Category: Congress

Democrat Aide Arrested for Doxxing GOP Senators During Kavanaugh Hearings

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Breaking news:

A Democratic congressional intern was arrested Wednesday and accused of posting the personal information of at least one Republican senator during last week’s hearing about sexual assault claims against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, authorities said.
U.S. Capitol Police said 27-year-old Jackson Cosko was charged with making public restricted personal information, witness tampering, threats in interstate communication, unauthorized access of a government computer, identity theft, second-degree burglary and unlawful entry. Police added that the investigation was continuing and more charges could be filed.
Senior congressional sources tell Fox News that Cosko most recently worked as an unpaid intern for Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas. He previously worked with Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., and former Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer of California. A LinkedIn page with Cosko’s name on it describes him as a “Democratic Political Professional & Cybersecurity Graduate Student.”
Jackson Lee’s office told Fox News that Cosko had only worked there for a couple of months, but has now been terminated.

Cosko is apparently from California.

 

Good-Bye, ‘Blue Wave’? Clintonista May Lose Key House Race in Florida

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Of all the many fossil remnants of the Clintonian epoch, few deserve more contempt than Donna Shalala. During her tenure as Secretary of Health and Human Services, she turned the department into a federal advocacy program for the 1960s “Sexual Revolution” ethos. Promiscuity, abortion and homosexuality were actively promoted by HHS during Shalala’s tenure. After she left office, she spent the next 14 years as president of the University of Miami, and ruined it. In the 20 years prior to Shalala taking over at Miami, the Hurricanes had won five national football championships (1983, 1987, 1989, 1991, and 2001). After Shalala took over? Zip, zero, nada. How bad was it? From 2010-2016, Miami lost to archrival FSU seven consecutive times. Hurricanes fans have no reason to love Shalala, and it seems that local voters also have their doubts:

The congressional seat was supposed to be the easiest of Democratic pickups. Hillary Clinton carried the Miami-based 27th District by nearly 20 percentage points just two years ago. Donna Shalala, the Democratic nominee, was a well-known, former Cabinet secretary with a talent for raising money.
But now local Democrats are dismayed as Shalala is struggling to put away her Republican rival, a popular former Spanish-language television newswoman named Maria Elvira Salazar.
According to internal polls from both campaigns obtained by POLITICO, Salazar is either ahead — or just narrowly trailing — Shalala.
Salazar leads the former Clinton Foundation head by 7 percentage points in a poll conducted for the Republican’s campaign that was completed Thursday. In a poll from Shalala’s campaign, completed Sept. 1, the Democrat leads Salazar by 4 percentage points.

(Hat-tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) Guess what? Maria Elvira Salazar is a University of Miami alumna and my Spanish is a little rusty, but I believe muy caliente is appropriate the phrase.

MARIA ELVIRA SALAZAR for CONGRESS

 

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Democrats Use Kavanaugh Nomination in Congressional Fundraising Efforts

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Many years ago, I checked a box on a website to get email updates from the Democrats and, of course, they sell their email lists, which means that my email inbox is filled up with liberal fundraising appeals, like this one from North Carolina congressional candidate David Brown:

Hi Robert,
Donald Trump just announced that he will nominate Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. This nomination is a calculated political decision which will have a deeply negative effect on the lives of working people for decades to come if Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed.
Brett Kavanaugh’s record has made it clear he will use his position on the court to protect corporations at the expense of workers, to allow wealthy donors to buy elections and to further dismantle voting rights. The fact that Donald Trump stated repeatedly during the campaign that any nominee of his would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, I have no doubt that is exactly what Brett Kavanaugh will do.
Simply put, nothing is more important now than doing everything in our power to elect me as your Congressman to put laws into place to protect the most vulnerable before Kavanaugh and the other conservative justices strip all the protections and rights away from us while standing on the Constitution.
Donate $5, $10 or more to help elect a community-centered leader to Congress.
Together we must do everything we can to win back the House, the Senate and the presidency to stop further disastrous nominees. But right now, we work to elect true representatives of the 10th district who will work every day to build our communities up and protect the people who live in them.
Join me on a better road forward.
–David

Brown is running against GOP Rep. Patrick McHenry in North Carolina’s 10th District, in the Appalachian hills west of Charlotte. In 2016, McHenry easily won re-election with 63% of the vote, and Trump carried some counties in that district with more than 70% of the vote. It isn’t likely Brown can actually win NC-10, but you could kick a few bucks toward McHenry’s re-election campaign by clicking here.

Maybe you should also give a contribution to the National Republican Congressional Committee, which is fighting in districts all across the country to stop Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in November. During the Tea Party years of 2009-2010, this blog helped raise lots of money for conservative candidates, and with Pelosi now desperate to take back the speaker’s gavel, I guess it’s time to we went back to campaign mode.

 

Politics 101: Can Democrats Win?

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During CPAC last weekend, several people asked my opinion of the chances of Democrats capturing a congressional majority in the fall. Obviously, I don’t have any clairvoyant powers. In October 2016, I was convinced that Donald Trump couldn’t possibly be elected. A month later, he proved me wrong. So I claim no special insight into future political events, mainly because I don’t know what’s going to happen between now and November. There might be a major terrorist attack or some other unpredictable event that could shift things one way or the other. Everybody says that the electoral map favors Republicans to maintain (and probably expand) their majority in the Senate, although it’s possible Mitch McConnell’s clown show could bungle away even a sure thing.

Never underestimate the power of Republican senators to screw things up, but still, given how many seats the Democrats are defending in November, not even Mitch is likely to blow this one. So let’s just count on the Senate to remain in GOP control. What about the House?

Historically, the party that holds the White House loses significantly in the first midterm election after the President’s election:

In the first midterm election for all but two presidents going back to 1946, the president’s party has lost U.S. House seats. Up until President Barack Obama, presidents with an approval rating above 50% at the time of the election lost an average of 14 House seats. Presidents with an approval rating below 50% lost an average of 36 House seats.

President Trump’s job approval is now 41.2% in the Real Clear Politics (RCP) average, but that’s not the only poll number that matters.

Consider the “right-track”/“wrong direction” question. As of today, the RCP average is 56.0% “Wrong Track,” 36.9% “Right Direction,” a 19.1% differential — a major improvement from the eve of the election in November 2016, when the number was 62.2% “Wrong Track,” 31.0% “Right Direction,” a 31.2% differential. Americans now feel much better about how the country is doing than they did before the election, and why shouldn’t they? The stock market is booming — pumping up everybody’s 401(k) value — the GOP pushed through tax cuts that are turbo-charging the economy, and the employment numbers are so good that some economists are beginning to worry about inflation.

Compare this situation to eight years ago. The economy sucked. Democrats led by Nancy Pelosi were promoting “Cash for Clunkers” and “green jobs” and ramming ObamaCare through Congress without a single Republican vote. The RCP “right-track”/“wrong direction” numbers on Feb. 26, 2010, were 34.8%/59.2% — a 24.4-point differential. Whatever people’s personal feelings about President Obama may have been, America objectively was in bad shape in 2010. Trump has never been as popular as Obama, but the country is doing much better, and this objective reality — making America great again, so to speak — is the best reason to suspect that Democrats may be disappointed in November.

Beyond this basic reality, there is also the fact that Democrat voters tend to be isolated in a few major urban areas and their leaders — well, they aren’t exactly mainstream heartland types:

California’s Democrats had their annual convention this week, working to figure out precisely what their agenda will be going forward. There are currently some serious schisms between the hard left and the more traditional elements of the party so they clearly have a lot of work to do. But all the policy talk went out the window when their featured speaker, Congresswoman Maxine Waters took that stage. The event quickly turned into an anti-Trump rally complete with chants and calls to figuratively drag President Trump out of the White House by force. . . .
Waters went on and on about Donald Trump for almost twenty minutes. Her theme was clear… everyone get ready for impeachment hearings. When it finished she was treated to several standing ovations and a chant of “Impeach 45” filling the entire hall.

If America elects a Democrat congressional majority in November, they’ll impeach the President, raise your taxes and confiscate your guns.

Is that what the American people want? Do they really want to put Maxine Waters and her Democrat friends in charge of Congress? My hunch is that selling this Kool-Aid in November won’t be easy. And have I mentioned that the Democrat Party is practically broke?

The Republican National Committee announced . . . it raised $12.4 million in January and has a total of $40.7 million cash on hand. . . .
The RNC also announced it had zero debt and said the total amount it had raised in the 2018 cycle was $144.9 million. . . .
The DNC . . . ended 2017 with $6.5 million in the bank and $6.1 million in debt.

Look, I’m not guaranteeing anything in November, but you can’t beat something with nothing. However unpopular Trump and the Republicans might be, they’re far more popular than Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters and the other kooks currently running the Democrat Party.



 

Democrats in Disarray and Denial as Schumer Shutdown Exposes Weakness

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Rich Lowry analyzes Sen. Schumer’s miscalculations:

The press wasn’t hostile to the Democrats over the shutdown, but it wasn’t uniformly compliant, either. The Left objected to a headline on a New York Times news alert right after the shutdown vote on Friday night: “Senate Democrats blocked passage of a stopgap spending bill to keep the government open.” It’s not clear how a remotely honest news writer could have described it any other way.
If the media couldn’t be counted on to be on board, neither could everyone in the party. In what is a persistent temptation for Democrats, Schumer forgot that the rest of the country doesn’t regard Trump with the deep disdain and abiding alarm of the coasts and the major metropolitan areas. The party still has senators in red states that the president won handily who can’t afford to indulge in anti-Trump flights of fancy. Five of them defected on the initial shutdown vote and more would have broken with Schumer if the shutdown had endured.

(Via Hot Air; hat-tip: Instapundit.)

Democrats are so accustomed to “uniformly compliant” media coverage that they don’t realize how little support they have outside the deep-blue zones of “deep disdain” for President Trump. As a result of Schumer’s disastrous miscalculation, conservatives now have “momentum” on immigration, and the Democrats’ failed shutdown strategy may have paved the way for the enactment of Trump’s “get-tough” border agenda.

Remember just a couple of weeks ago, a Yale University “expert” was claiming Trump was suffering from dementia, but who is really demented, Trump or the left-wing kooks who obsessively hate him? Trump has repeatedly outwitted his Democrat opponents, defeating Hillary despite all the “experts” who said he couldn’t win, producing an enormous surge in the economy (the exact opposite of what Paul Krugman predicted), pushing through tax cuts (from which more than 70% of Americans will see lower federal taxes) and now humiliating Senate Democrats over the DACA shutdown. Predictably, the losers are playing the blame game, further proving how out of touch they are:

The shutdown is over, and the consensus is emerging. The Democrats lost. They capitulated after getting little more than carefully worded promises from Mitch McConnell. The progressive blame game is under way, complete with accusations of cowardice that read very much like the recriminations following the GOP’s last shutdown in 2013. But there’s one explanation I’d like to discuss — not because it’s necessarily the consensus view but because it echoes sentiments I hear all the time. Believe it or not, there are those on the left who tell themselves that they lose because they’re just too darn nice. . . .
Progressives see themselves as tolerant, open-minded, and eager to engage with critics. . . .
Yet this is precisely the opposite of the way conservatives experience and perceive progressive culture. Yes, of course there are progressives who “yearn for inclusion, civility, and dialogue,” but there are also progressives who despise conservatives, attempt to silence conservative voices, and systematically exclude conservatives from the “dialogue” they allegedly crave. . . .
No, Democrats aren’t losing because they’re “too nice” or because they yearn for dialogue. The better explanation is that they’re losing in part because their own incivility and rage drive millions of Americans to the polls to vote in perceived self-defense. Their own incivility and rage falsely escalate too many political disputes to matters of life and death. What’s the argument after claiming that Republicans are intentionally killing people? Is there a rhetorical step beyond that?

Democrats don’t want “dialogue.” Democrats want power. They will tell any lie necessary to obtain that power, and their constant demonization of their scapegoated enemies — “sexist! racist! homophobe!” — is just partisan propaganda. The Democrat Party’s rhetoric of deranged hatred deceives their ignorant followers, but they eventually alienate everyone honest enough to look at the actual facts, and intelligent enough to perceive the likely result of Democrat policies. Americans do not want their country to become an impoverished socialist nightmare like Venezuela. Americans can see how the Democrats have wrecked California by providing sanctuary to millions of illegal aliens. Everyone can see what Democrats want to do to the rest of America, which is why Donald Trump won by standing up to tell the Democrats, “No.”

 

 

This is what the Left cannot bring itself to admit, that they have been weighed in the balance and found wanting. Their friends in the media are trying desperately to conceal this failure, to distract Americans from the reality of (and reasons for) the Democrats’ shutdown debacle. But dishonesty is not good policy, and denial is not wise strategy.



 

Renee Ellmers’ Incoherent Logic

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Do we want rapists to be prosecuted for their crimes? Yes. How can rapists be prosecuted, if their victims don’t report the crime? They can’t. It would seem logical, therefore, that anyone who wants to prevent rape would be in favor of incentives that encourage victims to report these crimes to police. But good luck explaining that to Renee Ellmers:

The debacle over an abortion bill quickly pulled from the House floor Wednesday didn’t have to happen that way, says Rep. Renee Ellmers, who started the rebellion against the measure to begin with. . . .
Ellmers supports banning abortion past the midway point of pregnancy — which is what the bill the House originally planned to pass Thursday would have done. But she wants it tweaked so that women who have been raped don’t have to report it to law enforcement before they can obtain an abortion.
The measure, which leadership still intends to bring for a vote at some point, would ban abortions past 20 weeks of pregnancy unless a woman has been raped or her life is in danger.
Ellmers said she’s pushing for removing the reporting requirement because it’s hard on women who may not want to notify law enforcement. A majority of rapes in the country go unreported, she noted.

We presume that Ellmers believes it is a bad thing that so many rapes go unreported, and this law would help encourage victims to report the rapes, so therefore . . .? What’s the problem here, ma’am?

“When we come off as harsh and judgmental, we stop that conversation and we’ve got to learn to be doing a better job,” she said.
And now that Republicans have majority in both the House and Senate, any legislation they pass must be carefully vetted to make sure it’s not viewed as harsh by women or young people, she said.

Oh, that’s it. She’s afraid of a perception.

It’s a public-relations problem. Also, it’s a problem of an education system that leaves people unable to think logically or to understand a logical argument. But people who don’t think logically vote Democrat anyway, so it’s not really a problem.

Maybe somebody should explain this to Renee Ellmers. Or else find a primary challenger who can understand basic logic.

 

The #MarchForLife2015 Thread

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WASHINGTON, D.C.
The lobby and corridors of this hotel were crowded with Catholic school kids when we checked in yesterday. St. Vincent de Paul of Perryville, Missouri, was the most visible contingent — dozens of kids wearing blue-and-gold letterman’s jackets — but the annual March for Life brings groups from all around the country, not all of them Catholic. On my way down to the lobby to go out for a smoke this morning, I noticed one of the kids was wearing a nametag with the familiar Episcopalian (or Anglican) symbol: Red cross on a white field with the St. Andrew’s cross in blue. “Episcoplian?” I asked.

“Yes, sir,” the boy said.

“Wow, I didn’t realize there were still pro-life Episcopalians.”

Out on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, the boy joined a group of about a dozen kids, and I spoke to one of the adult leaders, who told me they are from St. Michael’s Christian Academy of San Clemente, California.

Seeing so many fine young Christians who support the cause of life is very encouraging to me. I’ve spent the past several months of researching radical feminism and being immersed in such evil can be psychologically disorienting. “Has the whole world gone crazy?” I find myself asking, knowing how many millions of taxpayer dollars are spent to propagate this weird ideology in colleges and universities. “Is our civilization utterly doomed?”

The March for Life reminds me that there is still hope. There are still people who have not been deceived and corrupted. Unfortunately, however, there is the problem of Congress.

Pro-life conservatives were livid this morning after the House GOP leadership demonstrated its incompetence yesterday:

Today marks the 42nd anniversary of the Supreme Court legalizing abortion on demand throughout pregnancy. The pro-life movement commemorates this day with marches, worship services and lobbying for bills to protect unborn children. Pro-lifers were promised by the Republican leaders they just helped elect and re-elect that the House of Representatives would pass a bill today banning most abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, a point after which infants can feel pain and survive if born prematurely.
The legislation has been passed by the House in the previous Congress and is extremely popular in national polling. “One of the clearest messages from Gallup trends,” the polling firm reported, “is that Americans oppose late-term abortion.” A Washington Post/ABC survey showed that 64 percent of Americans favor limiting abortion at 20 weeks of pregnancy or earlier. . . .
We’re one of just a small handful of countries, including notorious human rights violators North Korea and China, that allow late-term abortion.
And yet somehow the Republicans managed to make a disaster of passing the bill. Instead of passing the legislation and sending it to the Republican-controlled Senate, the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act was pulled at the last minute and replaced with a bill that bans taxpayer funding of abortion.
What in the h-e-double-hockey-sticks just happened? It takes a special combination of incompetence and cowardice to miss an easy lay-up like this, but apparently the new Republican Congress has it in spades. . . .
If Republicans can’t pass wildly popular legislation protecting innocent unborn children, what’s going to happen when they face difficult legislative battles? . . .

You can read the rest. What happened is that two Republican members — including Rep. Renee Ellmers, whose election campaign in 2010 I strongly supported — decided at the last minute that they didn’t like some language in the bill. The problem, as I see it, is not with the bill, and not even with Ellmers. The problem is that the leadership doesn’t know how to whip the caucus properly and make sure they’ve got 100% support on crucial votes. Tom DeLay never would have let a trainwreck like this happen. Organizational incompetence is perhaps even more dangerous than ideological wobbling in a situation like this.

Proverbs 29:18: “Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.”

The lack of vision among some of our leaders is disappointing, but the people who “keepeth the law” are still happy. When I went out for another smoke, I encountered a group of about 20 people from Voice of Truth, a church near the central Georgia town of Dublin:

Voice of Truth is a non-denominational church where the Word of God is taught and preached. The church was formed when several Christian families felt called by God to reach out to the unchurched in our community. God has blessed us and we have grown in a few short years to a congregation of more than two hundred.

Preaching the Word of God and reaching out to “the unchurched”? Of course God will always bless that kind of work. I spoke to the leaders of the church, including brothers Phil and Keith Mills. They hold to a very basic Bible-focused theology, the kind you don’t need a Ph.D. to understand. As they were ready to leave for the march, they asked me to walk with them a little way. Phil explained that he and his brother were once a couple of young hellbound sinners, “just as bad as we could be.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I used to be a Democrat myself.”

 




 

Chilling With the 114th Congress

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WASHINGTON, D.C.
Greetings from the 21st Amendment Bar & Grill at the Holiday Inn Capitol. I just got back from “A Reception & Salute to the 114th Congress” sponsored by Insight America. The guests of honor were Sen. Tim Scott, Rep. Mia Love and Rep. William Hurd, the three black Republican members of Congress, the latter two newly elected.

Insight America was founded in 2013 by former Rep. J.C. Watts with the goal of increasing the Republican Party’s appeal, through such measures as hiring young black conservatives as Capitol Hill staffers. “I am not offended by the words outreach, tolerance and diversity. I don’t see those as liberal code words,” Watts told Roll Call two years ago.

It was a wonderful event. Congresswoman Love told a story about being challenged by a young liberal who couldn’t believe that a black woman could be a Republican from Utah. “I refuse to fit the mold society tells me I have to fit into,” Congresswoman Love said.

Senator Scott, who had been the only black Republican in Congress prior to the election of Love and Hurd last November, told of crying “tears of joy” on Election Night, getting laughs as he admitted a selfish motive: “More targets [for liberals] to shoot at.”

More than 100 attended the event, which featured the inspiring music of Alyce Metallo and Ben Lashey of McLean Bible Church.