Democratic party

Lame-duck sessions of Congress are rarely uneventful. Whether it’s cramming through spending at the last minute or cramming through even more spending at the last minute, our legislature can always be counted on to rubber-stamp bills that lacked political support before Mariah Carey returned to the airwaves. Leading the charge for the opposition this time around is the self-declared speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy. A Bloomberg headline recently proclaimed that “McCarthy Draws Line on Spending,” and trumpets seemingly blared out from the heavens heralding that Republicans had — finally — rediscovered their fiscally conservative bona fides. But not so fast: this is a script we’ve seen before.

Start spreading the news. As party leadership for the upcoming 118th Congress shapes up, we now know that Democrats will have not only New Yorkers but Brooklynites as their top men in both the Senate and the House. Chuck Schumer is poised to maintain his position as Senate majority leader after Republicans’ miserable results in the upper body. And with the departure of Nancy Pelosi as House head honcho, it will be Representative Hakeem Jeffries taking her place and hoping one day to be speaker himself. So what will an all-Empire State Democrat leadership mean for the rest of the nation? To get a sense of this, it's worth looking at the unexpected and outsized role that New York played in the recent midterm elections.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced today that in the wake of Republicans taking the House, she's doing exactly what the octogenarian leadership class in this era of American decline does every time voters invite them to gracefully leave the stage: hold onto power. The decision by Pelosi to not seek election as leader of the Democratic minority, choosing instead to stay on as a kind of speaker emeritus, means she will be effectively looking over the shoulder of her successor, be that Hakeem Jeffries or another unfortunate soul. She's Democratic Speaker for Life in all but name. She will be feted by a sycophantic media, which will glorify her and build her up, even as she overshadows the people actually tasked with running Congress. But then, that's mostly just the media anyway.

Less than a week out from the 2022 midterm elections, the White House announced that President Joe Biden would be delivering a speech warning of alleged "threats" to democracy. The backdrop for the address tonight that will almost assuredly accuse his fellow countrymen of being extremists and traitors? Washington, DC's Union Station. In many ways, Union Station is the ideal backdrop for a speech by the leader of the Democrat Party. It is the perfect embodiment of what the left's foolish and deranged policies have done to our nation: reduced a once thriving and majestic place into a crime-infested trash heap. Just seven years ago, I interned down the street from Union Station.

Don’t ever take sides with anyone against the family. I recall Michael Corleone’s warning to Fredo from The Godfather every time I see a political candidate’s family members denounce him in public. Even mobsters understood that family comes first. Not in agreement are the fourteen relatives of US Senate candidate Adam Laxalt of Nevada, who have endorsed his opponent. Ten of them likewise posed for a photo with the state's Democratic governor in 2018. One of Laxalt’s cousins accuses him of “using the family name to pursue a political career,” a claim you’ll only hear because she’s using the family name to advance it.

President Biden’s recent interview with transexual TikToker Dylan Mulvaney is a clarifying event for anyone who pays attention to America’s culture wars. The first notable aspect of the interview was the mere fact that it happened — that the president of the United States, in the home stretch of a midterm election season, deemed it a prudent use of his time to sit down with such a radical activist. The second notable aspect of the interview is what our senile commander-in-chief said in the course of his conversation. At one point, Mulvaney asked our hapless supremo if he thinks states should be permitted to “ban gender-affirming health care.

Tulsi Gabbard has been a de facto outsider within the Democratic Party for a long time. Now, she's finally made it official, leaving the party she served first in the Hawaii State House and then in Congress for eight years. Tulsi also announced a new Substack and a podcast as her next moves. Gabbard's path to this moment was marked by fascinating developments within the culture wars that came to characterize the Obama-Biden era of the Democratic Party. Once viewed as a rising star within the ranks — she was the first Hindu woman and the first female combat veteran in Congress — she was unanimously elected as vice chair of the party in 2013.

Tom Wolfe invented Al Sharpton in his 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. In the novel, he was called Reverend Bacon. In a splendid case of life imitating art, Sharpton took his place as a fixture in the metabolism of Democratic politics that same year when he hitched his star to the case of Tawana Brawley, then fifteen, who falsely claimed she had been abducted and raped by six white men, some of whom, she said, were police. For reasons that are part of the inscrutable workings of the universe, Sharpton’s histrionic fabrications in that case catapulted him to a position of tribal leadership among Democratic presidential candidates.

I first met Ken Starr in 1989. I was a Wall Street Journal editorial writer who was invited to speak at a conference held by the Federalist Society’s chapter at Cornell University. I met two very impressive people that day. One was Leonard Leo, the head of the Cornell Federalist Society. Only twenty-four, it was clear he had a natural genius for organizing, planning and networking. As the later head of the Federalist Society, he turned it into the premier farm team for conservative lawyers who wanted to become judges. In 2020, then-CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin told a group of lawyers that Leo had played a major role in the selection of a majority of the Supreme Court.

Jon Stewart has been a pretty busy guy lately. Not only is he hosting a new show-cum-podcast, The Problem with Jon Stewart, but he’s also been spending a good chunk of time in Cockburn’s hometown, Washington DC. Stewart has been making the waves while campaigning for HR. 3967, otherwise known as the Honoring our PACT Act of 2022, as he bashed Ted Cruz for initially not supporting it. His on-the-ground activism in DC garnered media attention this week after he held a press conference with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Jon Tester. Stewart made a passionate plea that would make Matthew McConaughey proud. The TV host also found himself embroiled in a spat with conservative firebrands Jack Posobiec and Raheem Kassam.