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Saints!

Thursday
March 28th, 2024
L&T Opinions Page

earl wattL&T Publisher Earl Watt

 

A recent opinion shared on CNN’s website by Nicole Hemmer defended Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, A Democrat, for dismissing two Republican members of the Jan. 6 Commission, Jim Jordan and Jim Banks, both of whom have shown concern about the 2020 election process.

In response, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy pulled all of his people from the committee.

One Republican, Liz Cheney, will remain on the committee, but she has already shown herself to be completely in support of the accusation that the protest at the capitol was spearheaded by Donald Trump and was a failed attempt to overthrow the government.

Pelosi’s decision to ban any Republican who doesn’t support her claims from serving on a bipartisan committee in search of the truth is a tell-tale sign that bipartisanship may be truly dead, and Hemmer’s piece on CNN believes it should be.

Doing away with bipartisanship only benefits two constituencies — the most liberal leadership and socialists.

Congress is the most evenly divided it has been (with the exception of two years that were close to the same in the 1990s) as it has been in more than three generations.

Congress has always found a way to work within the split because it had responsible leadership on both sides.

While I may be a conservative to the core, I also understand that compromise is required of our lawmakers, and I also understand the party in power will get more legislation in its favor than the party in the minority.

But Hemmer suggests bipartisanship is simply a myth that, while there may be some benefit from bipartisanship, unilateral control is a better avenue.

Each side believes this to be true from their perspective. If only our side made all the rules, the other side would see just how much better the world would be, or so that is what we think.

The comments I routinely see on my column is proof positive the other side wants no compromise whatsoever. The comments on articles on compromise are met with the predictable dogma that could be found on the daily Democratic talking points.

It’s the same from the Republican side as well.

Leadership requires the ability to support a proposal that may not have everything you wanted.

The founding fathers were not all sold on independence. They weren’t all sold on the Constitution. They each had a reason to reject it. But they also had a reason to support it.

Democracy isn’t clean, and the events of Jan. 6 are proof positive that trust in the system is just as important as the system itself. This protest turned into a riot, and it was no different than any other riot we have seen in the past year.

Protests can be unruly, but they are necessary in a democracy, whether you agree with the messaging or not.

It would be very easy to keep society neat and tidy with no protests or riots, but that would mean the elimination of the freedom of speech, or the ability to speak out against the government.

We currently already have a situation where the government is colluding with social media outlets to direct what speech is allowed and what is not simply by tagging some speech as “disinformation.”

The British did the same thing 245 years ago when people dared say they could govern themselves.

The movement against bipartisan speech is under way. Speech must be uniform and agreed upon, and that is dangerous and part of the one-party rule being advocated by Hemmer and the vast majority of the media.

Unpopular ideas like eliminating voter identification could never pass with bipartisan support. A monmouth University poll showed 80 percent of the people support voter identification to cast a ballot. But the fringe 18 percent who do not support voter identification control the majority of Congress, even just barely, and Hemmer advocates they pass such unpopular legislation because they can. And make the District of Columbia and Puerto Rica states. And require mass mailing of ballots that were not requested, and pass a social re-engineering scheme paid for by $3.6 trillion without one Republican vote.

In her view, it’s ok because that way of thinking benefits the far left and socialists.

These changes are hard to build coalitions, and when those rare moments occur of one-party control, she believes you wield that authority like a mace rather than govern to the middle.

If the other side, the conservative side, should somehow be able to win a majority after one-siding the process, Hemmer knows it won’t hurt the socialist cause because they will have entrenched their policy. As en example, Barack Obama used an executive order to create the DACA program which allowed underage illegal migrants to be free from deportation. It did not have the power of a duly passed law, but when Trump wrote an executive order cancelling the program, a socialist federal judge rejected Trump’s equal right as president to rescind an executive order.

Recently a judge has ruled DACA to be unconstitutional and suspended further applications to the program from being approved. This judge was appointed by George W. Bush.

But the one-party method Hemmer wants, and many liberal Democrats want, is to stack the Supreme Court to continue to expand one-party rule.

And, if conservatives somehow gained control, and they added more seats to the Supreme Court, so what? The socialist advancement and dependence on government would be too great to reverse.

Addiction is never good, even though we believe it is. It’s funny how the taste of alcohol, or even a chocolate bar, or the smell of burning tobacco can lure us into something that seemed so beneficial at first only to lead to deadly consequences later.

One-party rule is that same addictive drug, and the power is intoxicating. The problem is it moves the needle on limited government, and by the time we all realize we are no longer individuals, it will be too late. One party rule is a dangerous drug.

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