RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lessons-from-a-republican-survivor-11546647007

Everywhere he takes me, Rep. Will Hurd tells people—coffee-shop staff, breakfasting retirees, the proprietor at the historic Mi Tierra Cafe—that I’m here to figure out how he keeps winning Texas’ big swing congressional district. Sometimes he’s more blunt: How does a black Republican get elected in an area that’s 70% Hispanic?

“It’s not rocket science,” Mr. Hurd says. “Look—show up, talk to people, represent them, right? It starts with the philosophy that my bosses are the 800,000 people that I represent, not anybody else.”

But clearly he’s doing something unusual. In 2016, 23 Republicans, including Mr. Hurd, won House districts that Hillary Clinton carried. Today only two of those seats are in GOP hands—Mr. Hurd’s and John Katko’s, in upstate New York. Democrats flipped the rest in November, beating many well-regarded GOP politicians. Minnesota’s Erik Paulsen and Illinois’s Peter Roskam—gone. Colorado’s Mike Coffman and Virginia’s Barbara Comstock—bye-bye. Texas’ Pete Sessions and John Culberson—hasta luego.

To reach back further, there were 13 House districts that voted for Mitt Romney in 2012 and then Mrs. Clinton in 2016. In the last Congress, they were all held by Republicans. Now they’re all occupied by Democrats, with the lone exception of Mr. Hurd. His most recent victory, a squeaker by 926 votes, wasn’t called until two weeks past Election Day. In the interim, his Democratic challenger attended congressional orientation with her fingers crossed. But a win is a win, so the question stands: What’s Mr. Hurd’s secret sauce, and can other Republicans learn the recipe?

CONTINUE AT SITE

https://pjmedia.com/trending/green-new-deal-may-become-key-litmus-test-for-democrats-in-2020/

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal” doesn’t have a chance of passage in Congress and would not be signed into law by Donald Trump anyway.

But the proposal is growing in popularity on the left and congressmen who oppose it may find themselves in hot water with Democratic primary voters in 2020.

Common Dreams:

In a signal that Democratic voters aren’t satisfied with timid steps to address the human-made global climate crisis, new polling from Data for Progress—initially reported by HuffPost on Thursday—shows that incumbent congressional candidates in 2020 could be ousted by progressive primary challengers if they fail to back a Green New Deal.

Championed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and a growing collective of Democratic lawmakers and climate campaigners, a Green New Deal would combine efforts to curb global warming and create a more just economy through generating clean energy jobs and other initiatives. Such a deal, however, has been met with opposition from more conservative Democrats.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272458/right-underestimating-ocasio-cortez-mark-tapson

The gaffe-prone new U.S. Representative for New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has been an easy target for rightwing mockery thanks to her tenuous grasp of economics and the self-mythologizing of her youth on the Brooklyn streets (the daughter of an architect, she actually grew up mostly in an affluent town in Westchester County, New York). Conservatives are having great fun online with internet memes ridiculing the proud “Democratic Socialist” as a brainless fraud. But if those who dismiss her aren’t careful, it will be Ocasio-Cortez who has the last laugh.

A self-declared “radical,” Ocasio-Cortez wants to tax the wealthy as high as 70% to fund her climate change plan called the “Green New Deal.” She supports Medicare for all, tuition-free public college, the cancelation of all student loan debt, and housing as a federal right. Steeped in the oppressor/oppressed paradigm of identity politics, she is predictably pro-Black Lives Matter, anti-Israel, and wants to abolish ICE. She lacks both knowledge of and reverence for the U.S. Constitution. In other words, she checks off all the right boxes among a growing number of young Americans who find the idea of “democratic socialism” appealing, despite the fact that they can’t actually define it. It helps her enormously that new-Latina-on-the-block Ocasio-Cortez has a hip, youthful, multicultural appeal in a party burdened with doddering old white people like Nancy Pelosi, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Hillary Clinton.

As Ocasio-Cortez was being sworn in to Congress on Thursday, a LiveLeak video featuring the rising star of the Democratic Party began going viral on Twitter after being shared by an anonymous account called, well, AnonymousQ1776. “Here is America’s favorite commie know-it-all acting like the clueless nitwit she is,” the tweet read. “High School video of ‘Sandy’ Ocasio-Cortez.”

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/04/aoc-shadow

To get a sense of how powerful freshman Congressmember (her preferred title) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is, just look at her effect on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Specifically, look at the difference between Pelosi’s inaugural speech in 2019 and her speech in 2007, when the California Democrat was elected the first female speaker in U.S. history.

Back then, Pelosi offered several tributes to American soldiers fighting in Iraq. We must honor our military, veterans and first responders as “the heroes that they are,” she graciously offered. That sentiment was met with a rousing standing ovation from both sides of the aisle. The question of climate change—then gaining attention as a key issue thanks to Al Gore’s documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” released the year before—merited only one sentence.

But Pelosi’s message on Thursday was almost directly and proportionately reversed. After an obligatory shout-out to our troops and their families, Pelosi urged her colleagues to face “the existential crisis of our time, the climate crisis, a crisis manifested in natural disasters of epic proportions.” (A claim that is patently false, but unlikely to be scrutinized by the media’s biased fact-checkers.)

A new select committee on climate change would be convened, Pelosi announced, to “put an end to the inaction and denial of science that threaten the planet and the future.” The cure for the working class would be the creation of green jobs from sea to shining sea, she promised. Pelosi’s Democratic subjects rose to applaud her.

The military earned one other brief mention at the end of her speech, and the existential threat of Islamic terrorism officially was replaced by carbon dioxide emissions.

Even though the wealthy, septuagenarian from San Francisco now wields the speaker’s gavel, it is the bartender-turned-representative Millennial from the Bronx who possesses the power. Cortez essentially is this Congress’s shadow speaker, agitating the Democrats’ policy agenda and creating her own caucus of diverse, radical soulmates. Further, she is the poster girl for a left-lurching Democratic Party. Democrats now view socialism more positively than capitalism, according to an August 2018 poll and also want to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service as they impeach the president.

Ocasio-Cortez is earning the media attention and adoration other politicians can only dream of having. Hours before she was sworn-in on January 3, a cute video surfaced of Ocasio-Cortez dancing with friends in college—putting an “I’m just like you” face on her dangerous left-wing ideology. Her Twitter posts go viral immediately; other politicians now are trying to emulate her unpretentious approach on social media, such as when she whips up a quick dinner while talking about political issues to her 1.3 million Instagram followers. (In a cringe-worthy Instagram video this week, Senator Elizabeth Warren popped open a beer in her kitchen and chatted about her newly-formed presidential exploratory committee. Let’s just say it didn’t go over as her handlers had hoped.)

But Ocasio-Cortez is more than a pretty face with a devoted social media following. Armed with a hubris born out of inexperience and a leftist worldview born out of economic and historical ignorance, Ocasio-Cortez’s real charm is that she is unafraid to confront the old-guard leadership on Capitol Hill.

Her raison d’etre is human-caused climate change, the refuge of international socialists for the past three decades. Every means to dramatically alter the way people live—the mendacious objective of the Left—can be masqueraded as a noble desire to save the planet. Climate change largely was ignored by both Republican and Democratic candidates in 2016 and 2018; in fact, most climate-mitigation ballot proposals were defeated across the country in November. But thanks to Ocasio-Cortez’s aggressive activism—and hundreds of millions in political contributions flowing from billionaire environmentalists—it’s likely that issue will take center stage in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/israel-replaced-with-palestine-on-rashida-tlaibs-office-map/

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), a newly-minted Muslim congresswoman now infamous for calling President Donald Trump a “motherf**ker,” supports Palestine over Israel and now has a world map where Israel has been re-marked as “Palestine” with a sticky note.

Tlaib has not responded to multiple requests for comment on whether or not she approved the alteration and what it might mean. She has, however, celebrated with Women’s March leader Linda Sarsour, who has urged Muslims not to “humanize” Israelis.

“Someone has already made a slight alteration to the map that hangs in Rashida Tlaib’s new congressional office,” BuzzFeed reporter Hannah Allam tweeted Thursday, showing the map with a sticky note reading “Palestine.”

While the note was clearly intended as a replacement for the name of the Jewish state, it includes an arrow that points just barely north of Cairo, the capital of Egypt.

According to reports, Tlaib herself may not have posted the note. BuzzFeed’s Allam reported that a comedian in the crowd put up the sticky note, and Forward identified him as Palestinian-American comedian Mo Amer. Amer did not respond to PJ Media’s request for comment as to whether or not he had Tlaib’s permission.

Whether or not the sticky note remains, and whether or not Amer got permission, Tlaib opposes the two-state solution that would allow both Israel and Palestine to have separate governments. Instead, she supports a one-state solution with Palestine essentially subsuming Israel. She has also advocated for the withdrawal of all U.S. funds from the Jewish state.

She framed this withdrawal of funds as preventing “American foreign aid” from being “used to violate the human rights of people of any race, nation, or ethnicity.”

In fact, her support for the one-state solution is a minor scandal, since her early support for a two-state solution gained her the endorsement of J Street, a pro-Israel organization. She changed her position shortly after winning the Democratic primary, and faced no Republican opponent last November. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/01/dems_debut_their_clown_show_strategy_for_the_216th_congress.html

Now that voters have handed them control of the House of Representatives, Democrats are forced to reveal who they are to the national electorate, and it ain’t pretty. The party has more than its share of bizarre eccentrics, able to win a local election in a deep blue district, and they are feeling their oats. They thrive on media attention, which they get because they are colorful and young and say radical things that excite progressive journalists.

But money and power remain in the hands of the gerontocracy branch of the party, headed by Nancy Pelosi, the shrewd power player who learned her craft at the knee of the political boss of Baltimore, her father, Tommy D’Alesandro, who knew a few things about money, power, and deal-making.

Her first speech as speaker of the House this term feigned stately grace (calling the Capitol a “temple of democracy,” for instance) and bipartisanship fairly effectively, and she brought her grandkids to the podium at one point. However, her disturbing quirks as a public speaker were all too evident, even as she read her prepared speech.

Listen to the bizarre giggles she cannot repress as she is being applauded.

Anger and downright hatred for the sitting president of the United States powers most of the 40 newly elected members of the House Democratic Caucus, along with many veterans, including “Mad Max” Maxine Waters, slated to become chair of the House Financial Services Committee and very publicly committed to impeachment. Pelosi is shrewd enough to realize that impeachment without a smoking gun would be a disaster for Democrats, but that won’t stop the Trump-haters, who believe they have momentum and support of the party’s faithful. Eleven-term veteran Congressman Brad Sherman, of Ventura County, California, has already introduced articles of impeachment, and that’s just the beginning of the ordeal Pelosi will have trying to rein her crazies.

https://freebeacon.com/columns/the-coming-democratic-disillusion/

On Thursday, after eight years in the minority, Nancy Pelosi returned to power as speaker of the House of Representatives. Her party controls 235 seats to the Republicans’ 199. One contest, in North Carolina, has yet to be decided. The Democratic majority is a couple seats larger than the one Pelosi led more than a decade ago. Back then a Republican resided in the White House as well. By the seventh year of his presidency, when some 100 U.S soldiers were killed in Iraq every month and gas on average cost $2.80 per gallon, George W. Bush was about as popular as Donald Trump is today. And in 2007, as we all remember, Pelosi’s Democrats set about enacting universal health care and ending the war in Iraq.

Fooled you! Actually, the victories of the 110th Congress were much more modest: a minimum wage increase, lobbying reform, and a ban of incandescent light bulbs. Health care had to wait for a subsequent Congress and a Democratic president. So did withdrawal from Iraq—though retreat didn’t work out as planned, and America returned, in much smaller numbers, in 2014. The history of Nancy Pelosi’s tenure as speaker is a reminder of the limitations and tenuousness of political victories (and defeats).

I suspect Pelosi is aware of this lesson. I doubt her caucus is. More than a quarter of them are freshmen, many are young, and two are self-avowed democratic socialists. They are inclined to believe history began when Barack Obama entered Mile High Stadium in Denver. It’s an impression encouraged by cable news, which spent the run up to Pelosi’s investiture celebrating the youth, diversity, and ambition of the House Democratic freshmen. And yet, for all the talk of Alison Spanberger and the “Badass Caucus,” of how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib “aren’t going to take no for an answer,” of grand plans for a Green New Deal and Medicare for All, there remains the inescapable reality of power. Democrats don’t really have it. Indeed, they have even less than the last time Pelosi became speaker.

Yes, they can fire their subpoena cannon at the White House. They can interrogate cabinet officials, subpoena Jared and Ivanka, leak scoops to reporters, maybe force a cabinet official or two to resign, if any are left. When Mueller delivers his findings, they could begin impeachment proceedings. But impeachment, like progressive legislation, won’t get far. A decade ago the House could pass bills and hope that Harry Reid would persuade his Democratic Senate majority to support them. All Pelosi had to worry about was President Bush’s veto. Now, Pelosi has to deal with Mitch McConnell’s Republican Senate even before her policies reach Donald Trump.

She’s in the same situation as John Boehner, who became speaker after the Tea Party election in 2010. No one envied Boehner.

The main product of the Tea Party Congress (2011-2013) was frustration. Votes to repeal Obamacare went nowhere. Negotiations over a rise in the debt ceiling produced a fiscal sequester that hardly anyone liked. Through it all, Boehner faced sniping from within his party by newcomers short on experience but long on ideological zeal. It so wore him down that he resigned his post in 2015. His replacement’s tenure was even briefer.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2019/01/03/wapo-reporter-lieawathas-2020-run-has-registered-a-whopping-zero-on-the-enthusiasm-scale-n2538368

So, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has announced she’s running for president. She’s a hard-core liberal. One of the faces of the progressive left in the Democratic Party. Maybe a tinge (using it very loosely here) more moderate than Bernie Sanders, but still pretty far left. So, there should be hyper-enthusiasm, right? She’s a Democrat, a liberal, and a woman, the three things that are defining the party right now. The future is female supporters must be flocking to her banner, right? Nope. The Warren wave is registering a whopping zero on the enthusiasm scale, and voters in Massachusetts who know her don’t like her compared to the other Democrats running. On CNN yesterday, host Alisyn Camerota asked Washington Postreporter if the Ready for Warren cohorts are jacked up—and no one is about Warren 2020. Umm…ouch (via NTK Network):

Camerota asked Linskey, who previously reported for Warren’s hometown Boston Globe, if she sensed the same hunger for Warren to run for president today as there was in 2016.

“I think that has changed a little bit. I think there is some truth to that,” Linskey said. “You look back to 2015 and the run-up to the 2016 election, and there was this organization, ‘Ready for Warren,’ really pushing her to run.”

Linskey noted that during many of Warren’s speeches in 2105, she was often interrupted by people urging her to run for president.

“That sort of enthusiasm…we haven’t detected it much yet,” Linskey said about Warren’s 2020 run.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/enter-the-house-of-pelosi-11546473467

Nancy Pelosi takes the oath as Speaker of the House for the third time Thursday, a suitable reward for gaining 40 seats. If you expect a new era of progress in Washington, however, fair warning. The main Democratic goal will be investigating, not legislating. Then again, the country could do worse than policy gridlock, and it probably will.

The new Democratic House is being compared with the first Pelosi majority of 2006, but there’s one big difference: The 2018 Democrats ran on no discernible agenda beyond rejecting Donald Trump and all his works. The animating purpose of Congress will be investigations to damage, and perhaps impeach, the President to tee up total Democratic control after 2020.

Mr. Trump’s tax returns and foreign business dealings will get frequent star turns. Democrats think they can prove Mr. Trump has exploited his office for personal enrichment, or in some way that matters to Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. If not, at least they’ll embarrass the Trump family. Ivanka and Jared should prepare for subpoenas and dives into their email habits and security clearances.

Democrats will also run investigations into payments to Stormy Daniels; the Administration’s policy of separating children at the border; and every consultation with a business about a deregulatory decision. House Democrats will trail every cabinet officer down to whether he ordered a cocktail on a commercial flight. This will present even greater problems in staffing federal agencies.