Top 4 Lessons of 2018

With 2018 almost completely in the rearview mirror, the first full year of the Trump Presidency has provided Republicans with many lessons that they ultimately learned the hard way. 

1. The Moderate Democrat has gone extinct.  When it comes to building a wall on the southern border with Mexico, nearly 100 percent of Democrats in both Houses of Congress find themselves siding with big business; something that yesterday’s Democrats, who thought the party represented the interests of the working class, would find unimaginable.  While several Senate Democrats pitched themselves as moderates as they fought uphill battles attempting to win re-election in ruby red states, their voting record tells a different story.  Only one Senate Democrat, Doug Jones of Alabama, voted to end debate on a House-passed stopgap spending bill that included money for the wall. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who ran an ad highlighting his support for the wall, did not.  When it comes to abortion, more than 90 percent of Senate Democrats identify as pro-choice.  All of them voted against defunding Planned Parenthood. The percentage of pro-life Democrats will shrink even further in the 116^th Congress.

 

 2. “The Democratic Party is a Socialist Party…The Republican Party is a Timid Party.”  Sean Hannity made this declaration on an episode of his Fox News show five years ago.  Developments in Democratic Party politics in 2018 prove the first half of Hannity’s statement correct.  A self-described Democratic socialist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, ousted an incumbent Democratic Congressman.  Several Democratic candidates, including Ocasio-Cortez, vowed to do everything in their power to abolish ICE.  With one exception, the second part of his assessment has also proven correct.  The Republicans have demonstrated their timidity when it comes to advocating for and passing their agenda in every area except the judiciary. If not for Mitch McConnell’s decision to abolish the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, the Democrats would have blocked both of President Trump’s nominees to the Supreme Court.  Lindsey Graham, generally a mild-mannered guy who has historically shown willingness to work with the other side, won the respect of long-skeptical conservatives (at least temporarily) by excoriating Senate Democrats for their behavior throughout during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.  Graham had historically assumed that the Democrats came to the table in good faith, he voted for both of President Obama’s Supreme Court nominees.  The Kavanaugh fiasco may have finally awoken Graham to the reality that the Democrats have no interest in playing fair.  However, when it comes to every other policy agenda, Hannity could not have said it any better.  The Republicans apparently believe that the sole purpose of the budget process is to avoid a government shutdown.  If I had to compare the budget process to a house, that house would look like a run-of-the-mill fixer upper in desperate need of gutting from top to bottom.  Congress has got to do something about its culture of continuing resolutions, where each spending bill kicks the can down the road for a number of weeks, rather than funding the government for the whole year. Republicans should have pushed for wall funding in April 2017, at their first available opportunity.  At this time, Republicans had 52 seats in the Senate, as they had not yet fumbled the Senate seat in Alabama. Republicans could have demonstrated their strength by abolishing the legislative filibuster.  But they didn’t.  Contrary to what the media may tell you, the Constitution does not mandate the use of a “filibuster.”  The founders actually flirted with establishing a filibuster and they did; in the Articles of Confederation.  Alexander Hamilton could not have done a better job highlighting the problems with the filibuster in Federalist 22, which he wrote in an attempt to convince the people of New York to support the ratification of the Constitution. Because of the filibuster, any immigration bill or funding bill that reflected conservative spending priorities will never make its way out of the Senate.  Republicans have had the opportunity to change that. Their failure to do so has led to the Senate becoming the Graveyard of Conservatism, as I explained in an article last year.  Republicans have got to approach every policy issue with the same passion and fire in the belly that they showed when it came to confirming Neil Gorsuch over near-unanimous Democratic opposition and preventing the radical left from “borking” Brett Kavanaugh. 

 

3.  The supposedly impartial branches of government have completely abandoned their impartiality. Instead, the Judicial Branch, once dubbed the “Least Dangerous Branch of Government,” has essentially chosen to act as a second legislative branch.  In the age of President Trump, it has switched gears from implementing a national, one-size fits all social policy to writing immigration law and drawing Congressional maps.  For decades, judges have essentially created the immigration “status quo,” or, as Reagan would say, “Latin for the mess we’re in.”  This dates all the way back to 1982, when Supreme Court Justice William Brennan essentially created the lucrative industry of “anchor babies” by arguing that “no plausible distinction with respect to Fourteenth Amendment ‘jurisdiction’ can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful.”  Brennan’s interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment directly contradicts the legislative intent of the Fourteenth Amendment, as explained by its drafter, Senator Jacob Howard.  Howard made it perfectly clear that the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment did not apply to “persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers.” The consequences of this decision as well as subsequent judicial rulings that basically give the government the option of (a) preserving “catch and release” or (b) implementing a family separation policy became perfectly clear this year, when a series of caravans filled with economic migrants poured into the country; completely overwhelming the Border Patrol. Lower courts have also taken on the role of cartographers. A group of angry feminists challenged the Pennsylvania Congressional map, arguing that it unfairly benefited Republicans. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court demanded that the legislature draw a new map and asked the elected representatives to try to avoid splitting counties wherever possible.  The legislature complied and submitted a new map, which the Democratic Governor quickly vetoed.  The Supreme Court ended up drawing a new map that fulfilled all of the Democrats’ wildest dreams and partially but not exclusively accounted for their performance in the 2018 House elections.  While many people immediately think of the President when they hear the term “Executive Branch,” the Executive Branch also includes the rapidly growing list of cabinet positions, with Senate-approved cabinet secretaries picked by the President and a whole bunch of career bureaucrats unelected by the American people; or as Sean Hannity would say, the “deep state.” Text messages between the two reveal that FBI Agent Peter Strzok and his lover, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, used their close proximity to the Clinton investigation to implement an “insurance policy” against President Trump, a man who they believed deserved to lose “100,000,000 to 0.”    

 

4.   Beware of Special Counsels.  It has become perfectly clear that the investigation into “Russian collusion,” with career bureaucrat Robert Mueller at the helm has gone completely off the rails.  This should not come as a surprise to anyone who knows anything about Special Counsels.  In retrospect, the Special Counsel investigation looking into Bill Clinton seems like a mistake; even though he dTheir obsession with impeachment ultimately led Republicans to lose their historical advantage enjoyed by the party out of power during a sixth-year midterm election.  Rather than gaining seats in the Senate, Democratic wins in Indiana, New York, and North Carolina cancelled out Republican wins in Illinois, Kentucky, and Ohio. In 2017, President Trump made the decision to fire FBI Director James Comey; which the Constitution gives him the authority to do.  Comey had become a punching bag among folks on both the left and the right following his behavior related to the Hillary Clinton e-mail investigation.  Republicans hated Comey because he held this grand press conference shortly before the 2016 Democratic National Convention making out a very persuasive case for the prosecution of Hillary Clinton before ultimately deciding that “no prosecutor” would have brought a case against her.  Democrats hated Comey because he announced that he had reopened the investigation into Clinton’s e-mails eleven days before the 2016 Presidential Election. Arguably, both Presidential candidates would have fired him and President Trump should have fired him a lot sooner.  President Trump instead waited until May 2017 to fire Comey, after both Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a folk hero of the right, and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, a more establishment beltway bureaucrat, recommended his firing.  Shortly after his firing, Comey leaked the contents of his conversations with President Trump to one of his buddies at Columbia University, that the buddy subsequently leaked to the press. Comey admitted that he did all this leaking because he thought it would prompt the appointment of a Special Counsel.  Rosenstein fulfilled Comey’s wish and appointed Former FBI Director Robert Mueller, who botched the investigation into the anthrax mailings, as a Special Counsel to investigate “Russian collusion” in the 2016 Presidential election just one day after President Trump interviewed him to get his old job back. Many Republicans appeared willing to give Mueller the benefit of the doubt until it became clear that his legal team consisted of “thirteen angry Democrats.”  Not surprisingly, it did not take long for the “Russian collusion” investigation to veer completely into left field.  At the beginning of the 2018, the sleazy Michael Avenatti became a household name as he became a lawyer for Stormy Daniels, a porn star who alleges that President Trump paid her hush money so she would not talk about an alleged affair.  Special Counsels basically have no purpose; if the Department of Justice would simply do its job, then they would not need to punt its most politically charged cases to an ultimately unaccountable super-prosecutor with unlimited resources and time.

 

I had planned on including a fifth lesson, that Washington remains tone-deaf to the voters’ demands, but I feel like that lesson effectively summarizes the other four.  While President Trump has done his best to drain the Swamp, he can only do so much as long as Congress refuses to get its act together. Until then, the forces of the Swamp, aided by a compliant mainstream media, will do everything in their power to drain President Trump and the Republicans as they seek to deprive the Washington outsider of a second term in the White House.  Having him out of the way will allow business as usual to continue to reign supreme; at the expense of the American people.