When Dreams Become Nightmares
LISTEN TO THIS BONUS SEGMENT OF UNDERGROUND USA ON AMERICA’S THIRD WATCH
US Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) announced that he is stepping down as Senate Minority Leader after the November General Elections. But, in true Nancy Pelosi style, he will remain in office, so Republicans aren’t completely rid of him. Democrats can still count on him to aid them during critical votes in the Senate, as he has done in the past. And I am sure he will hold some influence over both who replaces him in leadership and how his replacement executes his job.
Of course, McConnell ignored the reality of the matter as he tried to control the narrative surrounding his stepping down saying:
“One of life’s most underappreciated talents is to know when it’s time to move on to life’s next chapter. So I stand before you today…to say that this will be my last term as Republican leader of the Senate.”
The truth of the matter is this. Both the Republican electorate and a good number of his elected Republican counterparts – both in the US Senate and House of Representatives – have been calling for a change in leadership, in total, for quite some time. They got half of what they were calling for.
But herein lays the rub. True conservatives, constitutionalists, and Libertarians are celebrating McConnell’s stepping down from leadership (albeit not soon enough), but who will be his replacement? Will he or she be any better? Or will he or she be worse?
The Disappointment Of A Dream Coming True
Oscar Wilde is quoted as saying, “They’ve promised that dreams can come true…but forgot to mention that nightmares are dreams, too.” A more sobering truth has seldom been expressed or more appropriate for the matter of McConnell’s replacement as Senate Minority Leader – or Majority Leader should the 2024 General Elections favor Republicans in the Senate.
I remember back in 2003 when Tom Daschle (D-SD) was the Senate Majority Leader. He was nothing less than a soft-spoken Progressive who, at every turn, attempted to derail any piece of legislation Republicans wanted to move forward or that President George W. Bush supported. In many ways he was successful.
Even though his tenure was short-lived as Senate Majority Leader, a common refrain from those on the Right was that Daschle had to be vanquished, either by an internal rebellion that would see him replaced or through the election process. He was eventually defeated in the 2004 General Election by John Thune (R-SD). Republicans took control of the Senate in that election.
But Daschle’s replacement in Senate Democrat leadership turned out to be a more caustic and underhanded individual than he was: Harry Reid (D-NV). We had all wished for Daschle’s political demise and upon achieving that demise we were confronted with a replacement completely devoid of ethics and respect for historical precedent and procedure.
Meet The New Boss, Worse Than The Old Boss
Reid was an open-borders Majority Leader even though when Republicans wanted to move immigration reform legislation back in 1993 he said:
“If making it easy to be an illegal alien isn’t enough, how about offering a reward for being an illegal immigrant? No sane country would do that, right? Guess again. If you break our laws by entering this country without permission and give birth to a child, we reward that child with U.S. citizenship and guarantee full access to all public and social services this society provides – and that’s a lot of services.”
Reid did everything in his power to hinder America’s energy independence under the guise of saving the earth from man-made climate change. He was a tremendous spendthrift even in the face of exploding national debt and Republican efforts to at least try to rein that spending in.
Of American citizens visiting the nation’s Capitol in the summertime, Reid said:
“My staff has always said, ‘Don’t say this,’ but I’m going to say it again because it’s so descriptive because it’s true…In the summertime, because of the high humidity and how hot it gets here, you could literally smell the tourists coming into the Capitol. And that may be descriptive, but it’s true.”
A Most Dastardly & Unconstitutional Act
But Reid’s most egregious act against the American people was how he ignored and manipulated the rules of the Senate to achieve the passage of the most unpopular piece of legislation in modern times: Obamacare.
As laid out for the world to see by DiscoverTheNetworks.org:
“In late 2009, 60 of the 100 members of the US Senate were Democrats. The rules governing the passage of legislation in the Senate normally required at least 60 votes to block a filibuster by the opposition party. Thus, to avoid a Republican filibuster and keep the healthcare reform bill alive, Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, needed all 60 of those Democrat votes. But there were…two significant holdouts – Senators Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Ben Nelson (D-NE).
“To win Landrieu’s support, Reid and Obama offered $100 million in extra federal funds for her home state…Landrieu negotiated that sum up to $300 million and then voted in favor of the bill.
“And to gain the backing of Nelson…the Nebraska senator was promised special treatment that would shield his state from having to pay for the ‘newly eligible’ Medicaid enrollees that Obamacare would produce…
“Reid, having lost his filibuster-proof 60-vote majority in the Senate [with the election of Scott Brown (R-MA), now needed to find a way to empower the Senate to make the fixes that the House Democrats wanted and get enough senators to vote in favor of those changes before sending the bill over to the House.
“Knowing he could no longer count on the 60 votes he would need to block a Republican filibuster, Reid resorted to a parliamentary procedural gimmick: When he put the necessary fixes up for a vote in the Senate, he did so under the rules of the reconciliation process…
(Obamacare did not in any way meet the criteria necessary to qualify legitimately as a reconciliation matter)
“Reid and the Senate Democrats passed Obamacare as a spending/budget bill, so as to exploit the reconciliation process and avoid the traditional requirement of 60 Senate votes to block a filibuster. They did this even though the Constitution explicitly states that all spending and budget bills must originate in the House of Representatives – not in the Senate.
“After the Democrat-majority Senate had passed the amended healthcare reform bill (with zero Republican votes), they sent it to the Democrat-controlled House, which also passed it, without any changes.”
To add insult to injury, in December of 2013, Reid exempted his committee and Democrat leadership staffers from having to buy insurance through the Obamacare exchanges.
Again, and in an even more fully-throated tone, Republicans called for Reid to be vanquished. He had done a tremendous amount of damage to the freedom of all Americans and he simply had to go.
In March of 2015, Reid announced he would not seek re-election in November of 2016. He endorsed US Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to succeed him as Minority Leader – and we all know how that turned out.
A Sobering Point To Be Heeded
My point in all of this is simple. If Republicans want to be rid of the milquetoast, Democrat-sympathetic, Deep State, “it’s my turn” style of politics that McConnell traded in then the entire McConnell apparatus must be disassembled and destroyed. Anything less than total expungement of McConnell-ism from the hierarchy of Republican leadership will only facilitate more of the same or – God forbid – something worse.
It would take the willing suspension of disbelief to think that Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) still doesn’t have an incredible amount of influence with Democrat leadership from the “back benches” of the US House. Just because McConnell feigns the end of his influence in day-to-day leadership matters doesn’t make it so. It merely changes his rhetorical seating arrangement. Nancy Pelosi is proof…as is Valerie Jarrett, who never left Washington, DC.
If Republicans are serious about wanting to embrace the “next generation of leadership” then they must have the courage and intestinal fortitude to make a clean break from the McConnell-ism of the past. That will take each one of us to make our voices heard in every Republican senator’s office.
“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
― George Orwell, 1984
Take Back Your Mind
Think For Yourself