…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
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:
Follow my postings on the RSS feed: http://www.drewnickell.com/?feed=rss2