the 35% that Trump got in New Hampshire. If the RINO Caucus had been able to coalesce behind one candidate, they might have stopped Trump, but the selfish ambition of these three candidates prevented that from happening. Likewise with the two “Conservative But Not Trump” candidates, Rubio and Ted Cruz. If one or the other had been willing to drop out early, perhaps their combined support would have exceeded Trump’s, but individual ambition prevented that, too. And, in that crisis of the Republican Party, you see, Kinzinger was always endorsing the wrong candidates.
Me, I’m a team player.
From the moment Trump came down that escalator, I realized he was going to be hard to beat and, a few weeks later, I got a call from my buddy Pete the Tech Guy, who was covering Trump’s first big rally in New Hampshire: “Stacy, this Trump thing is for real.” It was a genuine grassroots phenomenon, and when National Review subsequently published its “Never Trump” issue, I became concerned about a potential nightmare scenario: If the GOP Establishment somehow contrived a way to prevent Trump from getting the nomination, Trump might go third-party, and thus ensure Hillary’s election. We were, in a way, caught between the Devil and the deep blue sea. Trump was able to energize a segment of the electorate that had long felt neglected, and with this energized grassroots base, he ultimately overcame every obstacle, including the opposition of GOP Establishment types like Kinzinger, and thus saved America from the worst of all evils, President Hillary Clinton.
Being a team player, it was easy to see it this way, and the problem for Kinzinger and so many others is that they let their own ambitions blind them to the reality of what this choice meant. Whatever you think of Trump, there could be nothing worse for America than putting Hillary Clinton in the White House. We just barely avoided that apocalyptic catastrophe and, as bad as the subsequent imposition of Joe Biden has been, I’m sure it would have been much worse if Hillary had won in 2016 — but Kinzinger doesn’t seem to grasp this.
Something else Kinzinger doesn’t get: Congressmen are supposed to represent their constituents. In 2016, Donald Trump won the 16th District of Illinois by 17 points, with 55% to Hillary Clinton’s 38%. In 2020, the voters of the 16th District chose Trump by a 16-point margin, 56% to Biden’s 40%. In other words, the district that sent Adam Kinzinger to Congress voted for Donald Trump twice, by overwhelming margins, and you might think this would oblige Kinzinger to defend the man his constituents embraced, rather than to constantly attack Trump.
Who is it, really, that is the threat to democracy?
Why do Republicans like Kinzinger hate their own constituents?
This is what’s really wrong with the Republican Party, that so many politicians elected by the party apparently don’t feel any obligation to reciprocate the loyalty of GOP voters. If you are elected as a Republican, you ought to be enough of a team player that you don’t do what Adam Kinzinger has done, directly insulting his own party’s voters.
Fortunately for Republicans — not just in Illinois, but everywhere — the Census took care of our Adam Kinzinger problem. After the 2020 Census, Illinois again lost another House seat, and after the subsequent redistricting, Kinzinger would have had to face off against another Republican, Rep. Darin LaHood, in a very conservative district. Kinzinger decided to retire instead, and nobody — absolutely nobody — in the Republican Party will miss that selfish bastard. Good riddance.
Let this be a warning to all Republican politicians. Never forget that you are a representative of the people who elected you. If you had not first won a Republican primary, you never would have been a candidate in the general election, so that party loyalty is a prerequisite to success in politics. While philosophers may speculate on the existence and nature of a generalized public interest in political affairs, no speculative theory is necessary to understand the symbiotic connection between a politician’s success and the strength of his party in the community that elects him. That is to say, while a congressman or senator indeed is elected to represent all his constituents, he must always keep in mind what his own party’s grassroots voters want, in terms of his policy agenda. You may be able to fool voters to some extent for a while, but in the long run, politicians who don’t understand the reciprocal nature of party loyalty are doomed to destruction. If you cannot in good conscience represent your own party’s grassroots voters, honor requires you either to quit your office or to switch parties. What Adam Kinzinger has done is dishonorable, and he can posture all he wants as a Courageous Man of Principle, but he’ll have to do so somewhere else besides Congress, because the voters of his district rightly hate him.
Kinzinger betrayed the people who elected him, and ought to be ashamed of himself, but if he had any capacity for shame, I guess he never would have endorsed that loser Jeb Bush, would he?
In an extraordinary intrusion on congressional oversight, the Justice Department used grand jury subpoenas to secretly obtain the personal email and phone data of at least two top House Intelligence Committee investigators back in November 2017 just as they and their boss, then-Chairman Devin Nunes, were assembling bombshell evidence of FBI abuses in the Russia collusion probe, Just the News has learned.
The subpoenas, obtained by Just the News, show the DOJ demanded that Google turn over personal email and phone data from the two senior staffers on Nov. 20, 2017 and that responsive materials were to be returned to DOJ by Dec. 5, 2017.
The subpoenas were delivered during a critical time frame in the committee’s effort to expose the Donald Trump-Russia collusion investigation as having been driven by an uncorroborated political opposition dossier funded by Hillary Clinton. Nunes’ committee was locked at the time in a bitter struggle to force the FBI and DOJ to turn over records to the committee.
The DOJ subpoenas came to light in the last few days when the former committee staffers were informed by Google that their records had been taken, consistent with the Big Tech company’s policy of alerting customers five years after law enforcement takes such actions.
One of the subpoenaed staffers, former Intelligence Committee senior counsel Kash Patel, told Just the News that the DOJ’s subpoenas were an extraordinary intrusion on congressional oversight and raised serious concerns about the separation of executive and legislative branch powers guaranteed in the Constitution. . . .
And they told me “The Deep State” was a myth . . .
Incoming House Speaker Kevin McCarthy repeatedly promised over the past couple of years that, when the GOP regains control of the House, he would remove Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) from their respective committees.
It looks like he intends to follow through on that promise.
On Saturday, McCarthy spoke at a Republican Jewish Coalition event in Las Vegas, during which he announced he would follow through on his promise to boot the notorious anti-Semite, Rep. Omar, off the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
“I’m keeping that promise,” he told them.
Sources close to McCarthy told The Washington Times that Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell can expect to be kicked off the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence as well. Schiff falsely claimed to have seen intelligence that Trump colluded with Russia, and he heavily promoted the debunked Steele Dossier. Swalwell’s relationship with a Chinese spy had many in the GOP calling for him to be removed, but the Democrat-led House refused.
Last year, House Democrats removed Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) from their committees. It was an unprecedented move, as the House majority had never before meddled with the minority party’s committee assignments.
For some reason — I don’t know, I barely pay attention to this kind of stuff — Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert is the one Republican that Democrats most hoped to beat this year. And . . . nope:
Democrat Adam Frisch announced Friday that he had called GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert and conceded the race for Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District.
Although there will be an automatic recount done by the Colorado secretary of state’s office, Frisch said in a live Facebook speech that he did not ask for a recount, does not expect the results to change and does not want there to be fundraising done for an essentially fruitless cause.
“The likelihood of this recount changing more than a handful of votes is very small. Very, very small. It’d be disingenuous and unethical for us or any other group to continue to raise false hope and encourage fundraising for a recount,” Frisch said. “Colorado elections are safe, accurate, and secure. Please save your money for your groceries, your rent, your children, and for other important causes and organizations. I just got off the phone with Rep. Boebert. I called her to formally concede this election.”
Boebert acknowledged Friday that she had received Frisch’s concession call, tweeting, “I look forward to getting past election season and focusing on conservative governance in the House majority. Time to get to work!”
As of Friday morning, with almost all the votes tallied, Boebert led Frisch by only 551 votes in what had been considered a safely Republican western Colorado district. In Colorado, any race decided by a margin that’s 0.5% or less of the votes earned by the top finisher is automatically recounted.
Frisch was in a hard place because one of the reasons Democrats hate Boebert is that she’s an “election denier,” which is what they call anyone who doubts that Democrats got an 81-million-vote landslide for a brain-addled septuagenarian who never left his basement during the 2020 presidential campaign. So it would have been difficult for Frisch to claim he’d been cheated in a fraudulent election — pot, meet kettle.
It was perhaps predictable, once it became clear that Republicans had won a majority in the House of Representatives, that Nancy Pelosi would resign from the Democratic leadership in the House. She’s 82 years old, after all, but if Democrats had managed to keep their majority, she probably wouldn’t have turned over the Speaker’s gavel. The difference between being Speaker and House Minority Leader is night and day. Unlike the Senate, where the filibuster grants a certain amount of power to the minority, the majority in the House calls all the shots, and the minority gets zero, zilch, nada. Pelosi has served two separate four-year terms as House Speaker, first after the 2006 midterms, before losing the majority in the 2010 midterms. Republicans then held the House majority for eight years before Democrats recaptured the Speaker’s gavel for Pelosi in the 2018 midterms, only to have it slip from their grasp again this year. Democrats would have been smart to dump Pelosi after 2010, when she was already a septuagenarian, but despite her general ineptitude, she’s good at one thing, i.e., bossing around her fellow Democrats, and that was enough to keep her in power another 12 years.
How did she get there? How did this woman, the daughter of a Baltimore party boss, who became the epitome of a “San Francisco liberal,” end up with so much power? Well, does the name David Bonior ring a bell? How about Dick Gephardt? And does anyone still remember Tom Foley?
Tom Foley, a Democrat from Washington State, became Speaker of the House in 1989 because his predecessor, Jim Wright of Texas, had resigned amid an ethics scandal. At the time, Foley had already been in Congress more than 20 years, during which time Democrats had always been in the majority. In fact, a Republican hadn’t been Speaker of the House since Joseph Martin turned the gavel over to Sam Rayburn after the 1954 midterms. Democrats losing their majority was simply unthinkable, and hubris certainly played a role in the Democrats’ 1994 midterm wipeout that not only saw Newt Gingrich lead the GOP to a historic victory, but also saw Foley defeated in his own reelection bid, as he lost to Republican challenger George Nethercutt by a 4,000-vote margin. Before the 1994 midterms, Washington State’s House delegation was eight Democrats and one Republican; after 1994, it was seven Republicans and two Democrats. Heckuva job, Tom!
Taking over as leader of congressional Democrats was Dick Gephardt of Missouri, who had much higher ambitions. First elected to Congress in 1976, he sought the 1988 presidential nomination, but ultimately lost to Mike Dukakis. However, the campaign raised Gephardt’s national profile and helped him become the No. 2 man in the House Democratic leadership under Foley. When Foley got beat, Gephardt became the minority leader, a position he held for the next nine years, as Republicans maintained their majority control. After 2002, however, Gephardt decided to try another run for the White House, ultimately losing to John Kerry. (It says a lot about Gephardt that he lost to a couple of losers like Dukakis and Kerry.) Gephardt didn’t seek reelection to Congress in 2004. When he was first elected in 1976, Missouri’s congressional delegation was eight Democrats and two Republicans. When Gephart left office, Missouri’s congressional delegation was five Republicans and four Democrats. Are you noticing a trend here?
Say hello to David Bonior, a Michigan Democrat who was first elected to Congress in 1976, the same year Gephardt was elected. In 1987, Bonior became deputy whip of the Democratic caucus, and became whip in 1990. When Republicans won the majority in 1994, Bonior decided to make himself a full-time nuisance, filing 75 ethics charges against Speaker Newt Gingrich. This did nothing to help Democrats win back the House, however, and after the 2000 census, redistricting put Bonior into a new district where his reelection was uncertain. Bonior decided to throw his hat in the ring as a candidate for governor of Michigan, but lost the Democratic primary to Jennifer Granholm by a 20-point margin. When Bonior was first elected to Congress in 1976, Michigan had 19 House seats, 11 Democrats and eight Republicans. When Bonior left office, Michigan had 15 House seats, nine Republicans and six Democrats.
Could the trend be any clearer? All of these Democratic leaders saw their party’s fortunes decline during their tenure in Congress, and it was this general trend of decline that led to Nancy Pelosi becoming speaker. She was first elected to Congress in 1986 — way back when Tip O’Neill was still Speaker of the House — and in 2002, when Bonior resigned the post of Democratic whip, Pelosi got that job. Pelosi was catapulted to minority leader a year later, when Gephardt, contemplating his 2004 presidential bid, stepped aside. For nearly 20 years, then, Pelosi has been the top Democrat in the House, and with what result?
When she was first elected in 1986, there were 258 Democrats and 177 Republicans in the House. The results of this month’s midterms are still not final, but when Congress convenes again in January, it appears there will be 221 Republicans and 214 Democrats in the House. Democrats will be right back to the minority status they were in when Gephardt resigned as leader in 2003 and Pelosi took over. Heckuva job, Nancy!
California Rep. Katie Porter and her mentor, Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Apologies for the lack of blogging Thursday, but because today is Veterans Day, my day job required me to do two days of work in advance, blah blah blah. Anyway, I happened to click on a Hot Air item by John Sexton, toward the end of which, this part caught my attention:
Finally, another race I’ve been watching is the one to decide who will be my representative in California’s 47th district. At the moment, progressive rock star Katie Porter leads GOP challenger Scott Baugh by a slim margin of 1,552 votes with 58% of the total vote counted. That’s a pretty impressive showing for Baugh so far who was massively outspent in this race. Porter ran ads nonstop for weeks spending over $21 million dollars to save herself.
For a “rock star,” she’s kinda fat, isn’t she?
Southern California used to be all about “the beautiful people,” and I can’t help but think that the election of this pudgy dumpling to Congress was somehow symbolic of how the Golden State has fallen into ruins in the 21st century. Porter’s district includes some of the most beautiful (and expensive) beach towns in Orange County, and it was once a Republican stronghold. The congressional districts have been redrawn three times since GOP Rep. Christopher Cox represented the 47th in 1990s. Katie Porter was first elected in 2018 to represent the 45th District, another former Republican stronghold that once sent the likes of Duncan Hunter and Dana Rohrabacher to Congress. After the most recent redistricting, Porter sought reelection in the 47th District.
Although I was vaguely familiar with Porter — I recognized her name — I didn’t know much about her, so I clicked onto her Wikipedia page:
Porter . . . grew up in the small farming community of Fort Dodge, Iowa. . . .
After graduating from Phillips Academy . . .
(Whoa! Stop right there! Phillips Andover is one of the most elite private schools in America, where the cost of attendance is currently $61,950 a year. How does a kid from small-town Iowa end up in this posh East Coast boarding school? But never mind . . .)
Porter attended Yale University, where she majored in American studies, graduating in 1996. . . . Porter also interned for Chuck Grassley during this time.
Porter later attended Harvard Law School . . . She studied under bankruptcy law professor and future U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, and graduated magna cum laude with her Juris Doctor in 2001. . . .
(Again with the expensive elite East Coast schools, you see.)
Porter was a law clerk for Judge Richard S. Arnold of the United States Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit in Little Rock, Arkansas. She practiced with the law firm of Stoel Rives LLP in Portland, Oregon . . .
Porter was Associate Professor of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas School of Law. In 2005, she joined the faculty of the University of Iowa College of Law as an associate professor, becoming a full professor there in 2011. Also in 2011, she became a tenured professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. . . .
In March 2012, California Attorney General Kamala Harris appointed Porter to be the state’s independent monitor of banks in a nationwide $25 billion mortgage settlement.
This is why people spend big money to send their kids to elite schools, to put them on the fast track to wealth and power. I don’t know if you kept track there, but Porter was already a law professor at UNLV prior to joining the faculty at Iowa at age 31, and six years later she got tenure at UC-Irvine. Become a tenured law professor before age 40? Man, you got it made in the shade. Porter is fiendishly clever. According to this article, she went to Phillips Andover as some sort of psychology research project about gifted kids after she got a perfect score on the SAT in seventh grade, but I don’t know if that’s actually true, because Porter is so fiendishly clever that I suspect some of her life story has been embellished, or at least dramatized, for the sake of presenting a useful narrative. For example, this article says, “The daughter of an Iowa farmer-turned-banker, Porter grew up during the farm crisis, watching ‘the entire economy around me go to hell.’” Wait a minute here — “farmer-turned-banker”? How common is that career track?
Then I check that against the other story, which says that, in attending Yale, “Porter broke away from a family tradition of going to Iowa State University.” Oh, so there was a “family tradition” of university education? How many generations of college-educated Porters were there before Katie broke the “family tradition” by choosing Yale over Iowa State? Because I’m guessing that her “farmer-turned-banker” father wasn’t just some random rural clodhopper, y’know? Anyway . . .
The battle for Congress could be decided in Southern California as Rep. Katie Porter is locked in an unexpectedly tight race. https://t.co/GZlhdYfvpN
As an expert in bankruptcy law and a “consumer advocate,” Porter made a point of not accepting PAC money in her 2018 campaign, but I’m looking at her reelection campaign and she’s spent $24 million.
Man, I remember when even $1 million was considered a lot of money for a congressional campaign, but now Democrats — you know, The Party of the Working Man™ — are rolling in so much big money that Porter’s Republican opponent raised $2.7 million and was outspent 9-to-1 by the incumbent Democrat. That’s not counting whatever “dark money” outside groups may have spent to defend Porter’s California seat. And this pattern of Democrats vastly outspending their GOP opponents has been repeated in many races across the country. It has been said, for example, that the race in Michigan’s 7th District is the most expensive congressional campaign in American history. The Democratic incumbent, Elissa Slotkin, raised more than $9 million while her Republican challenger raised about $2.5 million, but that’s just a fraction of the total spending in MI-7. In the second week of October, more than $27 million had been spent on the race, more than half of which was from outside groups. The most recent count shows outside groups spent about $12 million on each side in MI-7, including spending by the party national campaign committees, so that the final tally is going to be more than $35 million for this one House seat. Meanwhile, in the eight most competitive Senate races (Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio and New Hampshire), a combined total of $858 million was spent by outside groups, and in none of those states did the Democrats get outspent by the Republicans.
Every conservative blogger and pundit is pointing fingers of blame for the failure of the GOP to produce a “Red Wave” this year. Some are blaming Trump and others are blaming the Republican establishment, but the reality is that the “Red Wave” was stopped by a Democratic “Green Wave” of campaign cash. And, by the way, I noticed something almost immediately after Joe Biden was “elected” (nudge, nudge), namely that the liberal media started talking about the 2022 midterm before Biden was even inaugurated. That is to say, having seen big losses in the 1994 and 2010 midterms, Democrats and their media friends knew very well what they’d be facing this year, and one of the things they did — it is now obvious in hindsight — was get an early start feverishly raising money for this year’s midterms, and organizing “dark money” operations to help support their effort to stem the anticipated midterm backlash.
It now appears that the progressive pudgeball’s $24 million has bought her another term in Congress, and while the Super Genius™ Pundits are busy with all their big-brain “What Does It Mean” post mortem analyses of the midterms, I didn’t ace the SATs in seventh grade, so my dumbass guess is that maybe we should start trying to figure where Democrats are getting all this money? Because it seems strange to me that a political party grimly determined to strangle capitalism and install a Weimar America regime would be so popular with big-money fat cats.
Is this some kind of kinky BDSM thing? Corporate CEOs kneeling before leather-clad Mistress Katie, begging her, “Demonize me in your rhetoric! Destroy my business with regulations! Tax me more, please!”
Meanwhile, please explain to me how somebody in Iowa with a “family tradition” of university education becomes a “farmer-turned-banker,” because that story seems too weird to be true . . .
PELOSI: First of all, let me say that I think much of what you have said I don’t agree with. That is to say, the New York Times poll, I think, is an outlier poll. You cited one poll.
ANDREA MITCHELL: It’s the RealClearPolitics average showing similar issues.
NANCY PELOSI: But that was one that brought down the average — it was an outlier. It wasn’t that big a sample. So I dismiss that.
I have been — since Congress adjourned, I have been in an average of five states a week. And I can tell you that women’s concerns about their freedom are very, very much still very significant in terms of how they will vote.
In fact, 80% of people who care about a woman’s right to choose say they will vote — it will determine who they vote for. . . .
I track these campaigns very carefully. I believe that we will have the mobilization on the ground to turn out the vote, the clear message we want to give women freedom of choice. [Republicans] want to have a ban on abortion.
We want to support and strengthen Medicare and Social Security, etc. They want to use a debt ceiling to cut that.
We want to — we have lowered the cost of prescription drugs for seniors. They want to reverse that. We want to save the planet for our children and the future. [Republicans] say that [climate change] is a hoax and that’s the argument they used on the floor to oppose the Inflation Reduction Act, which made historic gains for fighting the climate.
Nancy Pelosi: "The NYT poll is an outlier poll, you just cite one poll, all the other polls have a different."
Andrea: "It’s also the Real Clear Politics average."
Nancy Pelosi: "It was an outlier. It wasn’t that big a sample. So I dismiss that." pic.twitter.com/JZoLr3C1jF
She’s attacking the validity of a New York Times poll, arguing about sample size, and pretending that her anecdotal information — women who turn out at the Democratic campaign events she’s attended — is more useful in predicting what issues will motivate swing voters in the midterms. By the way, does anyone else remember that Pelosi’s last tenure as Speaker of the House only lasted four years, until the next midterm election in 2010, which produced a Republican landslide? There followed another eight years of Republican control, until 2018, but now, four years later . . . Well, good-bye, Nancy. Enjoy retirement with your “clear message” and “historic gains for fighting the climate.”
