The Matt Gaetz-Pam Bondi Switch

November 22, 2024 Hunter Wallace Conservatism, Politics, Populists 0

UPDATE:

This long Twitter thread explains why I am not upset about Gaetz going down. He screwed himself by associating with these people and it was too late to pull up from his nosedive.

It sucks.

I learned my lesson years ago on this.

Throughout the whole 2024 election cycle, I repeatedly said on X that activists focus too much on Trump and the presidency and neglect Senate races. No matter who is the president it is always the margins in the House and the Senate that determine whether anything gets done.

Here are some recent examples:

  • Obamacare passing on a party line vote in the Senate
  • Kelly Ayotte losing her Senate race in 2016 giving the incoming Trump administration a thin Senate majority controlled by Mitch McConnell to work with
  • John McCain singlehandedly torpedoing Trump’s attempt to repeal Obamacare in 2017
  • Years of grandstanding by people like Jeff Flake
  • Trump governing in a coalition with Senate Republicans and neutering his agenda to appease them because of the threat of impeachment from the Mueller probe
  • The first Trump administration only delivered the First Step Act and the Trump tax cuts because it was the only two things Senate Republicans could agree on
  • The chaos that ensued when Republicans bungled away a key Senate seat to the Democrats here in Alabama when Roy Moore lost to Doug Jones in late 2017. By early 2018, the Trump legislative agenda was dead in the Senate and completely dead after the 2018 midterms
  • In the Georgia runoffs after the 2020 election, Democrats won two key Senate races. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock enabled Democrats to pass the American Rescue Plan which spiked inflation which ultimately destroyed the Biden presidency
  • Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema saved the filibuster
  • The Senate is where most of Joe Biden’s legislative agenda died because of Republicans using the filibuster and opposition from Manchin and Sinema

In Trump’s second term, we can expect the Senate to play its customary role as the place where Trump’s agenda will be blocked. We knew going into the 2024 election that the tighter the margin in the Senate the harder it would be for anything to pass through Congress because it would empower the likes of Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski to play the moderate spoiler which happened with Matt Gaetz.

In 2020, I made two mistakes. I was so angry about Jeff Sessions that I refused to vote for Tommy Tuberville who has proven to be one of the better senators. Then I foolishly endorsed Ossoff and Warnock because I was so angry about with the deficit hawks who were ultimately proved right about inflation.

By the 2022 midterms, I had changed course. Anticipating this problem and reeling from Biden’s inflation, I was willing to support the likes of Dr. Oz, Herschel Walker, Kari Lake and Joe O’Dea in Colorado just to give Trump enough yes men to push through his agenda. In 2024, Republicans dropped four key Senate races in Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin and Michigan and nearly lost in Pennsylvania by a margin of 1% or so because a small percentage of Trump voters failed to vote for Senate candidates. In the process, they bungled away an forfeited an enormous amount of power to Mitch McConnell over Trump’s agenda.

Activists, of course, spent the whole election cycle trying to defeat Trump and all the Senate candidates who would have confirmed his appointments. Now, they will whine about Pam Bondi replacing Matt Gaetz who is out as AG because he is short of ONE VOTE in the Senate. Their whole political program is self sabotage.

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