To Lead, or Not to Lead…THAT is the Question

When John Boehner (R-OH) announced his stepping-down from the House speakership in September of 2015, it was largely due to his inability to lead his majority caucus, and complicated by the surprise defeat of his majority leader, Eric Cantor (R-VA), by a Tea Party conservative upstart, Dave Brat (R-VA), the year before. It was in that year before, that moderate Republicans, who would eventually become NeverTrump Republicans, could not find the political muster to defund ObamaCare, as they very well could have, and the demands for a change in House leadership then fell on the wrong guy- another oh-so-moderate Republican, one Paul Ryan (R-WI).

At the time, one recalls that Congressman Ryan didn’t initially want the job, but because no other Republican had the courage to lead the opposition to Barack Obama, he grudgingly accepted the speakership that Boehner gladly surrendered. Ryan was a national unknown until he became the vice-presidential running mate of yet another oh-so-moderate Republican, one Mitt Romney (R-MA), who had instituted a forerunner of ObamaCare in Massachusetts, when he was governor of that state. Ryan was an attractive, youthful counterpart to the older, ultimate insider Joe Biden, and it was thought he could propel Romney to victory. Yet both were so determined not to risk offense, that they moderated themselves to abject defeat in the 2012 election.

Paul Ryan went on to become Speaker of the House, and promised much if he could only witness a Republican majority in the Senate and, ultimately, in the White House. Ryan proved to be an on-again, off-again supporter of Donald Trump- not speaking at the behest of his party’s nominee until the convention that confirmed Trump’s nomination. In the coming weeks and months, Ryan’s so-called support of Trump waxed and waned with the prevailing winds of public opinion, based on polling that ended up being woefully wrong, in the end. Ryan even cancelled a campaign appearance with Trump, following the release of the Billy Bush recording, and was hedging his bets that Trump would ultimately lose to Hillary Clinton. Yes, the leader of the Republican Party busily prepared himself for a Clinton victory that wasn’t to be, instead of preparing an agenda for a Republican president to pursue.

So, it is this Paul Ryan, the wobbly wooden soldier of all things polite and proper, the perfect professional of political process, in whom Donald Trump entrusted his first legislative foray, taking on the most difficult challenge of all- the repeal and replacement of ObamaCare.

Instead of assembling an intramural team of both conservative and moderate Republicans, in both the House and Senate, to put together a fail-proof bill that would have had the support of most, if not all, of the Republicans in both houses, as true leadership would demand, Ryan played the insider game of crafting a Republican version of ObamaCare and proceeded with printing the bill before it could even be discussed within the Republican House caucus. He proceeded then to misrepresent the level of support for its passage to President Trump, and asked the new president to rally support for a bill not of his own making. Trump did his level best to meet with all factions, and even amended the bill to appease Republicans who were not initially in support of what they viewed to be “ObamaCare Light,” which didn’t exactly repeal ObamaCare and didn’t actually replace it, either. But then the oh-so-moderate Republicans, who are afraid of offending anyone at any time, began to drop off and the bill was doomed, in the end.

Democrats celebrated the failure of this bill as a “rookie mistake” of the Trump presidency and then cynically offered a willingness to work with the president on fixing what ails ObamaCare. Yeah, right.  Democrats would love nothing more than to hang its ultimate failure on a Republican president they despise, rather than face the certitude of its failure, and being held to account for crafting it in the first place.

Donald Trump’s decision to trust Ryan to deliver the votes necessary to pass the bill was indeed a mistake, but nothing would assure the ultimate failure of his own presidency more, than placing his trust in Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). It is Schumer who has urged his caucus to oppose the nomination of the most qualified and excellent Supreme Court nominee in more than a half-century, Neil Gorsuch, and it is Pelosi who infamously once said, “We have to pass the bill so we can find out what’s in it,” putting the nation’s healthcare in the position that it is, today. In trusting the Democrats who so vehemently oppose his presidency, to a level never seen by an opposition party in U.S. history, Trump would be a damned fool to go down that rosy path to perdition…ever.

Despite the president’s unwillingness to blame Ryan and the House Republican leadership for the bill’s failure, the fact is that the House Republican leadership has now abrogated any level of trust with the administration in pursuing legislation, going forward. Ryan will remain the Speaker of the House for the time being, but any chance of his being an effective leader of House Republicans has gone with the winds of time and circumstance.

So what is a Donald, or more appropriately, “the Donald” to do?

If President Trump wants to realize any hope of success in achieving his legislative agenda, he is going to have to draft his own legislation, submit it to Congress, and take to the airwaves to garner support for it from the public-at-large, much as former President Ronald Reagan did early in his first term, to prompt public support for his tax cuts. Reagan accomplished getting his way, despite a substantial Democrat majority in the House of Representatives. Trump has already shown an ability to gain public support, as evidenced by the response to his first speech to both houses of congress in February. To a public who is hungry for tax cuts and reform to the tax code, this would be a cinch for the President, and would prevent the spineless Republicans in the House and Senate from watering the bill down to a complete “nothing-burger,” something that oh-so-moderate Republicans are expertized in doing.

Essentially, the success or failure of Donald Trump’s presidency is now inexorably dependent upon his own ability and his own propensity to lead, because the GOP’s leadership, in both houses, once again proved that they are unable to lead, for the fear of their own failure.

In essence, to lead or not to lead, that is the question, for leadership requires a willingness to put oneself on the line, and that is the question for President Donald J. Trump, going forward.

 

-Drew Nickell, 26 March 2017

© 2017 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.

author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”

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…and, with the coming of spring…

All happening with concurrence and breakneck speed, there’s so much to consider and so much to say, that one can hardly keep up with it all.

For instance, there are the consternation hearings, on the part of Democrats, on Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch. Try as they might, the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee cannot find one legitimate reason to oppose his nomination, other than the fact that it was Donald Trump who nominated Gorsuch and that Obama’s late-term nominee Merrick Garland didn’t get a hearing, last year.

Time was when the “world’s greatest deliberative body” could come to consensus on nominees of Gorsuch’s caliber but, now that the chamber is exclusively defined by party, such consensus cannot be achieved and therefore has rendered the purpose of the Senate’s advice and consent function, moot. Gorsuch will soon join the eight justices who sit on the Supreme Court, as his nomination will survive, one way or another. He is eminently the most qualified nominee since Antonin Scalia, and quite possibly the best nominee put forth in our lifetime, going back to the Eisenhower presidency. He believes that judges are simply there to interpret the law and keep the law within the confines of the U.S. Constitution. He does not fit the mold of activist judges, preferred by Democrats, who legislate from the bench to create those laws which Democrats cannot otherwise achieve through legislation. Therefore, it’s time for these hearings to end, time for Mitch McConnell to evoke the nuclear option, so that Judge Gorsuch will be on hand to render asunder the wacky rulings of U.S. circuit court judges who seek to stop President Trump any way they can. Enough is enough.

Then there is the issue of the president’s tweets on “wiretapping.” Once again, the mainstream media lends voice to the anti-Trump opposition in both parties, to place aspersions on his claims that the Obama administration placed surveillance on the Trump team following the election. Now it is coming to light, as President Trump said it would, that such surveillance took place and, regardless of whether or not the surveillance was legal, the dissemination of the surveillance to a multitude of agencies- thanks to the last-minute executive order signed by Barack Obama- made it inevitable that some Obama crony would unmask the names of the U.S. citizens caught up in the incidental findings, and release these transcripts for purely political and partisan reasons- a felonious crime by any measure.  It would be most unwise to hold one’s breath, awaiting the mainstream media to acknowledge that, once again, they got it wrong, but it will ultimately be shown that Trump was subjected to the most hostile predecessor’s transition in U. S. history, and that will be Obama’s lasting legacy.

Once again, just as Democrats show they do not know how to behave themselves when they lose an election, Republicans insist on showing that they do not know how to function effectively when they win an election. The repeal and replacement of ObamaCare should have been an easily-achievable “slam dunk,” given the national mandate from voters who demanded that ObamaCare must go. Yet, once again, Republicans cannot decide whether they are moderate Democrat-wannabes, globalist mainstreamers, free-market conservatives or quasi-libertarians. So, in order to be all of these, they cannot seem to agree on how to do anything, namely, use their majorities in both houses to upend ObamaCare and provide a better solution for everyone else.

It’s no wonder, for the fact that many Republicans still cannot make up their minds whether they are for Trump, or against him. Regardless, the American Health Care Act that is being offered up by House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), and supported by the president, doesn’t quite repeal ObamaCare and doesn’t quite fix the health insurance problem in America. Even though Democrats will universally vote against the bill, they secretively and furtively hope that it will pass, so that they can escape blame for the coming and inevitable collapse of ObamaCare. Nothing would bring down the costs of healthcare like the entire eradication of health insurance altogether, but that is never going to happen, so we must await the machinations of lessers, instead.

Finally, the ill-effects of multi-culturalism, inclusion and relaxed immigration policies tragically come to light in horrors visited on the United States and the United Kingdom, concurrently. In England, tolerance for radical Islamic ideology brings on an attack on London’s Westminster Bridge, as an Islamic radical, British-borne, slams his rented vehicle into a pedestrian crowd, killing three and injuring more than twenty. He goes on to murder a British police officer with a knife, before the assailant is ultimately gunned down on the grounds of the Houses of Parliament. For too long, British politicians have indulged Islamists to proselytize their radical theology in the U.K. and are now faced with the cancer of Islamic extremism within the realm of Great Britain.

Here, in the United States, failure to enforce immigration laws results in two illegals from Central America, aged 17 and 18, insanely placed into the ninth grade class at Rockville High School, in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC. The two forced a 14-year-old girl into the bathroom and raped her in a most vile and disgusting way. Maryland’s House of Delegates responds to the rape by voting to make Maryland a sanctuary for illegals and, in so doing, guarantee that such incidents continue to occur, unabated. Leave it once again, to liberal Democrats in the Old Line State, to pursue the policies of political correctness above the need to keep its citizens safe. Maryland, oft-described as “America-in-miniature,” is a microcosm of what ails the nation- liberal dogma and ideology which can achieve nothing in the end but the ultimate destruction of the United States of America.

 

…and all of this was just…yesterday.

 

-Drew Nickell, 23 March 2017

© 2017 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.

author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”

now available at Amazon

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Their Mission: Trumpus Interruptus

Less than two months into his presidency, it is truly a wonder that President Trump has been able to accomplish much of anything- that is, given all of the forces set against him. With a mainstream media which seeks to cast none but aspersions onto his presidency, unified Democrats who have sworn to oppose him in each and every possible way, federal government employees, unaccepting of his election, who leak anything and everything to make him look bad, the NeverTrump Republicans who are desperately seeking anything they can find, to justify their anti-Trump behavior during the campaign, his is a presidency holding firm against a tsunami of opposition.  The demise of Donald Trump’s presidency seems to be an almost universal sentiment, if not an all-encompassing goal.

The Democrats and their complicit allies in the mainstream media will lie, distort and demagogue without restraint to short-circuit the president, even if it means that President Trump will enter his third month still shy of a full cabinet. Despite the fact that candidate Trump could have been, and most likely was, subject to surveillance on his predecessor’s orders without warrant (as the president is able to do under law), nothing has surfaced which would lay credence to the myth of Trump/Russian collusion. Yet, this will be the oft-stated mantra of the Media/Democrat alliance for the remainder of his presidency. The Democrats, as well as their allies in the mainstream media know better, but this won’t stop them from drumming out the lie, regardless. Should the Russia card fail to confuse the public, the racism, sexism and xenophobe cards all await play in the hands of Democrats- all because Donald Trump had the nerve to win the election over Hillary Clinton. So what if the country is splitting apart, based on these lies? Being a liberal means never having to say you’re sorry.

Their mission: Trumpus Interruptus.

Despite all of that, he has accomplished quite a lot nevertheless. Through executive orders which he has signed- and only one has been stopped by lawyers opposed to his presidency- he has checked off many, if not most, of the promises he made to the American people during his campaign. The early indicators are that business has responded favorably to these initiatives, and a new national optimism is emerging in the wake of his presidency. Whatever his enemies (and they are legion) have to say against him, the American people are beginning to witness a growing surge in support for what he in fact is accomplishing.

In his first attempt to pursue legislative action, he has taken on the most difficult task first- the repeal and replacement of ObamaCare.

No domestic issue is more fraught with political peril, nor complicated to its core, nor nuanced with an effective double-edged sword than dealing with the national disaster that is health insurance, today. Whatsoever was wrong with health insurance prior to Barack Obama’s presidency was hardly worth the effort to fix it by bringing down the entire health insurance market for everyone else. To leave the ACA as is, and thereby let it fail, places its ultimate failure exclusively on the Democrats, which would be the strategically cynical and partisan thing for Republicans to do. Republicans who, by and large, would rather fall on their own swords in pursuit of what they deem to be is right, have thus taken on the burden of fixing a system which Democrats engineered to eventually fail, in order to bring about nationalized and socialized health insurance for all. Leave it to the House Republicans to break this purported effort to repeal and replace ObamaCare into three steps, which well could be accomplished in one, if only Senate Republicans would do away with the decades-old Robert Byrd (D-WV) rule which sets a standard of approval at a filibuster-proof threshold. Nothing in the Constitution requires this- only a rule which the Senate is empowered to change, at will. With a little spine, Republicans could get everything they want, including a thorough divorce from health insurance by the federal government, medical malpractice liability reform and the severing of state boundaries to the health insurance market, and send all of the regulating power back to the states where it belongs, pursuant to the Tenth Amendment.

But will they?

While Democrats sit back and laugh at the clumsiness of their Republican colleagues, President Trump has been put into a position to show support for the Republicans’ American Health Care Act, on the sheer basis that it is better than ObamaCare- that is a pretty low bar, by any standard. It’s no wonder that his administration is reticent to place their name on something that may not pass, in the end, due to a unified Democrat minority and a fractured Republican majority, in both houses of Congress.

The sad fact of the matter is that Democrats don’t know how to behave themselves when they lose, and Republicans don’t know how to function when they win. In their mutual intransigence, the nation hangs in balance.

Sadly, for President Donald J. Trump, so may his presidency.

 

-Drew Nickell, 15 March 2017

© 2017 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.

author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”

now available at Amazon

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Our Dirty (not so) Little Secrets

Relax- this is not X-rated.

It’s something that parents should share with their teenaged children. In fact, it’s something that we wish our parents had shared with us, when we were coming of age.

First fact of life- Unless one is born, raised, lives and dies on a deserted, uncharted island, there is no such thing as privacy- anywhere. For instance, our ninety-five-year-old mother never once paid a bill on-line, never once opened an on-line bank account, and went through life thinking that her financial information, her medical information, and even her school records were strictly off-line…fat chance. Even her father’s immigration to the United States, in July of 1901, is detailed on-line, and so is everyone else’s. On the other side of our family, the fact that we were able to determine that our great, great, great, great grandfather fought in the American Revolution, and what he was paid for his services to the young nation (it wasn’t much, by the way) was found, courtesy of the internet. The fact that his father was indentured for seven years, to pay for his passage from the British Isles, was also found, courtesy of the internet.

Second fact of life- Don’t let our government, the mainstream media, nor politicians of either party ever fool you. Whether you are the president of the United States, a government employee, a corporate employee, a sole proprietor in business for yourself, a student, or for that matter, an indigent, our government can and will, without warrant, spy on you. They have been doing this for many years. The fact that you do not know this is merely because you haven’t, as yet, done anything to warrant prosecution. We have even arrived at a point in time when governmental employees, not pleased with recent election results, can and do eavesdrop on the president’s “secured” telephone lines, and release transcripts of his conversations to the media in order to embarrass, humiliate and sabotage any chance of his doing his job safely and securely.  If they can do this on “secured” White House telephone lines, it’s assured they can also do this at his former residence, in a Manhattan building that bears his name. His predecessor can deny, deny, deny all he wants to, but this is the same predecessor that told Bill O’Reilly that there was “not a smidgen of corruption” in an Internal Revenue Service that targeted private citizens who were opposed to his policies. This same former president’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, perjured himself in a congressional hearing when he said that the government was not collecting phone data on its citizens, so why would any sane person believe him when he says that Donald Trump’s telephone lines were not tapped, ever. The media will keep telling you about Trump’s ties to the Russians, but this is a lie, too. If there were any such ties, we would have heard about it by now. Rest assured that Hillary Clinton would have told us long before Election Day, after gaining the information from her supporters in the government and in the media.

Third fact of life- Dissuade yourself of the fallacy that filing your taxes on paper forms, hand written, means that your social security number and financial information is secure, simply because you didn’t e-file your tax returns. This is another fantasy. All of the information provided on your tax returns, regardless of how filed, has been logged in on government computers, which is why your earnings are reported on a social security statement, mailed yearly, which enumerates your earnings going back to your first part-time job as a teenager. Names can change but social security numbers never do.

Fourth fact of life- Anyone with a substantial dose of technical expertise, and a stubborn intent to do so with “due diligence”, can and will find out anything they want to about your own personal life, regardless of the nature of what you believe to be secret, which is why we get spam e-mail on how to maintain or reduce our blood sugar, why we get weekly phone calls from different sources offering to extend our warranties on our automobile (they know the make, model and year) , and why we get mailed reminders that the warranties on our appliances have expired. If your children run into credit issues, the collectors will call you wanting to know if your child is available to the phone, even when they haven’t lived with you in a decade. This is also why a prospective employer can go on-line and retrieve your history of traffic violations, not to mention more serious peccadillos from your past.

So while the entire world can know each and every little “dirty secret” you think you hold in your heart, so now can the world know all of the dirty little secrets that our intelligence communities hold in their confidential file folders.

Just ask Julian Assange.

 

-Drew Nickell, 10 March 2017

© 2017 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.

author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”

now available at Amazon

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Drew Nickell on Radio Today, 2 March 2017 at 1:00 PM EST

 

Drew Nickell is back on the radio as today’s guest on the Nora Firestone show on WKQA-AM, 1110 in Hampton Roads. He will be discussing current events surrounding the Trump presidency, and the political environment surrounding his administration. Here is a link to that live broadcast :

http://lightningstream.surfernetwork.com/Media/player/view/WKQA-AM_gsl.asp?StreamingServerName=nick11&OnDemandServerName=nick10&targetWidth=1000&targetHeight=800&call=WKQA-AM&od=0

The Reset- Trump’s Address to a Disjointed Session of Congress

Last night, before a worldwide audience, President Donald Trump masterfully delivered his first presidential address to both houses of congress. Widely hailed as the best speech he has ever given, the new president stuck to his stated themes of “unity and strength… in a message deeply delivered from (his) heart.”

Recounting the many executive actions taken thus far, in an administration all of six weeks old, the president outlined a broad legislative agenda, enumerated the economic challenges facing the nation- including unemployment, stagnant economic growth, growing dependence on food stamps, and an $800 billion dollar trade deficit. Calling on both houses of congress, he beseeched both parties to join together in solving these problems:

“…solving these, and so many other pressing problems, will require us to work past the differences of party. It will require us to tap into the American spirit that has overcome every challenge throughout our long and storied history.”

To look at most of the Democrats, many of whom boycotted his inauguration, it was as though they were not listening at all to the president’s call for unity, and instead sat there calculating how they might possibly spin their post-address commentary to their dwindling liberal base. Their churlishness and contempt, based on little more than utter hate for the man who upset their dreams of a Hillary presidency, showed them to be petulant children unhappy with not getting their way… and the more they complain, the smaller they seem. While they can get away with such bad behavior in the short term, Americans will continue to grow weary of their partisan posturing, and it will be the Democrats who continue their dive into the wilderness of fewer numbers and shrinking support.

While a few Democrats, most notably Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), were moved to give several standing ovations, most Republicans enthusiastically received the speech, rising to their feet upwards of eighty times. A few, like Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and his #NeverTrump aide-de-camp, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), bore noticeably sour-puss expressions much like their Democrat counterparts but, after all, they are just as unhappy about Trump’s election and therefore cannot help themselves but to throw water on the president’s campfire.

Nevertheless, remaining Republicans now have a president who will work with them on the key issues of repealing and replacing ObamaCare, revising the tax code and providing for national security, both at our border and around the world- and one, by the way, who is not afraid to name the enemy for who and what it actually is- Radical Islamic Terrorism.

The mainstream media even chimed in, condescendingly saying that as a result of the speech, Donald Trump was, at long last, President of the United States- that the speech might well prove to be the much ballyhooed “reset” of the Trump presidency- from the “dark campaign mode” of Donald Trump to a brighter, “more presidential mode” befitting the office he holds.

Well, it was a reset- but not the kind of reset the mainstream media has in mind.

The “reset” President Trump delivered was rather to those in the television audience who, for the first time, heard the man speak without the partisan and disparaging spin, oft-provided by his political opponents and their partisan allies in the mainstream media. Considering the fact that he won the presidency with less than half of the popular vote, and even though his approval ratings are supposedly in the low-to-mid forties, the speech proved to be a home-run for the president, based upon follow-up polling that showed a 69% optimistic response (as compared to a 28% pessimistic response) to his address.

Essentially, only the most strident opponents to the president could be critical of an address so adroitly delivered, so artfully composed, and so succinctly clear in message and mindset.

While it is still very early in the administration, there can be no doubt that there is a new president who, given the support of his own Republican party, is perfectly poised to make meaningful and much-needed change in Washington, DC.

Furthermore, there is now a notable benchmark that has been set to adjudge his presidency, going forward.

The more carping on the part of his opponents, the more criticism on the part of the mainstream media, the more successful President Trump will be in delivering on the promises he has made to the American people…

…and for all of those who trudged through the last eight years, “ain’t we got fun?”

 

-Drew Nickell, 1 March 2017

© 2017 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.

author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”

now available at Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/Bending-Your-Ear-Collection-Essays/dp/1633932907?ie=UTF8&ref_=asap_bc

Signed and personalized editions now available at my website:

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