Two years from now some 14 Democratic House members will be defending districts Trump won, compared to just three Republicans in districts carried by Vice President Kamala Harris.

It’s a significantly better outlook than the GOP faced after Trump’s 2016 victory, which he eked out on the basis of an Electoral College win in the key swing states. That year, two dozen Republicans were elected in districts Hillary Clinton won, roughly the same number of Democrat-occupied seats that Trump carried. In 2018, Democrats gained seats in the Clinton districts and even carved into some of the districts that Trump won, wresting back control of the majority until 2022, when Republicans re-took control.

One reason House majorities have grown slimmer in recent years is the increasingly sophisticated redistricting fights waged by both parties. Over the last decade, Democrats and Republicans have engaged in a protracted battle over the redrawing of congressional districts involving millions of dollars in litigation, thousands of hours of closed-door negotiations, and multiple Supreme Court showdowns.

Partly because of their efforts, Democrats limited the House majority to five seats this year – 220 to Democrats’ 215. But because of Trump’s popular vote victory, winning back the majority in 2026 will require Democrats to carve a path through Trump territory. […]

— Read More: amgreatness.com

The hysteria has been building for some time. It wasn’t so long ago that Elon Musk enjoyed enviable street cred among the brotherhood of snotty, self-congratulating elites. A green energy guru, he made the hearts of the Sierra Club Sultans go pit-a-pat with his talk of “sustainable transport” and solar roofs.

Then Musk made several missteps. The first was buying Twitter and restoring open discourse to a platform that was started to encourage, well, open discourse but had become a headquarters of government surveillance and censorship during the first Trump administration. Musk never recovered his progressive credentials after he came out as a supporter of free speech.

But the atmosphere of left-wing disapproval that was swaddling Musk since his purchase of Twitter turned toxic and hysterical this past summer when, following the assassination attempt against Donald Trump, he announced that, gasp, he was supporting Trump’s reelection bid. Could you believe it? Supporting Trump’s reelection—especially actively, ostentatiously, effectively supporting Trump’s reelection bid—was like the sin against the Holy Ghost: unforgivable.

And then Musk compounded the perfidy by joining forces with Vivek Ramaswamy to form DoGE: the “department” of government efficiency, a time-limited initiative to help bring government spending and regulation under control. They have set an expiration date of July 6, 2026, by which date they hope to have been able to give America a 250th birthday gift of fiscal solvency and rational regulation. […]

— Read More: amgreatness.com

Johnson’s remarks came during an interview with “Special Report” anchor Bret Baier on Fox News in which Baier questioned the Speaker on his prospects for success with a minimal majority headcount in the House.

The Speaker stated that getting the budget done as early as possible in January was a necessary part of working around the 60 vote threshold in the Senate by doing so through the budget reconciliation process which requires only 51 votes.

Currently the GOP holds only a bare bones majority in the Senate.

Congressional Republicans are determined to immediately start delivering for the American people next Congress.
 
Together with President Trump, we’ll secure our border, restore America’s energy dominance, prevent the largest tax hike in history, and dismantle the deep state. pic.twitter.com/2uoMrcDsHK

— Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) December 11, 2024

The Hill reports that Johnson explained that President-elect Donald Trump is coming into the White House “with a big mandate” and that the mandate extends to Republican lawmakers as well. […]

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These great national problems are not for your professional participation or military solution. Your guidepost stands out like a tenfold beacon in the night: Duty, Honor, Country. You are the leaven which binds together the entire fabric of our national system of defense. From your ranks come the great captains who hold the Nation’s destiny in their hands the moment the war tocsin sounds. The long gray line has never failed us. Were you to do so, a million ghosts in olive drab, in brown khaki, in blue and gray, would rise from their white crosses, thundering those magic words: Duty, Honor, Country.

MacArthur was telling the cadets who would soon become officers that their charge was to defend the country, not to be entangled in the debates of the day. He reminded the assembled that soldiers who guard the republic must be something different, but also something very important.

Fast forward to right now: after nearly 30 years of being tinkered with and, in many ways, decimated via politics, the armed forces of the United States are at a crossroads and inflection point. Our uniformed services are teetering towards being incapable of defending the country and becoming something General MacArthur warned against and something the founders never envisioned.

The American military and Department of Defense are in desperate need of new, fresh, clear-eyed, and purposeful leadership that is focused on one thing—the defense of the country. America needs someone to bring both a traditional and dynamic style of leadership to the Pentagon and to the armed forces. Pete Hegseth is that someone.

For the better part of 250 years, the American military was a politically agnostic entity. At times, our military would be filled with draftees, and at other times, it would be filled with small groups of volunteers. During conflicts, the government would call its sons to duty to defend the republic. Those sons would be sent home after the wars and after the peace was secure. […]

— Read More: amgreatness.com

Which path Trump should take all depends on whether one believes the last eight years were normal partisan squabbles or if one believes that something monumental happened: the obstruction of democratic self-government by a technocratic Deep State.

I believe it is the latter for reasons I have explained before at length. In short, Trump was not allowed to govern, nor treated as other presidents were during his first term. The problem began before Trump, as entrenched bureaucratic interests have worked quietly to control more cooperative and less independent presidents, like Barack Obama and Joe Biden. But the resistance to Trump reflected a mature, ideological, and increasingly self-conscious managerial class that believed they were entitled to rule without regard to electoral results.

Trump was a threat to business as usual. Thus, a cabal of intelligence agencies cooperated to stop him from making changes to foreign policy or scrutinizing the outsized military-industrial complex. Contrary to the media’s dire pronouncements, these insiders were the real threat to democracy and self-government.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, was one of the worst offenders. As documented in Bob Woodward’s book Peril, Milley spent a lot of time after the 2020 election caballing with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and reassuring her that the military would resist certain orders from President Trump. […]

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As an aside, I should note that I regard the persistence of Washington as the seat of our government as a serious impediment to the goal of “deconstructing” the administrative state. “It has,” I wrote back in 2022, “long been obvious to candid observers that there is something deeply dysfunctional about that overwhelmingly Democratic, welfare-addicted city.”

It is a partisan sinkhole. Jefferson wanted the capital moved from New York to Washington in part to bring it closer to the South, but also to place it in a locality that was officially neutral. There is nothing neutral about Washington today. The city has some impressive architecture and urban vistas. They should be preserved and staffed as tourist attractions. But the reins of power should be relocated.

I doubt that will happen. Which means that the eternal vigilance that MAGA must maintain around its enemies will have to be redoubled. Trump attempting to govern from Washington will be like Ike trying to undertake the Normandy invasion with half his planners on loan from the German general staff.

Still, there are some symbolic gestures that he and his aides might consider. I have long suggested that the inauguration be held somewhere other than Washington, D.C. There is nothing in the Constitution that requires the inauguration be in Washington. LBJ, remember, was sworn in on Air Force One just a couple of hours after Kennedy was assassinated. When Warren Harding died, Calvin Coolidge was visiting the family homestead in Vermont. His father, a justice of the peace, administered the oath of office in the parlor. I think the next inauguration should be well away from the swamp of Washington. Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach is one venue that springs to mind, but I am sure there are other attractive spots. At a minimum, I hope the inauguration committee will consider having some of the parties elsewhere. A ball in Butler, PA, for example, would not only be celebratory but also serve as a useful reminder of how close Trump came to a fatal encounter with an assassin’s bullet.

But the trouble with “Washington”—I use scare quotes to indicate that we are dealing with spiritual as well as geographical dispensation—is not only its partisan nature. There is also its apparently unstoppably expansionist character. No matter which party is in power, the business of Washington is to make government bigger—forever. Republicans talk about “limited government.” They then sign on to nearly every scheme to make government bigger and more intrusive. Democrats do the same, of course, but they generally skip the rhetorical foreplay about making government smaller. […]

— Read More: amgreatness.com

The orthodox and the supposed scripted future are now suspect. And they are likely to be dethroned—from the trivial to the existential.

Critics claim Trump has no mandate to stage such a counterrevolution. They argue that he did not win 51 percent of the popular vote or achieve a Reaganesque landslide in the Electoral College.

Yet all the initiatives he advanced and won on polled landslide public approval.

Despite being the target of Democrat lawfare for years, a defiant Trump promised to end an open border, massive illegal immigration, rising crime, and soaring prices. He pledged to slash government and its administrative state, terminate racial and gender identity politics, and restore deterrence abroad. […]

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The Georgia Congresswoman commented on a proposed resolution introduced by Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) that would prohibit lawmakers and House employees from using restrooms that don’t correspond with their biological sex at birth.

Greene said that men should be banned from women’s restrooms in every federal building paid for by taxpayers.

I support banning men from women’s restrooms in the Capitol, but that isn’t enough. Men should be banned from women’s restrooms in every federal building paid for by taxpayers.

The American people delivered a mandate on November 5th. They said they’re sick of this lie.

There… pic.twitter.com/clzWcGuEAv

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (@RepMTG) November 19, 2024

Sarah McBride (D-DE), who was elected to Congress two week ago, was born a male and is the reason for the resolution requiring biological men to refrain from using women’s restrooms.

McBride has lashed out at the resolution, calling it a, “blatant attempt from far right-wing extremists to distract from the fact that they have no real solutions to what Americans are facing.” […]

— Read More: amgreatness.com

In the weeks leading up to the Trump-fueled Republican rout, it was obvious who the media industrial complex was pulling for: the Democrats and the monumentally flawed Kamala Harris-Tim Walz ticket. Despite coverage that was more than 90 percent positive for Democrats and 90 percent negative against Republicans, unprecedented election interference from the likes of Jack Smith as part of a lawfare campaign orchestrated by the White House, and the memory-holing of the two Trump assassination attempts the American electorate saw through the leftist media propaganda. Americans went to the polls and delivered a powerful rebuke to Harris, Biden, the Democrats, and especially the media elites, who now have not a shred of credibility left.

And the recrimination as to who was at fault for their stunning defeat comes from every direction. It is the definition and personification of a circular firing squad.

And that brings us to the subject of today’s commentary. With even Fox News having taken swipes at Trump and the Republicans running in 2024, where could one turn for mainstream right-focused, balanced news coverage? Yes, we know that there is News Nation (which is gaining ground on rapidly disintegrating CNN for the number three position in cable news ratings) and One America News. Still, we have a better suggestion: Sky News from Australia.

With a robust online presence, especially on YouTube, Sky News is easy to access. We know because we followed their election coverage during the just-concluded cycle. And among their hosts, who our cousins down under call presenters, four stand out: Rita Panahi (Lefties Losing It), Gabriella Power (The Power Hour), Paul Murray (who has great chemistry with regular contributor Megyn Kelly), and James Morrow (an American living down under). […]

— Read More: amgreatness.com

Trying to get a timely indication of how Californians have ultimately voted in close races is a good indication of just how far removed the state’s election bureaucracy has drifted from the rest of the country. If you go to the election results page on the Secretary of State website for California, the first thing you see is the number of days left until voting results will be officially recognized. As of November 11, the number you see in a great big circle at the top of the page is the number 32. A small fraction of the circle’s perimeter is highlighted, indicating the amount of allotted time to count ballots consumed so far. California allows 38 days from the November 5 election until the final certification on December 13, and the ballot processors use every bit of their time.

How is this normal? Why do we accept this?

As of November 11, California still had nine uncalled seats for the U.S. Congress. Democrats have officially won 36, and Republicans won 7. In terms of potential flips among the remaining close races, five are Republican incumbents defending their seats, three are Democrat incumbents trying to get reelected, and one is an open seat previously occupied by a Democrat. A week has passed since the election, and there are nine congressional races in California that remain too close to call. Remember that number and that date. How many of them will the Democrats win?

To fully appreciate the convoluted absurdity that has become the norm in California elections, consider the Secretary of State’s “unprocessed ballots” page. Again, a week after the election, the Secretary of State reports the “cumulative total number of processed ballots” to be 10,728,985, and the “estimated total ballots remaining” to be 4,953,569. It’s a week after the election, and the state hasn’t managed to count nearly five million ballots. […]

— Read More: amgreatness.com