A Reprieve To Accomplish Some Good
By SHAUN KENNEY
President Trump is right to crow just a bit after the 2018 midterms. In a typical election, the opposition party tends to get about 31 net seats in the House; 39 if the president’s approval ratings are at 40 percent. In short, the Democrats not only underperformed their own narrative, they underperformed historically.
This same narrative only gets worse for the Democrats in the U.S. Senate, where the Republicans will emerge with a comfortable majority that should hold until 2022 at the earliest. With news that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg suffered a fall which cracked three of her ribs, it is a reminder that a Republican-led Senate will not only be selecting federal judges for lifetime appointments, but that the U.S. Supreme Court remains squarely outside the grasp of the progressive left.
There’s other good news in these numbers to for pro-life Catholics. As of today, about 49 senators could be termed “pro-life” — which would have been bad news for a nominee such as Amy Comey Barrett or anyone else whose dogma lives loudly within them. Yet with the current setup? There are something on the order of 53 pro-life votes, Sen.-elect Marsha Blackburn among them. She is famous for leading the Select Panel on Infant Lives which investigated Planned Parenthood’s sale of aborted babies’ body parts
Here’s another thing to consider. Speaker Nancy Pelosi will now hold the reins of power in the U.S. House, which means the progressive left will do everything possible to demonstrate to their base precisely how “woke” they are (I don’t know what the word means, but apparently it means something to the effect of pliable to people who cut checks for fake activism).
That will mean two years of sharp contrast in a Congress now deadlocked on the major issues of the day. For folks who are true fans of the First Amendment and wish Madison had stopped with “Congress shall make no law,” this is tremendous news indeed.
Other tidbits of good news from a tactical standpoint is that any talk of a government shutdown will now rest squarely on the shoulders of the House Democrats who control the chamber. Either present a budget the American people can support, or explain to the very same people why you are willing to hold their paychecks ransom and Social Security checks hostage to a secular ideology that more mimics religion than ideas.
Yet for those of us who are waiting, the “lame duck” session may be the last moment for this U.S. Congress to deliver on a core campaign promise — defunding Planned Parenthood.
The Trump administration has tried working around the edges, but they have yet to suspend Planned Parenthood funding through the Department of Health and Human Services.
Yet even if this Congress lacks the moral character to defund the nation’s #1 abortion chain, even the hat tip of allowing state legislatures to do so independent of the federal government would be welcome indeed. As it stands now, 31 state legislatures are firmly in the hands of a party that claims to be pro-life, while a mere 10 are in the hands of the pro-abortion left. It’s not the blanket solution we want — but it’s a step in the right direction of ending abortion where we can with the tools we have.
So there’s the optimistic version of what happened. The downside? In the American suburbs, a conservative message of family, faith, and firearms was drowned out by a steady mantra of health care, living wages, and anti-Trump rhetoric. Shades of the 2006 Democratic midterms where anti-Bush sentiment was in full froth.
The fact of the matter is that we are losing suburban culture to the siren song of the postmodern left. The self-reliance of rural America is being displaced by the soft hum of a computer screen and an omnipresent smartphone greedily being fed thumb taps.
Who cares that Obamacare has sent premiums skyrocketing? Will pre-existing conditions still be covered or not?
Who cares about the high cost of post-secondary education? Is government going to forgive my student loan debt or not?
Who cares about attracting the capital that creates jobs? Will I be paid $15 to shuffle paperwork or flip burgers or not?
In the end, the Democrats know the secret articulated by Alexander Hamilton so many years before. Most folks do not want to be helped; they only want to be fed. Most folks want to protect the possibility of becoming rich rather than face the reality of being poor.
And yet we are not poor in the slightest. America is in a veritable golden age of information and technology. No other nation on this Earth has been graced with the natural resources and intellectual power to do so much good, and yet we are in a terrible hurry to amuse ourselves to death with it.
The Leviathan State
So what changed with the midterm elections? Nearly nothing is the most honest answer. The progressive left still wants to tell you how to live your life and strip you of whatever meager possessions we have left in thrall to an omnipresent federal government whose only creed is “social justice” — while the complacent right continues to bait the Leviathan state in the hopes that it will eat one of us last.
In short, Republicans were granted a reprieve to accomplish some good.
After l’affaire Kavanaugh, it should now be clear that the professional left will hate us for all the good we do anyway . . . hopefully the lame-duck Congress will see this for what it is and get as much good done before the lower house is surrendered to lesser scions.
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Questions? Comments? Brilliant thoughts? Please feel free to send any correspondence for First Teachers to Shaun Kenney, c/o First Teachers, 5289 Venable Road, Kents Store, VA 23084 — or if it is easier, simply send me an e-mail with First Teachers in the subject line to: svk2cr@virginia.edu.
