It’s high time someone in the Republican Party told Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to turn all that bombastic self-serving showmanship and drama queen energy on Democrats, and stop trying to defeat her own party.
The Georgia Republican, who famously displayed sexually explicit photos of Hunter Bidenduring a committee hearing and called fellow Rep. Lauren Boebert a bitch on the House floor, is known for wild antics and equally harebrained conspiracy theories.
Currently, she is threatening to oust Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson. The Louisiana representative, with a five-vote majority in the House, is attempting to keep his caucus intact as he navigates treacherous issues including funding Ukraine, which has become unpopular with some conservatives, and reauthorizing the controversial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. He also struggled to pass a funding bill, which required relying on Democrats to get another big spending package over the threshold.
To be sure, not all Republicans approve of spending billions more to arm Ukraine, especially since our own border remains wide open; many in the GOP wanted Johnson to demand border enforcement in exchange for support of Kyiv. Ukraine is one of the most corrupt countries in the world (which is perhaps why Hunter Biden was so richly employed there), and it’s not clear that America’s billions sent to fight Vladimir Putin have all been spent towards that end. There is almost certainly inadequate oversight, as I wrote early in the war.
Nonetheless, countering Russia’s power-mad dictator is the right thing to do. Putin’s ambitions will not stop at Ukraine. The next target might well be a NATO ally, which would put U.S. boots on the ground.
Though the war has taken a terrible toll on the valiant people of Ukraine, it has revealed Russia to be vulnerable. If President Biden had allowed an all-out aggressive war against Moscow, we would not be at a seeming stalemate. Because he dithered, Ukraine is now losing ground and urgently needs weapons and ammunition. This can be remedied; we need to provide the funding and push the White House to outline the path to victory.
As to the FISA, Republicans are wary of allowing warrantless surveillance and rightly so. The law has been abused in the past, and is most hated today for having enabled surveillance of the Trump campaign by Hillary Clinton’s apparatchiks. Nonetheless, it was not that long ago that the U.S. came under attack by Islamic terrorists; given the millions who have entered the country illegally since Biden became president, hundreds of whom are on the terror watch list, it is imperative that we up our vigilance against terrorism, not dumb it down.
Mike Johnson opposed the FISA renewal in the past; asked why he changed his mind, he said that having received a classified briefing on the issue, he had changed his mind. I believe him.
Greene, who was elected by a total of 170,162 voters in 2022 in a district that the Cook Report rates R+22, doesn’t like any of it and would rather burn down the House, metaphorically speaking, than work towards the greater good. The greater good, unless she and her fellow discontents in Congress have forgotten, is defeating Joe Biden in November.
Our country is facing enormous challenges, many the result of the wrong-headed and dangerous polices of the Biden White House.
If Biden wins four more years in the Oval Office, we will be forced to travel even further down the road towards erratic and unreliable green energy while our bounteous and inexpensive domestic oil and gas resources go to waste.
If Democrats win control of Congress, which Ms. Greene may well facilitate, they will likely push through tax increases that will undermine investment and productivity, thereby depressing wage increases, and open the door to even more wasteful spending. We will see a further erosion of law enforcement, and conceivably millions more people entering the country illegally. Our education system will continue to deteriorate and an entire new generation of inner-city boys and girls will emerge from that system unable to move up our ladder of opportunity.
Democrats will push to empower unions, trampling the rights of those who choose not to join, and may attempt to pack the Supreme Court in order to ramrod through measures like widespread student loan forgiveness and “clean” energy mandates which the court in its wisdom has prevented.
In short, there is much at stake.
