THE FOUNDATION
“A single assembly is liable to all the vices, follies, and frailties of an individual; subject to fits of humor, starts of passion, flights of enthusiasm, partialities, or prejudice, and consequently productive of hasty results and absurd judgments. And all these errors ought to be corrected and defects supplied by some controlling power.” –John Adams, Thoughts on Government, 1776
U.S. Marine Corps Birthday
On Nov. 10, 1775, the Second Continental Congress resolved to create two battalions of Continental Marines for the War of Independence from Britain. In 1798, President John Adams signed the Act establishing the United States Marine Corps. The 13th Commandant of the Marine Corps, General John A. Lejeune, issued Marine Corps Order No. 47, Series 1921, directing that on Nov. 10 every year, in honor of the Corps' birthday, the Order’s summary of the history, mission and tradition of the Corps be read to every command.
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TOP 5 RIGHT HOOKS
The Supreme Court agreed Friday to hear the ObamaCare case involving subsidies on the federal exchange. According to the letter of the law, only state exchanges can offer customers premium subsidies. Since 36 states opted not to set up an exchange, however, the Obama administration decided unilaterally to allow buyers on the federal exchange at Healthcare.gov to have access to those same subsidies. The issue of subsidies is critical because they are the only way much of the American public can afford to comply with the stringent requirements and onerous fees of the so-called “Affordable” Care Act. If the subsidy provisions are gutted, ObamaCare’s house of cards collapses. Arguments will be heard in the spring of 2015, with a decision likely in June. A three-judge panel of the DC Circuit Court already ruled correctly, but the court’s leftists also agreed to an en banc rehearing, so it’s curious the justices are basically nullifying that case. Technically, the court is taking up the challenge heard by the Fourth Circuit Court, but it’s the same legal argument. Will the Roberts Court finally get it right on one of the worst laws this nation has ever seen? If not, how in the world will they save the law from itself this time? More…
The White House named Loretta Lynch, the U.S. attorney that handles cases in Brooklyn, Long Island and Queens, as Eric Holder’s replacement for attorney general Saturday. Obama’s pick is political because of how apolitical it is. The Senate unanimously confirmed Lynch twice before to different positions. And Republican senators Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham say they don’t see much of a problem with Lynch in the AG spot. This likely forces the GOP to do Obama’s bidding in this nomination. At the White House, Lynch said, “The Department of Justice is the only Cabinet Department named for an ideal. And this is actually appropriate, because our work is both aspirational, and grounded in gritty reality.” Unlike her predecessor, let’s hope Lynch doesn’t equate “aspirational” and “gritty reality” to dirty politics. Still, we’re not holding our breath. More…
In September, Barack Obama made a non-committal commitment to fight ISIL in Iraq without U.S. troops being involved in any fighting. “American forces will not have a combat mission – we will not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq,” he insisted. “It will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.” So how’s that going? Well, now he says, “As commander in chief, I’m never going to say never.” The New York Times reports, “President Obama has authorized the deployment of an additional 1,500 American troops to Iraq in the coming months, doubling the number of Americans meant to train and advise Iraqi and Kurdish forces. The trainers and advisers are to help Iraqis and Kurds as they plan a major offensive expected next spring against Islamic State fighters who have poured into Iraq from Syria.” Granted, these *are" “trainers and advisers,” not combat troops, but what happens if the fight comes to them? Additionally, the Times notes, “White House budget officials said they would ask Congress for $5 billion for military operations in the Middle East against the Islamic State, including $1.6 billion to train and equip Iraqi troops.” Obama’s clearly trying to clean up the mess he created without admitting he was dead wrong about abandoning Iraq in 2011. More…
The minute Congress passes immigration reform, Barack Obama will gladly sign the bill and it will be the law of the land, according to his latest political offer. The bill will have more authority than Obama could ever muster, he says. But the offer is too good to be true. “I’m going to do what I can do through executive action,” Obama said. “It’s not going to be everything that needs to get done. And it will take time to put that in place. And in the interim, the minute they pass a bill that addresses the problems of immigration reform, I will sign it, and it supersedes whatever actions I take. … If in fact a bill gets passed, nobody is going to be happier than me to sign it because that means it will be permanent, not temporary.” But this move, giving up power and influence, is so unlike Obama. National Review’s Rich Lowry says Obama’s move is essentially blackmail. As if to further provoke, Obama added cynically, “[N]obody is stopping them.” More…
On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Barack Obama said the election emboldened him to continue his political strategy to govern without Congress. “The buck stops right here, at my desk,” Obamatold Bob Schieffer. “So whenever, as head of the party, it doesn’t do well, I’ve got to take responsibility for it. The message that I took from this election … is people want to see this city work. And they feel as if it’s not working. … So I’ve got to make this city work better for them.” But later, he admitted, “[C]ampaigning and governance are two different things. … When you start governing, there is a tendency sometimes for me to start thinking, as long as I get the policy right then that’s what should matter. And people have asked, ‘What do you need to do differently going forward?’ And I think you do that gut check after every election.” Obama has made his gut check – this election was a referendum on the way he did policies, not the policies themselves. The buck never stops with him.
For more, visit Right Hooks.
RIGHT ANALYSIS
Outgoing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) broke character after the wave Republican election victory with a conciliatory statement to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who will be the new sheriff in town come January. Reid said, “I’d like to congratulate Sen. McConnell, who will be the new Senate majority leader. The message from voters is clear: They want us to work together.” Oh, now let’s get along.
Reid’s plea for comity after his iron-fisted rule is laughable to the point of tears. As for his take on the message voters sent, well, he was going to put whatever spin on it he needed to save face.
The real message from the voters on Tuesday was that Americans are fed up with Democrats' big-government experiment. After six years of Obama in the White House and eight years of Reid’s mob controlling the Senate, it’s abundantly clear that leftist government doesn’t work. Of course, the cold, hard facts of history have proved this time and again, but people have to learn at their own pace.
Reid’s statement does not in any way indicate we will now see a kinder, gentler man from Nevada. At age 75, this lifetime politician has always had a reputation for being rude and downright miserable. Being humiliated on such a historic scope is unlikely to teach this old dog new tricks.
Since assuming the leadership when Democrats took the Senate in 2006, Reid almost singlehandedly poisoned what was once an august governing body. The Senate was designed by the Founders to be a deliberative chamber, where slow, reasoned debate and special rules and measures would counterbalance the simple majority rule of the House. Senators didn’t lose power simply by being in the minority. Procedure would keep the machinery of republican government humming, but at a reasonable pace to keep the majority party from running roughshod over the country and jamming an unsupported agenda down the nation’s collective throat.
With the full support of Barack Obama, Reid set out to change all that.
Reid’s single biggest destructive act was evoking the so-called nuclear option – eliminating the filibuster from Senate voting procedures for most nominations. Upset at Republicans blocking activist liberal judicial nominees, Reid yanked the filibuster out of the rulebook in November 2013 in order to get Obama’s nominees a series of up-and-down votes. McConnell likened the action to Obama’s famous lie about ObamaCare: “[Reid] might just as well have said, ‘If you like the rules of the Senate, you can keep them.’”
The hypocrisy was astounding, and it wasn’t lost on midterm voters. In 2005, Senate Democrats, then in the minority, brought the chamber to a standstill to block a number of George W. Bush’s judicial nominees. When talk of the nuclear option surfaced at the time, then-Sen. Barack Obama said, “The talk of the ‘nuclear option’ is more about power than fairness.” Then-Sen. Joe Biden added, “The nuclear option is ultimately an example of the arrogance of power.” What a difference being in the majority can have on your view of fairness and power.
It’s unclear if McConnell will restore the filibuster – especially when many Senate Republicans are eager to give Reid a dose of his own medicine. Sen. Orin Hatch (R-UT), who called Reid a “pathetic majority leader,” wrote, “To restore the [filibuster] rule now, after Mr. Obama has installed his controversial judges, would cement a part of some double standard: when Democrats controlled the White House and Senate, judicial nominations need only 50 votes; but when Republicans control both, judicial nominees require 60 votes, allowing Democratic minorities to block Republican nominations.” Hatch declared that now is no time to “unilaterally disarm.”
Reid has personally insulted Republicans in front of reporters, baselessly accused them of corruption, and buried hundreds of perfectly good bills that came from the House simply because they were Republican bills. His one-man war against the Koch brothers was another sign of just how vindictive Reid can be – to the point of assaulting First Amendment rights.
Reid’s office is confident he will be elected minority leader for the next congressional term. He did receive public support from Senate Democrat leadership and many members, but that was before Tuesday’s pounding. He has fallen in line with many key Democrats in drumming up excuses for their losses – racist Americans, dumb Americans, poor voter turnout (lazy Americans), and so forth. At this point, though, no Democrat senator has come forward and publicly blamed Reid or challenged him for the leadership.
McConnell could put pressure on Dems to get rid of Reid by freezing them out of the committee process or squeezing them in other procedural ways; essentially falling back on tactics that Reid used with impunity. McConnell could lock things up until Dems get their house in order, but that could be a dangerous move. The Republicans won their big victory Tuesday not so much because they had broad public support, but because Democrats had completely squandered their own support. Any moves that smack of Reid-style politics could anger voters further. And there’s a White House to win in 2016.
For now, it looks like Reid might remain with us, but if he has to hold any position of power in the Senate, minority leader sure has a nice ring to it.
Many realities utterly anathema to Democrats' divide-and-conquer strategy for winning elections revealed themselves last Tuesday. Yet perhaps the one that threatens their future far more than any other is the reality that, for the first time in decades, the Democrat race narrative is starting to crumble. Suddenly, black America’s invariably reliable allegiance to their party is in play.
What more and more black Americans may now be realizing is the party they’ve hitched their wagon to for five-plus decades is still telling them things have barely changed for the better, if they have changed at all – and that maybe, just maybe, 50 years of unquestioning allegiance producing virtually no improvement means it’s time for a change.
Read the rest here.
The only one refusing to accept the voters' full-throated rejection of the failed leftist policies of the Democrats is Barack Obama. But with this welcomed new equation, what will the GOP do?
In developing strategy, more than mere mechanics are involved. The strategy of the GOP majorities must be to enact the will of the American people. And the elected Republicans of the House and Senate would do well by answering a few questions.
Read the rest here.
For more, visit Right Analysis.
TOP 5 RIGHT OPINION COLUMNS
For more, visit Right Opinion.
OPINION IN BRIEF
The Gipper: “Today we did what we had to do. They counted on America to be passive. They counted wrong.”
Columnist Peggy Noonan: “It is confounding – not surprising but stunning, unhelpful and ill-judged – that the president is … going for antagonism, combat and fruitless friction. This is not just poor strategy, it seems to me to be mildly delusional. Chris Matthews erupted on MSNBC: ‘There’s something in this guy that just plays to his constituency and acts like there’s no other world out there!’ That’s true. And deeply strange in a politician. It’s as if he doesn’t think he has to work with others, he only has to be right. I think Mr. Obama sees himself as a centrist because he often resists the pressures of the leftward-most edge of his base. Therefore in his imagination he is in the middle, the center. If he is in the middle of a great centrist nation, how can they turn on him? The answer: They are confused. This is their flaw, not his. He’s not going to let their logical flaws change his game. … The president here is doing what he has been doing for a while, helping Republicans look good. That is an amazing strategy for a Democratic president to adopt.”
Columnist Larry Kudlow: “Here’s a stunning question and answer from Edison Research, which interviewed 18,000 voters around the country as they left the polls on Nov. 4: Do you think Hillary Clinton would make a good president? Yes: 42 percent. No: 52 percent. Whether she’s the frontrunner or not, a majority of midterm-election voters don’t want her running the country.* … But here’s the kicker – my absolute favorite: In the 2016 presidential election, for whom would you be more likely to vote? Hillary Clinton (Dem): 24 percent. The Republican candidate: 40 percent. That’s right. The yet-to-be-named Republican beats Hillary. I guess she shouldn’t have said businesses don’t create jobs. Or maybe voters remember her Russian reset with Putin, her calling Bashar Assad a ‘reformer’ we can do business with, or her ‘who cares’ exclamation about how the U.S. base in Benghazi was destroyed. Or maybe the old Bill Clinton magic is not rubbing off anymore. But the fact is, the exit polls say Ole Hillary would lose to a Republican no-name. And at the margin, Tuesday’s election has probably re-scrambled the Republican deck.”
Comedian Jimmy Fallon: “After Michael Jordan recently criticized President Obama’s golf game, Obama responded by saying that Jordan should spend more time thinking about his basketball team, the Charlotte Hornets. Then Jordan said, ‘Do you really want to talk about whose team got crushed this week?’”
Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
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