Democratic party

"I am 'Ultra MAGA'," House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik defiantly told a reporter Wednesday, "and I'm proud of it." Republicans should be embracing the badass nickname Biden bestowed upon them, just like Trump should accept being crowned the "great MAGA king." The only problem is that Stefanik is not "Ultra MAGA." Far from it. Just one day before Stefanik declared herself part of the cool kids' lunch table, she voted with 149 other tone-deaf Republicans to send an additional $40 billion in aid to Ukraine. Congress had already approved $13.6 billion in emergency spending after the Russian invasion back in March.

Crime is on the rise in cities across America and the left is asleep at the wheel. Democrats are set to be routed in the upcoming midterm elections, but instead of getting onboard with tough-on-crime policies, they've focused their efforts on measures that are wildly out of touch with even their own voters. To start, Democrats have their pandemic lockdowns to thank for at least some of the crime crisis. Carjackings are up in cities, which experts attribute to teenagers who are not in school or extracurricular programs. James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, said that the pandemic has given people too much free time, which can lead to an uptick in crime.

The Democratic Party is out of the office. Quite literally. Nancy Pelosi, who controls administrative policy in the House, this week extended the in-office moratorium and proxy voting through the middle of May. Pelosi says she based the policy on the recommendation of the sergeant-at-arms who wrote that there is still an ongoing “public health emergency due to the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 remains in effect.” Quite the contrast to the president’s message. Pelosi's extension follows reporting from the Washington Free Beacon last week that most Democratic offices in DC remain shut, citing Covid-19 pandemic and workplace restrictions as the reason.

Viewed in one light, last week’s overwhelming rejection by the New Hampshire state legislature of a bill to put secession to a vote was a resounding win for unity in a fractious time. But it probably won’t be the last time we see such a proposal in a state house. A fatalistic argument from one of the bill’s thirteen supporters explains why: “National divorce is going to happen. It’s inevitable, and we have a chance to get ahead of this.” He may be right, if polls are to be believed. Last fall, a survey out of the University of Virginia brought the depressing news that 40 to 50 percent of Biden and Trump voters claim “it’s time to split the country.” Commentator David French declared the finding unsurprising, because Democrats and Republicans “loathe each other.

The latest version of the Democrats' $1.5 trillion spending bill being pushed through Congress includes funding for questionable foreign projects, such as "gender programs" in Pakistan and democracy building in authoritarian nations. According to a section of the bill outlining State Department funding for the year, an unspecified portion of the nearly $4 billion available in bilateral economic assistance — meaning direct transfers from the United States to other countries — shall "be made available for programs to promote democracy and for gender programs in Pakistan.

Long live the gerontocracy: Nancy Pelosi will seek reelection in 2022. The House speaker, who turns eighty-two in March, announced her move in a Twitter video. “While we have made progress much more needs to be done to improve people’s lives,” Pelosi said. “Our democracy is at his because of assaults on the truth, the assault on the US Capitol and the state-by-state assault on voting rights.” “This election is crucial: nothing less is at stake than our democracy,” the speaker continued. “But as we say: we don’t agonize, we organize! And that is why I am running for re-election to Congress and respectfully seek your support.

How long will the Democrats weep for the death of their transformational agenda this week? It's anyone’s guess. Everyone handles grief differently. Senator Chuck Schumer’s decision to hold a vote on a filibuster carveout seems like less of a Hail Mary effort and more like an attempt to virtue-signal toward the progressives in his party. If someday he is forced to go toe-to-toe in a Senate primary with Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, at least he can tell the pitch-fork waving socialists that he tried to change the filibuster. That should save him, right Chuck? Despite President Biden’s opinion, that he “probably outperformed what anybody thought would happen”, the general consensus after his first year is that things aren’t going great.

At the stroke of midnight on January 1, Bill de Blasio — New York’s bumbling, mildly sinister but profoundly incompetent mayor — got laughed out of office as his second term came to an end. Don’t let the door hit ya, the city collectively sneered...despite voting for the man twice. The new administration couldn’t even wait until morning to flip the official @NYCMayor Twitter account. One minute after midnight, it changed all its pictures over to ones of Eric Adams, before the man had even been officially sworn in. An image of the smiling new mayor loomed over de Blasio’s final message: a photo of he and his wife walking in shadow down a long hallway with their backs turned on a city they abandoned long ago.

Vice President Kamala Harris has been quoted as saying her media coverage would be better if she were a white man. She is absolutely right. She wouldn’t have bad coverage. She wouldn’t have any coverage at all. That’s because she would still be a minor senator from a big state, not the second-highest official in the Executive Branch. She was selected only because she has the identity-politics markers so important to Democrats. It should be obvious by now that Harris is a terrible politician. When friendly reporters toss her softballs, she swings, misses and blames them. When she is given hard policy assignments, she swings and misses those, too. (In her defense, her main assignment, immigration, is President Biden’s failure, not her’s.

Preventing crime and punishing offenders is primarily the responsibility of local authorities. They have no greater obligation to the citizens who elected them and who fund the government. It is up to local police, supervised by political leaders and subject to the law themselves, to provide a safe environment for citizens to go about their lives, pursuing their own goals in peace and security. It is up to local politicians to ensure that police are adequately funded and properly trained. It is up to local prosecutors to follow up all justified arrests and prosecute offenders when the evidence is adequate. When police overstep their limits, prosecutors should pursue them too. The goal is a safe environment, subject to the rule of law.

I come neither to bury Kamala nor to praise her. Commentary on her vice presidency is polarized. Harris’s well-known praise chorus is completely deranged. True, she is the first woman to become vice president, and only the second “person of color,” to use a term in vogue. These are historic achievements to those who understand history through the thick lens of demographic taxonomy. True, also, Harris has over the last year shown a near-total lack of the political skill generally needed to make a serious run at the presidency. She has been given large projects and failed to advance the administration’s goals. She has not improved as a speaker and comes across as indifferent, haughty and detached. Her approval ratings lag even those of her feckless boss.

This past weekend, twenty CEOs from big box retailers sent a letter to Congress, asking for help in combatting the rampant theft that is plaguing their stores. While it's refreshing to finally see these companies speaking up, it's hard to ignore the irony of their circumstances. After all, a little over a year ago many of these retailers were sending out emails to their customers that echoed the far-left rallying cries of progressives. No one asked for Best Buy or Ulta to weigh in on social issues, but they were more than happy to virtue-signal anyway. Plenty of the stores that signed on to this letter have openly supported the Black Lives Matter movement. To understand what that means, you have to understand the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation.

The Democrats' only possible path forward is to ensure that Trump does not run in 2024. So they want to lock him away in jail. With only three years left to go, the 2024 race is narrowing to Trump versus Some Democrat. By Election Day, President Biden will be a vaguely sentient eighty-two, VP Harris will likely have left the country, and the Dems' rainbow coalition of identity claimants will quickly winnow itself down to nobody as their collective lack of experience devalues their various claims of victimhood. What to do about Trump? You can convince some Americans for awhile that Trump is a Russian agent, or violated an Emoluments Clause thingie they'd never heard of before, just by saying it over and over.