By DEXTER DUGGAN
A year from now, the 2020 presidential election and other key ballot contests will be a little more than a dozen weeks distant on the calendar.
Although the unexpected may intervene — as prognosticators must cautiously remind their audiences — President Trump and his seething Democrat foes had pretty clearly staked their positions for the campaign by midsummer 2019, two and a half years after he entered the White House.
At least theoretically, it had been a miserable time for the Dems since the miserably corrupt Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, but they’ve done pretty well at getting key goals, despite being frustrated at fulfilling their fever dreams of Trump being pulled from the Rose Garden in manacles.
Trump’s fundamental pledge of building the wall is almost as far from reality as it ever was while massive illegal immigration submerges the law-abiding U.S. But mountains of federal spending in a new two-year accord on appropriations are arrived at with a happy handshake between the president and his putative political opponents.
Expanding funding for Democrat big-government priorities won’t cause any distress on the left side of the aisle.
Beginning his presidential campaign in 2015 with his bold wall pledge, Trump neglected to add that of course he wouldn’t be able to achieve it if adversary judges and establishment congressional appropriators wouldn’t let him.
And when he truthfully called attention to the very real but ignored crisis of women and girls being victimized by border rapists, leftists only howled that Trump was a racist, not that their preferred open borders facilitated massive sex abuse. Their political correctness once again took priority over the real suffering of real victims.
But Trump failed to deliver after vowing that “millions” of illegal aliens with deportation orders already issued against them would be removed. As of July 24, USA Today reported that only a few dozen offenders had been arrested.
As usual, the latest government spending deal is said to avert a terrible crisis, just as these deals always do. It reportedly contains no “poison pills” that would make Dems ill, so rest assured that their slaughterhouse pals at Planned Parenthood are to keep scooping up buckets of tax money, despite Trump’s base-pleasing talk to the contrary.
Remarkably, the president reportedly told aides to prepare for big budget cuts if he wins a second term — “a move that would dramatically reverse the big-spending approach he adopted during his first 30 months in office,” the Trump-hating Washington Post said in mid-July.
Ah yes, promised budget cuts always seem years distant, not right now. Why look, the border wall is so low that you have no trouble seeing over it to view the promised cuts far off on the horizon.
Although one would think fighting against big spending would be a powerful conservative topic for 2020, the new budget deal intentionally removes this as a campaign issue. Go figure.
As NPR congressional correspondent Susan Davis said on July 23: “The main goal with this deal is to head off any debt-limit default. The country was coming up against its borrowing limit in early September. So this deal will essentially suspend it until the end of July of 2021. That puts us well past the presidential election, takes it off the table in the election year.
“It also sets spending limits for the next two years with the goal of heading off any more government shutdowns during that time,” Davis added — another potential campaign issue disabled.
What a cozy accommodation to the swamp that Trump had pledged to drain.
National conservative columnist Quin Hillyer told The Wanderer on July 23: “On all matters involving actual legislating rather than administrative action, President Trump is proving to be all bluster, no delivery. He also is proving to be the single biggest-spending president, in circumstances of peace and prosperity, in the nation’s history.
“The American people will suffer greatly, in future years, because of Trump’s profligacy,” Hillyer said.
On the other hand, Trump scores positively by selecting judicial nominees committed to the Constitution, not to advancing left-wing ideology, including to fill vacancies at the all-important Supreme Court. The potential problem here is for conservative justices to surrender to left-leaning institutional inertia as time passes.
President George W. Bush’s Chief Justice John Roberts, once hailed as a conservative hero, appears to have been captured by this vitiating inclination, but veteran Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, nominated by President George H.W. Bush, clearly remains a guide for conservative conscience.
Reforming Planned Parenthood through regulation by its federal-government sponsor has had positive points, although not uniformly so.
Among recent developments, LifeSiteNews.com reported on July 22: “The Trump administration revealed…it would delay enforcement of its new rules to ensure Title X dollars don’t go to abortionists, giving abortion-involved facilities more time to comply with the regulations. . . .
“The rule is projected to cut almost $60 million from the $563.8 million Planned Parenthood received during the most recent fiscal year, and redirect it to women’s health providers that aren’t involved in abortions,” LifeSiteNews.com added.
Meanwhile, LifeNews.com reported on July 24: “In 2017, the Trump administration announced plans to cut millions of dollars in grants to Planned Parenthood through the failed Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program. Now the Trump administration is sending $1.5 million to pro-life pregnancy centers to help young Americans make positive, life-affirming sexual decisions.”
On July 23 a conservative activist who declined to be named so he could speak freely expressed his views to The Wanderer about Trump’s uneven record.
“The list of big promises Trump has kept is relatively small — good judges, support for our military, a hard line with rogue regimes, and getting tough with China are some examples of important promises he has kept,” the activist said.
“But other promises, like making the best deals with Congress, ‘locking her up,’ cutting spending, and the granddaddy of them all — ‘building the wall and making Mexico pay for it’ — have not been kept and, in some cases, haven’t even been attempted,” he said.
“Trump can rightly blame Congress for a lack of border-wall funding, and Congress and the administration both bear some responsibility for allowing unelected judges to hijack policy determinations beyond their rightful jurisdiction,” the activist said.
“But the failure to get the job done, no matter who can fairly be blamed, has to rest with Trump, whose premise for election in the first place was that he was the consummate deal-maker who could and would get the best stuff done. Remember? There was going to be so much winning, we’d be tired of all the winning,” he added.
“This doesn’t give the Democrats a pass for their dereliction of duty when it comes to securing our nation. They are eager to see us overrun even if only because Trump wants us secure, and anything Trump wants they reflexively oppose,” the activist said. “They are pursuing policies that will rightfully shame and follow today’s Democratic Party for years to come.
“The budget deal seems like a bad overall deal, but that is common when you have divided government. Trump wants stuff and the Democrats want stuff, and the easiest compromise is to give everyone everything they want, which can get expensive for the taxpayers,” the activist said.
“They also agreed not to modify the deal further, which protects some Democratic priorities like Planned Parenthood, while preserving Trump’s ability to move funding around and likely start building some actual border wall. So you can say that both sides gave up some and got some,” he concluded.
Insane With Frustration
Meanwhile, Democrats’ ludicrous attempts to squeeze their friend Robert Mueller one more time in hopes he would spurt damaging evidence against Trump from his futile, squeezed-dry Russia-collusion investigation as special prosecutor merely left both Mueller and the Dems looking pitiably washed up.
Mueller was hauled out for more testimony on July 24 before House bodies.
The same day, Republican Cong. Andy Biggs, of Arizona, told the Phoenix-based Seth Leibsohn radio talk program (KKNT, 960 AM) that “at times, he seemed lost.”
Biggs, who was one of the GOP members questioning a confused-seeming Mueller, told the talk program, “This was a massive dud. They (Democrats) did not get anything that they wanted.”
Describing the day’s testimony as a disaster for rabid Democrats, national radio talk host Rush Limbaugh recalled how long and futilely they had tried to destroy Trump but continued to lose.
“They are insane with frustration and rage and anger,” Limbaugh said on July 24. “Not a single thing has worked!”
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