As Congressional and Senate campaigns begin their traditional post-Labor Day ramp up into the final sprint toward the November midterm elections, the conservative base is angry. They’re angry about energy prices. They’re angry about inflation ravaging their take home pay. They’re angry about the wanton refusal of the federal government to enforce the southern border. They’re angry at wokeness, at prosecutors who refuse to prosecute criminals, and at creeping Critical Race Theory infecting the curriculum in schools. They’re angry at taxes going up, and for paying more to cover the forgiven student loan debt of people they don’t know. They’re angry at how the pandemic has been handled, the nonsensical politicized mask and mandate edicts at both the federal and state level. They’re angry at FBI raids into the residences of former presidents while former Secretaries of State can flout the same secrecy laws and get away with it. It is a righteous anger.
The Democratic Party, along with their allies in media and with the apparent help of careerists in federal agencies, are giving conservatives every reason to be angry. Nancy Pelosi’s stunt to prevent House Republicans from choosing whom their members would be on the 1/6 Select Committee, something that has never been done on any select committee, jamming down another wild spending spree dressed up as an “inflation reduction act”, which does nothing of the sort, are both good examples of how the slow burn of the Republican base has reached near boiling point.
And that’s before Democrats, media, and even Joe Biden himself refer to Trump voters as semi-fascists or worse, ironically while giving a prime time political speech you’d find in the opening scene of The Man In The High Castle, were it to have been renewed for a sixth season.
Marco Rubio on Fox News recently railed against the FBI’s raid on Mar-A-Lago as banana republic stuff, but he noted a word of caution.
Ted Cruz around the same period of time on his podcast noted a similar concern.
If there’s one message I do hear talking to callers to the radio show I produce and reading comments from listeners and viewers, they’re expecting Republicans to do something about it when they come to power. In short, they want revenge, and honestly, this really has little or nothing to do with the 2020 election results. Let’s assume the GOP takes both houses. I realize the lift is a lot heaver in the Senate than it is in the House, but I remain cautiously optimistic that Republicans will net gain 1-2 seats (holds in Wisconsin, Missouri, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida, gains in Georgia and Nevada).
I really don’t want a republic in which every four or eight years whichever side comes to power pays back, usually with interest, against perceived wrongs done upon it by the losing side. That downward spiral is extraordinarily unhealthy to our American experiment. But on the other hand, the behavior of the Democratic Party is so egregious of late that if there’s not some price paid, Republican voters will get deflated so quickly that I fear the new majorities will be very short-lived.
So the big question – what are 3 steps the Republicans with their new majorities, albeit with Joe Biden still in the White House, can do to stick it to the Democrats and satisfy the thirst for revenge amongst their base without so poisoning the political well that we do actually become a banana republic? I will be very interested to read the comments, but here’s my three things Republicans can and should do to get the conversation started.
1. Nancy Pelosi’s stunt of tossing off Republicans from the J6 Select Committee has to be repaid in full and then some. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell need to be removed not just from House Intel, but stripped from all committee assignments. Make them the backbenchers they deserve to be. I’d be sorely tempted to do the same for all ranking members of all committees – tell them because of the decision of their leadership that they endorsed, they will now sit on the committee sidelines this cycle. Speaker McCarthy should then negotiate with whomever becomes the next Democratic leader (Nancy Pelosi most likely resigning from Congress after they lose power at the end of the year) and negotiate a return to normalcy. Offer the Democrats a chance to appoint their members to committees after a two-year time in the penalty box, but only if they agree to appear with then-Speaker McCarthy and say we’ve reached a truce.
2. Appropriate away the money from Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. Every damn dollar. This is a moral imperative. The Democrats’ jam down of hundreds of billions of dollars that does nothing to reduce inflation or the deficit, but does turn the IRS into an agency with more staff than the State Department, the Pentagon, the FBI and the Border Patrol combined, is just a skeleton. It’s a budget. It’s a proposal. The IRA just passed doesn’t actually spend the money. It says we’re going to spend the money. Spending the money happens when the appropriations bills get hammered out at the end of the year. And if there are any contentions in the appropriations process, which there almost always are, especially in an election year like this one, continuing resolutions at current spending levels bridge the gap. Republicans need to do appropriations when they’re in power that suck the funding out of every single one of Joe Biden’s areas of growth and dare him to shut the government down over it going into his reelection year. And they should dust off the Congressional Review Act and apply it to every offensive rule that has emanated out of the Biden administration.
3. Resist the temptation to impeach everybody you don’t like. Trust me – it’ll backfire. The Republicans need to focus on taking one scalp, maybe two, not every scalp. If the House Republican agenda for 2023 descends into investigations/hearings/impeachments of Joe Biden, Merrick Garland, Christopher Wray, Hunter Biden, Alejandro Mayorkas, Jennifer Granholm, Anthony Fauci, Antony Blinken, they’ll be viewed by large parts of the country as unserious and unable to govern. Accountability? Sure. But Republicans have got to show the country they can govern. You can walk and chew gum at the same time, but if the gum is 15 pieces, it becomes so unwieldy to chew it that you walk into a tree. My suggestion? If you’re going to go after someone, go after the botched Afghanistan withdrawal. Maybe Dr. Fauci’s malfeasance on the pandemic. Either one has the potential of being an onion that will have layers upon layers to peel. Virtually all the rest of the cast of possible targets of investigation get fired once a Republican wins the White House in January, 2025, so again, my caution is for the Republicans to pick their battles and execute, and for the base to understand the Constitutional limitations based on who’s in the White House and not expect too much right away.
Keep in mind that one of the main reasons the Democrats are in the electoral peril that they are is because voters didn’t want radical change. They just wanted Democrats to not be Trump. They wanted caretakers of the economy, not crushers of it. The sweet spot for which Republicans should aim is to use some of the tactics of the Democrats without coming across to voters as radical as the Democrats.
Duane Patterson has been the senior producer of Salem Radio Networks’ Hugh Hewitt Show since its inception in July 2000. He is the host of the Aftershow podcast, heard exclusively within www.hughniverse.com, the troll-free subscriber site for Hugh Hewitt Show premium listeners and viewers, and can be followed on Twitter @Radioblogger.
