The Republicans vs. President Trump


    
The left and the Democratic Party have made “#TheResistance” their political strategy since President Trump became the 45th President of the United States.  They would argue that strategy has paid off, as the Democrats have picked up one seat apiece in the House and Senate in addition to a handful of state legislative seats.  Their #Resistance would have achieved absolutely no success if not for the incompetence and/or willful ignorance of Republicans in all three branches of government.      

 
One week after taking office, President Trump signed into law an executive order that would restrict travel from seven terror-prone Muslim-majority countries identified as national security threats by the Obama Administration, which constantly reminded the American people that “we are not at war with Islam,” “ISIL is not Islamic,” and “Islam is a religion of peace.”  Had the Obama Administration issued the exact same travel ban, the left would have had a hard time making the case that he did so out of bigotry.  Yet because President Trump had talked about a “Muslim ban” on the campaign trail, left-wing immigration activists ran to the Courts, looking for a judge to strike down the travel ban on the grounds that it violated the First Amendment’s guarantee for Freedom of Religion.  The left found their man in Judge James Robart, a Seattle-based Federal judge appointed by President George W. Bush, who struck down the travel ban.     

 
Two Obama-appointed judges found revised travel bans unconstitutional, including one that included the predominantly atheist country of North Korea and the primarily Catholic country of Venezuela.  The debate over the travel ban has now found its way to the Supreme Court, which will hand down its ruling in June.  

 
On September 5, President Trump announced that he intended to end President Obama’s Executive Order known as DACA; which shielded approximately 800,000 illegal immigrants brought to the country as children from deportation.  President Obama signed the executive order after repeatedly telling immigration activists that he did not have the authority to unilaterally change immigration law. Upon rescinding DACA, President Trump gave Congress six months to come up with a legislative solution for DACA.  Congress discussed several “DACA fixes” including one that would give a path to citizenship to 1.8 million illegal immigrants brought to the country (more than double the amount originally covered by DACA) in exchange for $25 billion for the border wall, an end to chain migration, and ending the diversity visas.  The Democrats ultimately rejected this proposal because it would have turned off the spigot of low-wage workers that have provided them with a new constituency as more and more working-class Americans that once made up the party reject liberal insanity.  Nearly three dozen House Republicans wrote a letter to House Speaker Paul Ryan, begging him to find a legislative fix for DACA.  If only they shared the same passion for building the wall.

 
The March 5 deadline for coming up with a DACA fix has obviously come and gone.  Judge John Bates, appointed by President George W. Bush, described President Trump’s executive order rolling back President Obama’s unconstitutional executive amnesty as “virtually unlawful.”  In addition to ruling that the Trump Administration must restore protection to the illegal immigrants previously covered by DACA, Judge Bates also ruled that President Trump must begin processing new DACA applicants.      

 
The Democrats point to the fact that Republican-appointed judges have struck down President Trump’s actions related to immigration and national security as vindication for their claims that his actions violate the Constitution.  Perhaps the Democrats do not realize they have several allies in the Republican Party who share their goals of maintaining a liberal immigration policy. 

 
Nearly every other Republican Presidential candidate in 2016 had the “correct” positions on all of the other issues important to Republicans.  Only one made combating illegal immigration, building a wall on the US-Mexico border and reforming legal immigration centerpieces of his campaign.  That man now sits in the oval office.  Most of the other candidates offered some type of amnesty for illegal immigrants; two of them voted for the “Gang of Eight” bill. 

 
Congressional Republicans have mostly failed to implement the Trump agenda; they stupidly passed a $1.3 billion omnibus bill that included funding for Planned Parenthood, the Democrats’ pet project, while explicitly prohibiting the President from using the $1.6 billion allocated to border security to build a wall on the southern border with Mexico.  The bill also increased funding for the National Endowments for the Arts, which the White House has also promised to defund.  In the past, the NEA has funded “art” projects including crucifixes submerged in urine and a picture of the Virgin Mary covered with vulvas. 

 
While Congress bears much of the blame for actually crafting this monstrosity, President Trump does deserve some blame for actually signing it.  Do Republicans not realize that failing to implement the Trump agenda risks a wipeout in the midterm elections?  Republicans will have to decide whether or not to grow a backbone again on September 28, when the government runs out of money again.  President Trump indicated at his rally in Michigan over the weekend that he would shut down the government if the spending bill did not include funding for the border wall.  Democrats hope that history will repeat itself; that their threats to act like three year olds who threaten to throw tantrums by shutting down the government will lead Republicans to give them a pacifier by passing a piece of crap spending bill with the Chuck Schumer seal of approval.

 
Congress has also moved at a snail’s pace in confirming officials to the Trump cabinet.  While most of the obstruction comes from Democrats, Republican Senator Cory Gardner of Colorado actually blocked some of President Trump’s nominees to the Department of Justice to get back at Attorney General Jeff Sessions for breaking his promise to look the other way on Colorado’s law recreational marijuana, which conflicts with Federal law.      

 
Many Republicans in the Executive Branch, including the “Republican” overseeing the Russia Probe, have a lot more power to actually take down the President.  The “Republican” Former FBI Director James Comey did an enormous amount of damage to the country by leaking some personal memos detailing the substance of some of his conversations with President Trump to his good buddy at Columbia Law School, telling Senator Susan Collins that he did so hoping that would lead to the appointment of a Special Counsel. 

 
Comey got his wish.  Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, another “Republican” foolishly took Comey’s bait hook, line, and sinker, appointing another “Republican,” Former FBI Director Robert Mueller, as a Special Counsel just after President Trump interviewed him as a potential replacement for Comey and indicated that he did not want to hire Mueller.  Based on the questions that Mueller plans to ask Trump in a hypothetical interview leaked out earlier this week, Mueller has more in common with John Kerry, both in physical appearance and political goals, than any run of the mill Republican living on Main Street USA.  Investigation of Russian collusion serves as the secondary purpose for the Special Counsel Investigation; it has become increasingly clear that the primary purpose of this investigation is to remove President Trump from office by any means necessary.  If Attorney General Jeff Sessions had not decided to recuse himself from anything related to Russia because he met with the Russian ambassador in his capacity as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee while also serving as an advisor to the Trump campaign, the Trump Administration would not find themselves subject to a Special Counsel investigation orchestrated by a career bureaucrat.  

 
Another “Republican” hoping to take down President Trump: Stormy Daniels, the porn star who alleges that she had a one-time affair with President Trump shortly after the birth of his now twelve-year-old son Baron.  A report in The Wall Street Journal alleges that President Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 in hush money shortly before the 2016 Presidential election.  Believe it or not, Daniels came very close to running as a Republican against Louisiana Senator David Vitter in 2010.  Daniels also alleges that someone with connections to Trump threatened her outside of a Las Vegas parking lot in 2011.  A sketch of this person completed seven years after the fact has drawn comparisons to Tom Brady and even Daniels’ own husband. She definitely should have lost her “Republican in Good Standing” card the second she announced she planned to donate any winnings she would receive in her lawsuit against President Trump and Michael Cohen to Planned Parenthood in President Trump’s name.  As the Russia probe has not born as much fruit as the Democrats would have hoped, the left now hopes that the Stormy Daniels saga will remove President Trump from office.  They hope to get him under oath testifying about Russia, hoping that he will end up perjuring himself should the topic of Stormy Daniels come up.  The Trump Administration’s newest attorney, Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, certainly did not help himself during a nearly hour-long interview on Fox News’s “Hannity,” when he made a statement suggesting that President Trump paid back Cohen for the $130,000 in hush money, which he had previously denied doing.  Regardless of whether or not Daniels’ allegations have any merit, all politicians, especially Republicans, could do themselves a huge favor by refraining from locker room talk and following the Pence rule.

 
The American people have learned the hard way that “Republican” doesn’t necessarily mean conservative.  The battle between establishment Republicans, who like to “go along to get along” and anti-establishment Republicans, who want to change the way Washington works, will continue for the foreseeable future.

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