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Were the Capitol Rioters Christ-Followers?

Elana Schor wrote an unhelpful article titled “Christianity on Display at the Capitol Riot Sparks New Debate” for the Associated Press (AP) on Thursday. It’s an insubstantial dollop of slumgullion ostensibly on “Christian Nationalism” that throws together equally unhelpful quotes from Christian leaders without once defining Christian Nationalism (or nationalism); or making distinctions between patriotism and “Christian Nationalism”; or between those who merely use Christian rhetoric and true Christ-followers; or between the rioters and the thousands of Americans—including many Christians—who were at the protest but had nothing to do with the riot.

Schor cites Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission:

[W]hen [Russell Moore] saw a “Jesus Saves” sign displayed near a gallows built by rioters, “I was enraged to a degree that I haven’t been enraged in memory. This is not only dangerous and unpatriotic but also blasphemous, presenting a picture of the gospel of Jesus Christ that isn’t the gospel and is instead its exact reverse.”

Moore is right, a sign saying “Jesus Saves” displayed near a gallows built by lawless rioters is dangerous and blasphemous. But why does this sign enrage him more than when former constitutional law professor and then-president of the United States Barack Obama cited Scripture as his justification for endorsing the legal recognition of homoerotic unions as marriages? Why does it enrage him more than when self-identifying Christians currently serving in Congress defend the legalized extermination of humans in the womb? Why does the lawless rioters’ signage enrage Moore more than what our elected leaders say and do?

Just calling oneself a Christian no more makes a person a Christian than does a man calling himself a woman make him one.  Scripture teaches that “A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit.  Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will recognize them by their fruits.”

Moore and others claim that the image of Christianity is now marred in the view of leftists, many of whom already hate Christianity and seek its eradication from public life. But is that true? Or are leftists cynically exploiting the indefensible acts of those who falsely claim to be Christ-followers? Are leftists using the signage and rhetoric of anarchists who bear no resemblance to true Christ-followers to further cow cowardly Christians and to turn them against courageous Christians like Senators Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Tom Cotton?

Who is doing more damage to the church (small “c”): the Capitol rioters or the heretical wolves in sheep’s clothing who have infiltrated every denomination and are corrupting doctrine and leading flocks astray, including the Southern Baptist Convention? Some will argue that both groups damage the cause of Christ, which is true, but which should enrage Christians more?

Perhaps leftists hate—not the rioters—but those genuine Christians whom they can now slander by associating them with the acts of anarchists. And perhaps there’s another reason leftists hate genuine Christians.

Jesus forewarned Christians about their fate, but American Christians blinded by the freedom we have long enjoyed, can’t see the hatred Christ foretold even as they are cursed and cancelled:

 If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you.  If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you.

Schor bizarrely writes this in an article ostensibly about Christianity on display at the Capitol riots:

In the video shot by a New Yorker reporter during the siege, the fur-hatted Jacob Chansley—known as the “QAnon shaman” for his alignment with the conspiracy theory as well as his self-described spiritual leanings–delivered a prayer thanking God “for allowing the United States of America to be reborn.” While Chansley spoke, other rioters fell silent in apparent participation.

Jacob Chansley, aka Jake Angeli, was the tattooed, furry-chested, jammy-wearing, buffalo-horn accoutered anarchist who strutted into the Senate chambers with a cocky grin on his face. Why he is included in an article purportedly about Christianity is baffling. If crazy QAnon ideas have infiltrated churches as heretical views of sexuality have, they must be purged. In my experience, however, heretical views of sexuality are far more prevalent in churches than are QAnon ideas and far more dangerous.

Chansley is a “shaman” who follows his own syncretistic religion that includes elements of Eastern mysticism, chakras, auric/planetary frequencies, hallucinogenic drug use, and a weird movement called Ministry of Tomorrow (MOT).

Chansley was first introduced at age 11 to hallucinogenic drugs by his father, which raises an issue few are addressing: the importance of fathers. How many anarchists on the left and right grew up with good fathers in the home?

So, while Chansley may be a Trump-supporter, he is definitely not a typical hardworking conservative Trump supporter or a theologically orthodox Bible-believing Christian. He is, however, definitely a lunatic. The fact that some lunatics support Trump has as little to do with Trump as the fact that there surely are lunatics who support Biden. After all, lunatics and anarchists have to support somebody. Here’s more from Chansley/Angeli, but I don’t recommend wasting your time.

The fact that Chansley “delivered a prayer thanking God” during which “other rioters fell silent” does not mean Chansley is a Christian. Surely Schor knows that Muslims pray, Hindus pray, shamans pray, and Christian heretics pray, and they all think they’re praying to God.

Theologian John Piper offers a helpful explanation of the relationship between the diverse loves of Christians. The first love for Christ-followers must always be for Christ and his kingdom:

[N]ever feel more attached to your fatherland or your tribe or your family or your ethnicity than you do to the people of Christ. Everyone who is in Christ is more closely and permanently united to others in Christ, no matter the other associations, than we are to our nearest fellow citizen or party member or brother or sister or spouse.

But, Piper explains, many of our lesser loves have value too:

God means for us to be enmeshed in this world. We’re “not of the world,” Jesus says, but we are in the world, and we are supposed to be in it. … We may be in a city, a state, a country, and if I ask, “What is patriotism in this enmeshment?” my answer is that patriotism is a kind of love for fatherland — and I mean fatherland in a very general sense. It could be a city (Minneapolis), or a state (Minnesota), or a country (US, Brazil, China, Nigeria), or a tribe (Ojibwe, Navajo, Fulani, Kachin). And that love for these enmeshments, these belongings, is different from the general love that Christians have for everybody or for the whole earth. …

So, it seems to me that this is good, and that the goodness is implied in the Bible, and God created us to be in skin, in languages, in families, in cultures. He doesn’t mean for us to despise our skin or our language or our culture, but rather to be at home in them, and to feel good about them — of course, we have to add — up to a point. They’re all sinful, and so we never give them absolute allegiance. We never cease to be exiles and sojourners, even in our families and tribes and ethnicities — indeed, in our own bodies. …

In the end, Christ has relativized all human allegiances, all human loves. Keeping Christ supreme in our affections makes all our lesser loves better, not worse. Under his flag, it is right to be thankful to God that we have a fatherland, a tribe, a family, an old pair of slippers that just fit right.

The challenge for Christians in this time of turmoil and growing persecution is to hold fast to the whole counsel of God, rooting out heresy of all kinds; to proclaim the whole counsel of God even when the world hates us; and to come alongside those who speak truth in the public square and are mocked for doing so. We have no biblical warrant for speaking truth only when we’re guaranteed doing so will be cost-free.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/audio_Were-the-Capitol-Rioters-Christians.mp3


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Was Biden’s Inaugural Address the Best Ever?

Chinese Translation – 中文翻译

With a thrill running up his leg, Chris exclaimed that Biden’s inaugural address was the best inaugural speech he’s ever heard! No, not THAT Chris—not Chris Matthews. Chris Wallace said it was the best. He was wrong. It wasn’t the best inaugural speech ever. It was the BEST SPEECH period. I’m tearing up just thinking about how best it was.

But wait, was it? Wouldn’t the best speech necessarily be a true and honest speech?

Biden said, “[A]t this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed. … [T]he American story depends not on any one of us, not on some of us, but on all of us. … [T]o restore the soul and to secure the future of America—requires more than words. It requires that most elusive of things in a democracy: Unity. Unity.

I love unity, unity, as much as the next gal or nonbinary human, but I’m wondering how the efforts of Big Tech, corporate behemoths, AOC, John Brennan, and other Democrats to cancel and crush anyone who expresses ideas they hate fulfill Biden’s quest for double the amount of unity we have right now.

Just a few nights ago on MSNBC, John Brennan cheerfully told lefty Nicole Wallace that the Biden administration is “moving in laser-like fashion to try to uncover as much as they can about” the “insurgency” composed of “religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians.” Hmmm …

So, how does the Biden administration define these groups? Will the criteria used for identifying “religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists” and “libertarians” be made public? After the laser-focused secret police uncover the plot of Brennan’s enemies to compete freely in the market place of ideas, what will be done with the dissident freethinkers? Will they be forced into PBS’s “enlightenment camps” or will AOC’s “de-radicalizing” pogroms to cleanse America of conservative Christians take care of their disunifying presence?

In the service of doubling our unity, will Biden plead with Big Tech, Big Business, AOC, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and Washington Post to call off their dogs, Overlords, and spy agencies?

Will Biden plead with the press to interrogate him fairly—you know, exactly as they interrogated President Trump? Will he plead with them to take off their soiled kid gloves?

Will Biden’s executive order mandating the sexual integration of children’s locker rooms, restrooms, and sports in government schools fulfill his quest for doubling our unity?

In the spirit of unity, will Biden acknowledge that the desire of girls and women to be free of the presence of opposite-sex persons in their private spaces is natural, normal, and good?

In his laser-like focus on unity, will Biden send “guidelines” to public schools recommending they no longer promote the controversial and divisive beliefs of the 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory?

How does the leftist ideological monopoly in our colleges and universities double our unity or foster democracy? We know that in addition to unity, Biden is bigly into diversity. We also know that without diversity of thought, critical thinking is impossible. So, in the service of both unity and diversity, will Biden urge college and university administrators and faculty to seek equity among faculty? Will he implore them to work diligently toward ideological parity, perhaps threatening to withhold government funds until such parity is achieved?

Will Biden condemn the cancellation of conservative speakers on campuses and the refusal to invite conservative speakers to campuses?

Will he condemn Hollywood and book publishers for their anti-conservative bigotry and de facto censorship of movies, plays, and novels with themes that criticize “progressive” ideas or embody conservative themes?

Will he denounce ugly epithets like “homophobe,” “transphobe,” “hater” and “bigot” that are hurled continuously at any Catholic or Protestant who upholds the historic teaching of the church on sexual matters? Will he agree that Christians should be free to use pronouns that correspond to scientific reality and God’s created order? Will he agree that Christian business owners should be free to make employment and service decisions in accordance with their faith?

To double our unity, will Biden urge Americans to remove lawn signs that say, “Hate has no home here,” since all Americans know those signs are a passive macro-aggressive way of leftists calling their theologically orthodox Bible-believing neighbors—both Catholics and Protestants— “haters”?

In his effort to unify the country twice over, will Biden publicly acknowledge that the claim that homoerotic acts are moral is neither a scientific claim nor objectively true?

Democrats have demonstrated that they are gung-ho about calling in the National Guard and every weapon in our formidable military apparatus to prevent further violence in the Capitol. So, in an effort to multiple our unity, will Biden beseech the New York Times to offer former editorial page editor James Bennet his job back? Bennet was the editor who was forced to resign for publishing an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton in which Cotton argued that it was legitimate to call in the National Guard to quell the unremitting violence that roiled American cities last summer.

In his inaugural address, Biden said, “This is a great nation and we are a good people.” I’m confused. Critical Race theorists have been telling us for years—and emphasizing it through arson and looting—that America is a systemically evil nation conceived in racism and dedicated to the proposition that all people of color are inferior. So, which is it?

Biden said, “I ask every American to join me in this cause. Uniting to fight the common foes we face: Anger, resentment, hatred. Extremism, lawlessness, violence.” Later, on Inauguration Day, Antifa attacked a federal building in Portland. Has Biden condemned that lawless, violent attack by angry extremists? Did he label it an attack on democracy? Did he call it an insurrection?

While his inaugural address rightly condemned the “riotous mob” that used “violence” to attack the Capitol building, Biden said not one word about the riotous mobs that attacked federal buildings; monuments; private property; and police precincts, vehicles, and officers all summer. Why did his unifying address remain mute on that violence?

If and how Biden answers those questions will give Americans a better idea about whether he wants unity in diversity or unity by crushing diversity. We’ll know if this is the beginning of the Unity Games or—as Lady Gaga’s inaugural costume suggested—the Hunger Games.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Was-Bidens-Inaugural-Address-the-Best-Ever_audio.mp3


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U.S. Senator Tom Cotton Calls Out 1619 Project for Revisionism

The 1619 Project has been controversial since its publication by the New York Times a year ago. While many on the left have praised it, with Oprah Winfrey even announcing plans to adapt the project into a television series, historians and those on the right have noted errors and call the collection of essays and poems revisionist history. Now, U.S. Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) has proposed a bill seeking to ban public schools from teaching it as part of their curriculum.

While the project acknowledges the founding of the United States as taking place in 1776, it seeks “to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year.” That year is important because it marks the arrival and enslavement of the first known Africans in the North American colony of Virginia. The project further determines that the American Revolution occurred because the original 13 colonies understood Britain would soon outlaw slavery, thus making war the only pathway to preserving the foul institution on this side of the Atlantic.

When the project was rolled out by the Times, it included K-12 curriculum for schools. The curriculum is being used in several major school districts in cities, including Chicago, across the country. Cotton’s bill would prohibit school districts from using federal funds to teach the project.

On July 30, Cotton told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, “The entire premise of the New York Times’ factually, historically flawed 1619 Project … is that America is at root, a systemically racist country to the core and irredeemable. I reject that root and branch.” Cotton’s bill is called the “Saving American History Act of 2020.”

The bill calls the 1619 Project “an activist movement” that is “gaining momentum to deny or obfuscate this history by claiming that America was not founded on the ideals of the Declaration [of Independence] but rather on slavery and oppression.” It notes that “this distortion of American history is being taught to children in public school classrooms” through curriculum based on the 1619 Project, which “claims ‘nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional’ grew ‘out of slavery.’”

It further states, “The 1619 Project is a racially divisive and revisionist account of history that threatens the integrity of the Union by denying the true principles on which it was founded.”

Of course, Cotton is meeting fierce opposition. The 1619 Project has been so well received by the mainstream media that in the spring of this year, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the journalist responsible for the project, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

Jordan Cohen, a spokesperson for the Times, said the project “is based in part on decades of recent scholarship by leading historians of early America that has profoundly expanded our sense of the colonial and Revolutionary period. Much of this scholarship has focused on the central role that slavery played in the nation’s founding.”

The same day Cotton’s bill was introduced, July 27, Hannah-Jones joined a Twitter conversation regarding whether the 1619 Project was about history or memory. She tweeted, “The fight here is about who gets to control the national narrative, and therefore, the nation’s shared memory of itself. One group has monopolized this for too long in order to create this myth of exceptionalism. If their version is true, what do they have to fear of 1619?”

She continued in the next tweet, “I’ve always said that the 1619 Project is not a history. It is a work of journalism that explicitly seeks to challenge the national narrative and, therefore, the national memory. The project has always been as much about the present as it has the past.”

Considering her statements, one wonders how can the 1619 Project be taught as history in public schools.

Even Hannah-Jones tweets later in the thread, “Further, the curriculum is supplementary and cannot and was never intended to supplant U.S. history curriculum (which is pretty terrible but none of these folks seem concerned about that.) Teachers have used it in English, social studies, art, foods classes.” However, reports are the curriculum is being taught as history. Protestors are proclaiming it as history in the streets.

The Illinois Angle

The 1619 Project and Cotton’s bill appear to have had an effect on Illinois State Representative La Shawn Ford (D-Chicago). As you may know, Ford recently called on the Illinois State Board of Education to remove all history books in Illinois schools, and for schools to stop teaching history until new curriculum can be developed. He said current history books and curriculum “unfairly” communicate history.

Ford said, as reported by WGN, “We’re concerned that current school history teachings lead to white privilege and a racist society.”

A few days prior, Ford told Politico’s Illinois Playbook, “What’s being taught is inaccurate,” saying blacks were only depicted as slaves and that other minorities, including women and people of Jewish heritage, were also portrayed unfairly.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to contact your federal lawmakers and urge them to support the Saving American History Act of 2020, a bill that would prohibit the use of federal funds to teach the divisive 1619 Project by K-12 schools or school districts.


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Federal Legislation Would Allow Americans to Sue Big Tech Companies

U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) has introduced a bill that would allow Americans to sue companies such as Twitter, Google, and Facebook for censoring political speech. The bill comes as an activist NBC journalist contacted Google to demonetize The Federalist and then reported on it.

The Limiting Section 230 Immunity to Good Samaritans Act, which was introduced June 17 would amend Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934, is co-sponsored by U.S. Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL), Mike Braun (R-IN), Tom Cotton (R-AR), and Kelly Loeffler (R-GA).

“Big Tech companies like Twitter, Google and Facebook,” Hawley said, “have used their power to silence political speech from conservatives without any recourse for users. Section 230 has been stretched and rewritten by courts to give these companies outlandish power over speech without accountability. Congress should act to ensure bad actors are not given a free pass to censor and silence their opponents.”

Under the terms of the bill, companies would be prohibited from receiving Section 230 immunity unless they “update their terms of service to promise to operate in good faith and pay a $5,000 fine (or actual damages, if higher) plus attorney’s fees if they violate that promise.”

It would also let users sue companies for breaching the terms of good faith and prohibit companies from discriminating when enforcing terms of service and failing to honor their promises.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is also preparing legislation that would remove legal protections from companies “when they facilitate or solicit content or activity from third parties that violate federal law.” According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, the DOJ’s proposals will not only address the question of censorship, but also tackle social media’s facilitation of child exploitation, terrorism, cyberstalking, and other crimes:

The department’s proposal, for instance, would remove legal protections when platforms facilitate or solicit third-party content or activity that violates federal criminal law, such as online scams and trafficking in illicit drugs. The department also wouldn’t confer immunity to platforms in instances involving online child exploitation and sexual abuse, terrorism or cyberstalking. Those carve-outs are needed to curtail immunity for internet companies to allow victims to seek redress, the official said.

The Justice Department also will seek to make clear that tech platforms don’t have immunity in civil-enforcement actions brought by the federal government, and can’t use immunity as a defense against antitrust claims that they removed content for anticompetitive reasons.

Regarding the situation with NBC, Google, and the Federalist, the journalist from NBC made a complaint to Google about criticism of Black Lives Matter that appeared on The Federalist’s website. She then bragged about her “co-investigation” with Google getting the site demonetized. Everything was quickly sorted out, with Google claiming it never demonetized the Federalist.

This censorship issue will most likely continue to come up as the election season goes on. Twitter has been in the spotlight for slapping warning labels on tweets by President Donald Trump saying they violate the company’s policies forbidding abusive behavior. The president has responded that the company is trying to silence conservative voices and hurt his re-election campaign. An executive order he tried to put in place to ease social media restrictions on speech has been blocked in court.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to contact Illinois’ U.S. Senators Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth to ask them to support and/or co-sponsor S. 3983. The “big tech” social media giants should be held accountable facilitating federal crimes, including terrorism and child exploitation as well as for their anti-conservative bias (censorship) in moderating content.


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Watching a Bully Get Smacked

It appears that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is having a long overdue comeuppance.Seven years ago, inspired by SPLC’s “hate map,” a gunman walked into the Family Research Council (FRC) in Washington, intending to massacre the staff and then stuff Chick-fil-A sandwiches in their faces.FRC is among many Christian organizations targeted by the SPLC for pro-family stances. During the 1990s, FRC helped draft the Defense of Marriage Act and defended the right of the military and the Boy Scouts to adhere to traditional morality. Over the years, FRC has produced a mountain of meta-research papers that debunk the many spurious studies fed to the media by the LGBTQ activist movement.It was more than enough to get FRC placed on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate map,” a profoundly defamatory instrument that inspired Floyd Lee Corkins II to try to commit mass murder that day in August 2012.

The young gay activist would have succeeded and perhaps gone on to other Christian targets on his list if not for the heroics of building manager Leo Johnson, who was shot in the arm but managed to disarm Mr. Corkins and wrestle him to the ground.

Mr. Corkins pleaded guilty to three felonies, including an act of terrorism, and was sentenced to 25 years in prison.  He told the FBI that the SPLC’s “hate map” led him to FRC’s door.

The SPLC is now ensnared in a scandal that has cost the group its leadership and, it is hoped, its misplaced credibility with law enforcement agencies and corporations.

In March, two groups of employees wrote letters to SPLC leadership, warning them that “allegations of mistreatment, sexual harassment, gender discrimination and racism threaten the moral authority of this organization and our integrity along with it” and that the SPLC leaders were complicit “in decades of racial discrimination, gender discrimination, and sexual harassment and/or assault.”

U.S. Senator Tom Cotton, Arkansas Republican, has written to the Internal Revenue Service asking for an investigation into the tax-exempt status of the SPLC, which he described as a “racist and sexist slush fund devoted to defamation.”

The senator’s action came on the heels of the firing of SPLC co-founder Morris Dees for misconduct and the resignation of Richard Cohen, who had been SPLC’s president since 2003.

The Montgomery, Alabama-based SPLC, which earned a national reputation in the 1970s for taking on the Ku Klux Klan, had been the gold standard for determining what constitutes a “hate group.” From the U.S. Justice Department on down, the SPLC’s “hate” listings were widely used to identify violent extremists.

Housed in what’s nicknamed the “poverty palace,” the SPLC has an endowment exceeding $500 million, including $120 million in offshore accounts. After defeating the Klan, the group needed new enemies on which to raise millions of dollars via direct mail.  To the delight of LGBTQ activists, the SPLC began placing Christian conservative groups alongside skinheads, Nazis and the Klan in its materials and on the “hate map.”

Soon, companies like Amazon began removing Christian groups like Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) from their charitable programs such as AmazonSmile.  The charity index GuideStar USA affixed “hate” labels to ADF, Liberty Counsel, D. James Kennedy Ministries and other Christian groups, costing them support.

In an April 4 Wall Street Journal article, “We Were Smeared by the SPLC,” ADF Senior Vice President Kristen Waggoner relates how the “hate” designation is anything but harmless.  She saw “the word ‘HATE’ plastered in red letters on a photo of my face” on a Google image-search. “Days after I argued the Masterpiece Cakeshop case in front the U.S. Supreme Court, I found the window of my car shot out in my church parking lot after a Sunday service.”

As the SPLC wallows in its own bile, it would be natural to take pleasure from their troubles, especially given the ruthless way they’ve treated their victims.  As David wrote in Psalm 57:6: “They have prepared a net for my steps … they have dug a pit before me; Into the midst of it they themselves have fallen.”  It’s not wrong to appreciate when a bully gets smacked and justice prevails.

However, Psalm 24:17-18 also warns against schadenfreude: “Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles, lest the Lord see it and be displeased, and turn away his anger from him.”

While still insisting on justice, we might learn from Leo Johnson, who has metal rods in his shattered arm.  At Floyd Corkins’ sentencing, Leo recalled that after disarming Mr. Corkins, he refrained from shooting him because, he said, God spoke to him, telling him not to.

“I forgive you but I do not forget,” he told Mr. Corkins. “If you believe in God you should pray to Him every day because not only did God save my life that day – He saved yours, too.”

All this said, the media and corporate America should refrain from using the SPLC as a source until it cleans up its hateful act and stops smearing people.




Storage Wars: The Midterm Edition

Now that the heady rush of jubilation has faded from the election, it’s time to take stock of what we actually achieved. The numbers couldn’t be more forthright. It’s as if the American people interrupted the President to interject, “Now, let me be clear…” The 2014 election was an epic political repudiation of President Barack Obama, U.S. Senator Harry Reid, and the Progressive agenda in Washington.

It was a demonstration that all but the most white-eyed leftist loons in America are tired of Obama’s ineptitude, deliberate or otherwise. How amusing now to think about those talking heads on cable who tried to suggest that the Democrats might not lose the Senate, the day before America catapulted the Senate back to the Republicans in a resounding fashion.

But what has been achieved? What has our political support purchased? In a strange way, American voters are like folks on that Storage Wars show. Turn on any episode and you’ll see people bidding crazy amounts of money on a garage-worth of stuff they’ve only glimpsed from a distance. Could be treasure, could be rubbish. And just like those storage-capitalists, we don’t yet know what we just purchased.

In the majority of races, it would be very difficult to elucidate just what the Republican candidate ran on, since the only discernable plank in the 2014 GOP campaign strategy was “We’re not Obama”. It could be that we’ve only traded progressive Democrats for progressive Republicans. The reality is that the GOP has controlled arguably the most powerful organ in the Federal government for the past four years.

The power of the House of Representatives lies in the purse. It is through the House that all the rest of the government is funded, since all bills for raising revenue originate in the House (ala Article I, Section VII). Of course this is by design, providing one more check and balance to offset the potential overreach of a Federal leviathan. Whoever controls the House, controls the funding of the entire US Government.

And yet, this power was deliberately set aside by GOP leadership during one of the most egregious, tyrannical growths of Presidential power in American history. One could argue that there has never been a greater need for the House to check a runaway Executive branch and yet the Speaker of the House sat on his hands for four years. No, even worse, the Speaker told his enemies about his plans to sit on his hands before he did so. When U.S. House Speaker John Boehner communicated time and again that the power of the purse was off the table, he surrendered before the enemy even took the field.

Since Boehner took the Speaker’s gavel in 2010, Obama has:

  • Implemented (and funded) Obamacare
  • Directed his DOJ to blatantly flout federal law in cases involving DOMA
  • Prevented the Congressional inquiry into the deliberate harassment of conservative organizations by the Internal Revenue Service
  • Violated religious liberty of Americans via the contraception mandate
  • Stonewalled Congressional investigators attempting to get to the bottom of the murder of American diplomats in Libya

And this is just the low-hanging fruit!

Obama’s abuse of presidential power has been beyond the wildest dreams of progressive radicals, yet Boehner’s House has achieved only one minor victory: Sequestration via a half-hearted government shutdown. Yet even Boehner himself admits that he had to be talked into it and was against the idea from the beginning.

New Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is at least as spineless as Boehner and coupled with the fact that these two men now control the entire Federal legislative machinery yet haven’t advanced the slightest hint of a conservative agenda over the past 4 years, can Americans have any hope in the success of a newly-elected conservative majority?

It is a question which is impossible to accurately answer at this juncture. Conservative politicians are not immune to legislating much differently than they campaigned. Given the number of Establishment-endorsed GOP candidates who won, I think there will be more than a fair number of newly-minted RINOs in D.C. come next year.

It remains to be seen how much of a seat at the table Boehner and McConnell will give any true conservative who shows up. Based solely on their actions over the past 4 years, chances are that McBoehnell will work behind the scenes to erode support for any kind of conservative resistance which forms in either house.

The encouraging thing is that there are several strong conservative voices headed to Washington next year. Folks like Ben Sasse in Nebraska, Joni Ernst in Iowa, and Tom Cotton in Arkansas should revitalize the efforts of U.S. Senators Mike Lee and Ted Cruz, men who have been holding the conservative line in the U.S. Senate. Similarly Dave Brat, Barry Loudermilk, Mia Love, John Ratcliffe, and Andy Mooney are headed to the an U.S. House in desperate need of articulate, impassioned, principled conservatives.

These Congressional rookies probably think they’ve finally emerged from the political fight of their lives, but they haven’t seen anything yet. If there’s one thing the heartless Republican establishment will attack, it’s an unapologetic conservative. They’ll keep their powder dry until they spot the opportunity to turn on a Tea Partier and then it’ll be open season. If these freshmen are smart, they’ll realize that power lies in numbers and the tighter formation they can maintain, the better.

There’s a reason why the Greek phalanx and the Roman testudo were such effective fighting formations. With any luck, organizations like the Tea Party Caucuses in both houses can form rank around these fledgling representatives until they get their sea legs and prepare to carry the fight to the enemies of Liberty, foreign or domestic.


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