Infrastructure Bills: Socialism on Steroids
Under the innocuous title of “infrastructure,” a revamping of our society into a socialist state is hurtling through the Senate. A preliminary procedural vote was held on July 21 on the first of two infrastructure bills that constitute a federal takeover of everything from child care to state transportation systems, and more votes are expected.
While our highways could use some repair, these Democrat-written bills are about nearly everything other than highway funding. The $3.5 trillion Democrat version includes federally controlled universal preschool, taxpayer-subsidized child care, low-income housing, free community college, and more Leftist fake energy projects like clanky windmills.
Child care, free indoctrination at community college, and radical environmentalism have nothing to do with infrastructure. Neither do inner city buses on which hardly anyone ever rides.
Thisissocialismonsteroids.NotasingleRepublican yet supports the $3.5 trillion version, but Dems plan to pass it later on a 50-50 vote with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking the tie.
The tidal wave of printed money would not flow to improving highways and bridges, as Americans are being misled to believe. Some of the dollars would be poured down the drain of mass transit which has never been economical, while preferred by liberals to make people more dependent on government.
These infrastructure bills would even hinder the ability of states to improve the highway system, by adding a layer of new federal oversight and control over the spending of funds on improvement of the open roads that have helped inspire the American dream. Family road trips, which many skipped last year due to Covid, would not be helped by these trillion-dollar spending packages.
Biden wants these bills passed before the August recess, which requires holding procedural votes very soon. The initial vote was on the smaller $1.2 trillion H.R. 3684 being advertised as bipartisan, but its details have not yet been released so Republicans wisely declined to allow it to overcome the 60-vote threshold to advance.
It is the $3.5 trillion version which is the bigger threat, as Dems plan to enact it through budget reconciliation without support by a single Republican. If the Senate parliamentarian agrees, the 60-vote requirement will not apply to that bill and it could become law through bypassing the ordinary filibuster rules and exploiting a simple majority.
Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is so outraged by this maneuver that he said Republicans should leave town in order to block the quorum requirement of 51 votes in the Senate. While bills can pass under reconciliation in the Senate with only 50 votes plus Kamala Harris, 51 votes including at least one Republican Senator are needed to establish a quorum in order to hold a valid vote in the first place.
Meanwhile, inflation under Biden has already sharply increased after being dormant for three decades under conservative fiscal policies established by a Republican- controlled Congress. Multi-trillion dollar spending programs dependent on more borrowing to pay for them will only fan the flames of greater inflation.
“I’m not sure what may happen, exactly how it’s going to be paid for,” Biden told reporters. There are only two options available for funding this: an increase in taxes, or an increase in borrowing causing greater pressure on inflation.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) observed that the $3.5 trillion Democrat infrastructure bill is “completely inappropriate for the country, which is already suffering from dramatic inflation.” In contrast, the efficient network of interstate highways that span our Nation are the envy of the world, lowering everyone’s shipping costs during the Covid pandemic and supported by drivers who pay federal taxes of 18.3 cents per unleaded gallon and 24.3 cents per gallon of diesel.
There is even a federal underground storage tank fee, and the notion that immense new taxes or borrowing is necessary to repair our infrastructure is not what this is really about. Instead, these bills are just another way for the Left to candy-coat their socialist agenda and railroad it through Congress.
Vaccine Police Roll Up Their Sleeves
A third of Americans will not voluntarily receive a vaccine against the Wuhan virus, as politicians who monitor polling have long known. The origin of the Wuhan virus is the Chinese Communist Party, but America’s response should not have the same mindset.
Contrary to Dr. Fauci’s recent outburst against “red states and places in the South that are very highly ideological,” it is not merely Trump supporters who oppose mandatory vaccination. Many Bernie Sanders supporters and Biden voters also resist, as illustrated by health care workers who quit their jobs rather than submit to mandatory vaccination.
Biden alarmed freedom lovers by saying “now we need to go to community-by-community, neighborhood- by-neighborhood, and oftentimes, door-to-door – literally knocking on doors” to push Covid vaccination. His Secretary of HHS Xavier Becerra insisted that “it is absolutely the government’s business” who has not been vaccinated.
Just south of Florida, Cubans are rising up against totalitarianism there. “Homeland and Life,” shouts the viral rap song that led to an outpouring of protests against communist rule.
“You, five nine [1959]. Me, double two [2020],” is its refrain. Communist dictator Fidel Castro took control of Cuba in 1959, with encouragement by Leftists (he was even welcomed to speak at Harvard), and the song refers to that takeover as the “evil revolution.”
Yet to the vaccine police, the outpouring of anti- communist protests in Cuba is supposedly about access to vaccination, rather than pent-up opposition to decades of dictatorship. The popular song which inspired these protests says nothing about vaccines, and everything about freedom.
Despite billions spent by Biden on the most intense vaccination effort ever, only two-thirds of Americans are even partially vaccinated against Covid-19, and a smaller percentage fully so. Adverse vaccine reactions remain underpublicized, while the CDC reports more than 10,000 deaths which have been registered with the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) concerning the Covid vaccine.
Missouri saw a 50% increase in its coronavirus cases in the first week of June, and nationwide there was a 47% spike in Covid with 43 states reporting a week-to-week rise.Incidenceofthefludecreasesinsummermonths,but the opposite is occurring for Covid amid mass vaccination.
For the first time, health officials are now warning that vaccinated individuals who are immuno-compromised – as millions of Americans are – can still contract and die from Covid. Roughly 20% of the new Covid cases in the ICU at the University of Kansas Health System are vaccinated persons, and deaths from Covid among the vaccinated are reported in England.
“Breakthrough infections” is the euphemistic term used to describe contagion of the disease by people who were vaccinated against it. The term implies that such infections are rare and unexpected, when in fact they are frequent enough to burden ICUs at hospitals now.
Yet liberals continue to scapegoat the unvaccinated, and particularly Trump supporters, for the spread of Covid. The vaccinated population appears to be the real super- spreader, as the ostensibly healthy Typhoid Mary infected dozens a century ago while working as a cook in New York.
Vaccination is supposed to make it safe to have unmasked attendance at NFL games beginning soon, despite how attendance at Trump rallies last fall was prohibited by Democrat governors in battleground states. After a year of berating everyone to wear masks, the CDC now says it is unnecessary for vaccinated people.
Japan has handled Covid far better without widespread vaccination than the United States and England have with it. Japanese are risk averse about vaccination and do not discriminate against the unvaccinated; their Olympics is being held without fan attendance.
If Covid vaccination worked as promised, Covid cases should be decreasing rather than climbing. None of the promoters of vaccination warned that vaccination might lead to more Covid cases rather than less.
Mandatory vaccination is ideological, not scientific. No matter what the data show, the true believers demand more vaccination even though it is correlated with an increase in Covid cases overall.
“It needs to be hard for people to remain unvaccinated,” declared Shanghai-born CNN commentator Leana Wen, the former president of Planned Parenthood. Not only is that approach not working, the overreliance on vaccination seems to be making the spread of the disease worse when our nation should be overcoming it.
Progress was being made against Covid prior to the mass vaccination, when President Trump personally overcame the disease with early treatment. Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) and other Trump supporters contracted the disease and then treated it early, with enormous success.
In June the College of Charleston, South Carolina, reversed its mandatory vaccination policy, and other colleges should do likewise. Biden should admit that vaccination alone is not going to end the Covid pandemic, and he should start promoting early treatment as Trump did more than a year ago.
Who Wants to be “Primaried”?
“Primaried” has become a popular term for dealing with disappointment by entrenched incumbents in both political parties. It means attempting to defeat an elected official in his own party primary, an enormous political embarrassment.
Primary challenges are a healthy way to shake up the status quo in politics. The grassroots thereby rise up and overcome the enormous advantages of incumbency to replace a RINO with a conservative.
Fear of being “primaried” is the real reason for the sudden new interest by Texas Governor Greg Abbott in the southern border, after years of his inaction. Gov. Abbott arranged for photo ops of himself with Donald Trump during their joint visit to the border.
Texas can afford to complete the building of the wall that Trump started, and Abbott has finally hinted at doing so. The timing may have more to do with the early Texas primary and the field of Republican candidates running against Gov. Abbott.
Texas GOP Chairman Allen West released a compelling video of him speaking in front of the incomplete border wall south of El Paso. Then, most appropriately on Independence Day, the retired lieutenant colonel and former congressman announced his candidacy against Gov. Abbott in the Republican primary.
Sen. Ted Cruz’s successful toppling of the seemingly invincible David Dewhurst in the 2012 Senate GOP primary immediately comes to mind. Texas Republican voters cast their ballots for those who speak out and do more.
Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, who has already won a preliminary ruling against President Biden’s “equity” agenda and prevailed in statewide elections, is another conservative pondering a run against Gov. Abbott in the primary, to be held on March 1st. If Gov. Abbott cannot muster 50%, then a runoff election will be held which historically favors the more conservative candidate.
Abbott’s inaction on election integrity is as stark as his failures on the southern border. While Georgia, Florida, and Iowa enacted bills to restore some election integrity, Texas has still not acted, and risks becoming a battleground state.
After dithering for a month, Gov. Abbott finally called for a special session of the Texas legislature to begin in July. But he was slow in designating issues for this special session, and Democrat legislators fled Texas to D.C. to block a quorum. Michelle Malkin calls them “fleebaggers” (in a play on “teabaggers”).
Two Supreme Court Rulings for Election Integrity
In its final decision of its Term, the Supreme Court gave states the green light to reduce election fraud by reining in lax voting procedures. Justice Alito, writing for the 6-3 Court, firmly rejected a common liberal argument against voting procedure changes.
“Disparate impact” is a Leftist test for invalidating any law that might arguably have a greater impact against a minority group. It is possible to mine statistics and object to almost any law, even criminal laws, as impacting one demographic more than another.
“We also do not find the disparate-impact model employed in Title VII and Fair Housing Act cases useful here,” Justice Alito wrote for the Supreme Court on July 1, in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee. Liberals may regret pushing that issue, now that the High Court rejects it in a ruling fully applicable to election laws in every state.
Justice Alito added that the Democrats’ argument “would also transfer much of the authority to regulate election procedures from the States to the federal courts.” He thereby blocked attempts at judicial activism in interfering with good state election reforms.
This conservative decision should help defeat the eight lawsuits that were filed against Georgia’s new election law, which properly requires identification for mail-in voting. Even Biden’s Department of Justice has piled on with its own lawsuit to interfere with the reasonable Georgia law in cleaning up its election system.
Meanwhile, another good decision was rendered by the Supreme Court on its final day. Likewise split 6-3, the Court rejected snooping by California through the identities of donors to conservative nonprofit groups, including one located in Michigan.
Overreach by California and other Leftist states is a growing problem, as they try to export their tyranny to the Midwest and other red states. California Democrats have no business sticking their noses into organizations headquartered elsewhere.
The internet has created new ways to harass people for merely exercising their First Amendment rights to speak out or donate. California’s overreach was too much for even Chief Justice Roberts, who held for conservatives in Americans for Prosperity v. Bonta, despite last year allowing California to shut down churches.
“It is hardly a novel perception that compelled disclosure of affiliation with groups engaged in advocacy may constitute as effective a restraint on freedom of association as other forms of governmental action,” wrote Roberts while quoting an earlier NAACP case on a similar point. Yet many liberals today seek to infringe on First Amendment rights that were upheld in the famous NAACP case.
Trump’s Back in a Big Way
Trump just proved that he does not need Air Force One or Twitter to attract an enormous crowd of supporters. His sensational return has the bonus of smoking out the Never- Trumpers who have unsuccessfully schemed to silence him, which will never happen.
Trump’s back, without missing a step. After holding a spectacular rally in Ohio on June 26, Trump then spent the next three days lambasting his “pathetic” Attorney General Bill Barr, whose duplicity and inaction helped place our country in its current predicament.
“Despite evidence of tremendous Election Fraud, he just didn’t want to go there,” Trump observed about the “slow moving swamp creature” who ran the Justice Department. Reportedly Barr pretended to open an election fraud investigation merely to tell Trump that no such evidence could then be found.
At Trump’s overflow Ohio rally, he deplored the mistreatment of his attorney Rudy Giuliani, which included a shocking raid on Rudy’s residence. Communist countries target a politician’s attorney, as liberals have done to Giuliani.
Trump’s speech included a retelling of his favorite fable “The Snake,” about the risks of giving asylum to refugees. “Lesson of ‘The Snake’” was one of Phyllis Schlafly’s final columns; it is reprinted in the February 2017 issue of The Phyllis Schlafly Report. Our southern border is overrun by illegal aliens which Trump visited on June 30, after Biden refused to go there.
Trump returns not a moment too soon. His complaints about the crisis at the border and the politicization of the Department of Justice to harass his supporters are what all Republicans should be shouting from the mountaintops.
Despite being head of Justice Department, which maintains a large staff of attorneys in its Voting Section, Bill Barr did nothing to stop the flood of fraudulent mailed-in ballots which are now being investigated locally in the battleground states. While the Left has ongoing serial prosecutions of every Trump supporter they can get their hands on, Barr never took any meaningful action against election fraud.
Barr allowed the DOJ to be hijacked for political prosecutions, which has subsequently resulted in 500 arrests of unarmed protesters who asserted their First Amendment rights on January 6 at the U.S. Capitol. Barr then abandoned his post with a month left in his term, quitting before Christmas and leaving the Department leaderless when the electoral votes were opened and verified.
“Bill Barr was a disappointment in every sense of the word,” Trump declared in response to a new book revealing Barr’s disloyalty. “Instead of doing his job, he did the opposite and told people within the Justice Department not to investigate the election,” Trump added.
“Bill Barr’s weakness helped facilitate the cover-up of the Crime of the Century, the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election!” Trump exclaimed.
Politicized prosecutions by the DOJ is something Barr should have permanently stopped. Instead, he looked the other way and jumped ship rather than do his job.
Barr’s resignation letter when he quit early included lavish praise for President Trump at the time. But Barr’s refusal to stand up against Leftists in his own department leaves Washington awash in tyranny-by-prosecution.
More than $100 million was spent on the Mueller investigation, including defense costs against frivolous accusations, and yet apparently not even $100 was spent by Barr’s department to ensure integrity for the presidential election. “Count every fraudulent vote” became the mantra among the Deep State left unchecked by Barr.
“If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it,” the do-nothing Barr is quoted in the new book Betrayal by ABC News’ chief Washington correspondent. “But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bull—-,” Barr reportedly said.
With that vulgar epithet, Barr took the easy way out. Asking hard questions is how wrongdoing is uncovered, not refusing to earnestly investigate by someone whose very job was to investigate first before drawing conclusions.
By dawn before Trump’s latest rally in Ohio, a substantial crowd had already gathered. Some had been there for days, such as truck driver Mike Boatman who spoke with an NPR reporter.
“Anywhere he goes, he’s going to draw big crowds. This is small-town America right here,” Boatman observed amid hordes of patriots who grew to a hundred times larger than what Biden could draw even in a big city.
“We won the election twice, and it’s possible we’ll have to win it a third time,” Trump said when he ultimately took the stage, reprising President Andrew Jackson’s successful criticism of the corrupt bargain by the Eastern Establishment almost 200 years ago. “It’s possible,” Trump added coyly about returning to the White House.
The event location targeted Rep. Anthony Gonzalez (R- OH), who voted with nine other Republicans to impeach Trump. Pro-Trump Max Miller is running with Trump’s endorsement for that seat.
Never-Trumpers relished the thought of joining liberals to toss Trump overboard, and find someone to play ball with the Establishment. Yet six months later, no such replacement exists, and Trump has returned with the fanfare of a true leader that he is.
