I’m not sure why I think this, but Good Lord This Has Been A Long Week.
I suppose it’s because I’m busy as hell right now — I’m writing From Hellmarsh With Love, which by the way is serializing here at The American Spectator with new installments dropping every Saturday, and it’s a little bit of a compressed writing schedule. That probably accounts for all the late nights.
There are other things, of course. You don’t really make a career as a writer and pundit unless you’re one of those lucky souls who gets the network talking-head contracts, and I doubt that’ll ever be me. So I have different irons in fires — I’m running a PAC, two websites, this column, there are the books, and here and there I’ll do speechwriting and consulting stuff.
And then there’s all the radio and podcast talking-head stuff.
Plus I’m still doing research for the next political book, which will be The Revivalist Agenda. That one was going to come out right about now, but I ended up parking it until after the election.
I don’t know what kind of book it’s going to be, is why.
Should Trump win, The Revivalist Agenda is going to be an exhortation for the new president and his congressional allies to impose transformative, disruptive change on the administrative state and literally break the power base of an out-of-control, fiscally incontinent, and grossly out-of-touch federal government.
But if he doesn’t win, the book is going to have to focus on what red states can do to save what’s salvageable of the American constitutional republic. That means openly defying the federal government at turn after turn.
Either way, The Revivalist Agenda is about Republican politicians ceasing to be conservatives and learning to be revivalists. The difference? Having the courage to go on offense.
One of the key points in my first book in the revivalist series, The Revivalist Manifesto, was that conservatism is far too timid a political movement, and it has lost fight after fight to the Left as a result. It’ll take a Republican Party— which is what we’re stuck with as a political vehicle to save the country — worthy of the power the majority of the country would like to take away from the Democrats.
But they aren’t worthy. Maybe that’ll change. It actually has to. When? Beats me.
The SAVE Act mess on Capitol Hill is an example of where we are.
1. Everything About This Is Stupid
You probably heard what happened on Wednesday in the House of Representatives. It wasn’t good.
The House shot down a temporary spending deal that would extend government funding for the next six months, sending lawmakers back to square one with less than two weeks until a scheduled shutdown and lapse in federal funding.
Lawmakers rejected House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) proposed continuing resolution that would extend current government spending levels into late March, leaving it for the next Congress and White House administration to negotiate. As an incentive, Johnson sought to appease hardline conservatives who are generally against continuing resolutions of any length by attaching the GOP-led SAVE Act, which would require proof of citizenship for voter registration.
However, that effort failed in a 202-220 vote as 14 Republicans joined nearly all Democrats in rejecting the spending package, falling short of the majority needed to advance the lower chamber.
Johnson knew the bill was likely to fail well before it came to the floor as several of his GOP colleagues publicly opposed the package and he was forced to pull the vote last week. Because of his slim majority, Johnson can only afford to lose four GOP votes on any given piece of legislation — a margin that was far surpassed on the floor on Wednesday.
However, the speaker was adamant to hold a vote, calling it crucial to tackle election integrity concerns ahead of the November contest. Johnson also framed it as a way to put Democrats on the record after nearly House Democrats voted against the SAVE Act when it passed the House earlier this year.
We shouldn’t be in a position where the House is trying to pass a continuing resolution to fund the government at a $2 trillion deficit. The vast majority of that $2 trillion does more harm than good.
That $2 trillion pays for the Biden–Harris administration to send planes to Port-au-Prince to pick up Haitians and bring them to places like Springfield, Ohio, and Charleroi, Pennsylvania, where they’re displacing American workers at food-processing plants and other workplaces.
And somehow House Republicans, who are supposed to control the purse strings, can’t eliminate that funding.
Which is reason enough to be disgusted with the process.
Then you get — once again, as it’s been practically every single year this century — to the point where a gun is put to the head of each member of Congress, and they’re told they have to vote for a continuing resolution rather than a budget that contains literally trillions of dollars in harmful government spending — funding agencies that have been weaponized against their constituents — or else the world will literally end with a government shutdown.
This government needs to be shut down. It does more harm than good. It has gone septic.
And yet the hard reset it needs isn’t possible because Republicans lack the stones to shut it down.
I’ll include my friend Mike Johnson in this, and that makes me sad. It’s a failure of Johnson’s to break out of this vicious cycle.
But give Johnson his due that he at least included the SAVE Act, which would put some teeth into the prohibition against illegal aliens voting in our federal elections, into the continuing resolution.
And 14 Republicans in the House are so disgusted they wouldn’t vote for it.
So now one of two things will happen. Either Johnson will strip the SAVE Act out of the continuing resolution, which means a surrender and it will pass with a few Republican votes and every single Democrat, or there will be no continuing resolution from the House side and the Senate will pass one that is almost certainly going to be even worse, and the House will either have to pass it or be solely responsible for a government shutdown about a month before a federal election.
Which might actually be more of a plus than a minus given how awful all of this has become. But nobody in D.C. wants to take that risk.
This is an atrocity. The only solution is to drain as much power out of Washington, D.C., as possible, which Congress will not do.
The states have to fix this. Having Trump in the White House to help will certainly be an asset, but particularly red states have got to start exerting sovereignty again.
2. Trump Did a Lot Better at the NABJ Than Kamala Did
We really don’t need to say much about this, do we? She’s abysmal in every possible way. She’s so terrible that the fact that she’s a puppet of an unaccountable, out-of-touch managerial elite that will run the country with her as a mere figurehead the way they’ve done with Biden as their front man is…
…actually a plus.
How did we get here? How did this imbecile, who couldn’t win a statewide contest for secretary of state or insurance commissioner in any purple state, get to be the top of the Democrats’ ticket?
Yes, I know the answer. It’s still hard to process.
Do you think anybody at the National Association of Black Journalists is willing to concede that at least with Trump they got honest answers with a little bit of thought behind them and Kamala gave them this show of disrespect?
I keep telling yall about Kamala! Now look for yourselves.
Kamala at the end of her interview with the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ). She couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Kamala left frowning (She’s a mean woman).
I swear they were limited in their… pic.twitter.com/VbLEvUb8dh
— Vernon Jones (@VernonForGA) September 19, 2024
3. Willie From Slidell
I wrote about this Thursday at the Hayride, because unfortunately my state is responsible for this piece of filth:
Holy Sh*t: Democrat C-SPAN caller says quiet part out loud — gets cut off for praising Trump’s would-be assass*ns:
‘Take That Shot!’ pic.twitter.com/3iQxlxZYOD
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) September 18, 2024
What I said was this:
Most of them aren’t dumb enough to show their asses on C-SPAN, but it doesn’t take very long to smoke out the animus these people have – not just for Trump, but even more for his supporters.
Who are generally speaking a bunch of people who would rather be American citizens rather than citizens of the world, who think there is such a thing as a national culture, which derives from Christian Western civilization, that is worth keeping, and who think there should be places our government shouldn’t go in our daily lives if we aren’t hurting our fellow man.
Modern Democrats might say they’re for those things, but they only really say that because they think they’re supposed to. They don’t believe in free speech or the freedom of religion or the right to bear arms. They don’t really believe in “democracy,” unless it’s this new formulation of “Our Democracy” the Democrats have cooked up which is more like an oligarchy and a bureaucratic tyranny than a democracy.
And what they really don’t believe in is the idea that their power or ideas should be challenged.
To them, government is God. God doesn’t really exist. So the idea that their side wouldn’t hold political power is abject apostasy. It can’t be tolerated.
4. Trump on Gutfeld Was Good Stuff
Nick Arama at RedState had a good summary of Trump’s appearance on Gutfeld Wednesday night with lots of great video clips.
None of them were better than this, though. It’s Trump telling the story of giving RFK Jr. and his family a ride on the Trump jet while the latter was suing him.
Trump on Gutfeld ~ Hilarious story about him and @RobertKennedyJr !
WAIT FOR IT . . . ???????? pic.twitter.com/c2RcLkLW6m
— God's Girl (@Rachel22Queen) September 19, 2024
Trump drives me crazy at times because I see holes he can easily fill. But then I have to stop, because for all his flaws he’s a real human being. Most politicians are not, which is why they can’t fix anything.
5. The Fraudsters Fight Louisiana’s Abortion by Fraud Act
Earlier this year in my home state of Louisiana, the legislature passed a bill that reclassifies two common abortion drugs, mifepristone and misoprostol, as Schedule IV Controlled Dangerous Substances.
In case you haven’t heard, taking these to kill a fetus carries some risk of complications. You actually do need a doctor’s supervision if you’re going to terminate a pregnancy with this stuff. So the Louisiana Legislature passed, and Gov. Jeff Landry signed, a bill making sure a doctor is involved and you can’t just get mail-order abortion drugs that can cause adverse medical side effects.
Oh, but that’s not good enough for the abortion-addicted Left, which can’t stop regulating the hell out of every other form of human activity but the act of killing children. We pick up the story from the radical-left radio station WWOZ in New Orleans:
Under the city council’s motion, the health department would be tasked with investigating the impacts of the law by surveying doctors and pharmacists and working with hospitals to review medical records. They would also look into the possibility of launching a complaint system for patients and health care providers, Moreno said in a statement.
She said the goal is to gather enough evidence to get lawmakers to overturn the law.
“We have to push back somehow,” Moreno told WWNO/WRKF. “We want to push back with information and push back with real data, and I think this gives us our best shot for them to reverse this very dangerous law.”
Attorney General Liz Murrill’s office accused “the media, political organizations and candidates, and pro-abortion organizations” of creating “confusion and doubt” around Louisiana’s anti-abortion laws.
In a statement on Tuesday, she argued that nothing in Louisiana’s near-total abortion ban and the new controlled dangerous substances law “stands in the way of a doctor providing care that stabilizes and treats emergency conditions.”
Louisiana Right to Life has also argued the law will not harm women’s health.
The Moreno in this story is Helena Moreno, who’s a limousine leftist former TV newscaster and state representative now sitting on the City Council in New Orleans and a decent bet to be the city’s next mayor. She’s a never-ending fountain of political attention-whoring, and she’s trying to get the City of New Orleans to essentially refuse to comply with state law.
There’s a very easy way to handle this. Landry’s the governor, and he can simply issue a statement that New Orleans’ health department is an organ of state government, and it will not be allowed to defy state law. If it attempts to, it will have its funds impounded by the state and next year it will be disbanded by the Legislature.
A city is a direct subsidiary of a state. It doesn’t have the same relationship to a state government that the state has to the federal government. In our constitutional system, the state is sovereign. That we have failed to make that clear is something we must atone for. But one thing that is especially true of blue cities in red states is that state sovereignty must be enforced downward, and then upward toward the feds.
Hopefully, if this political virtue-signaling out of the communist politicians who run New Orleans continues, Landry will deal them a very harsh lesson that can serve as an example for others to follow.
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