Now that Kevin McCarthy is no longer Speaker, I welcome you dear reader, to the undiscovered country. If you don’t understand the reference, it was the title of the sixth movie in the Star Trek franchise. Its theme was dealing with the future. Since no one knows what the future holds, it is considered the undiscovered country (Shakespeare used the term to describe death).
The way forward for House Republicans will not be easy, nor should it be. This is a party that is fighting for its very identity. On one hand you have the Freedom Caucus, a bunch of next generation rabblerousers who are in the mold of both Donald Trump and Newt Gingrich, if such a thing is possible. On the other hand, you have the so-called old fashioned Conservatives (i.e., the establishment), whose major thrust is to go along to get along with the other side to try and get what they can by way of compromise, again, if such a thing is possible. These forces have been at each other’s throats since the days of Barry Goldwater, albeit in different iterations and epochs (think Goldwater, Reagan, Gingrich, the Tea Party, Trump).
I consider what happened to McCarthy poetic justice/karma. As much as Matty Boy and the Gates Eight have been blamed for creating chaos and sabotaging Republican efforts, Kevin from Cali is no stranger to such antics. In my Sabotaged post, I intimated how McCarthy had tainted the Benghazi Investigation with a well placed “irresponsible” comment about Hillary Clinton’s future run for the Presidency in 2016. It was designed to give cover to Republican leadership in the aftermath of the attacks on the Consulate and its annex on the evening of September 11th of 2012. Rather than addressing shortcomings of how our diplomatic corps had prepared for the events in Libya, it turned into a Democrat finger pointing session that did nothing to correct the deficiencies leading to that disaster.
The Democrat midterm victory in 2018 where they took back the House majority, in my humble opinion, never should have happened. In Part 6 of the Aftermath series, I laid out why the Republicans should have kept control of the House, but failed to do so in what can only be summed up as a few members of a baseball team throwing the game because they didn’t like their star pitcher. But that’s exactly what the House leadership did by not pursuing the farce that was the Mueller witch hunt. A majority in the House would have allowed them the ability to do a deep dive into the origins of the COVID 19 virus, including the connection between the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Representative Michael McCaul, as the Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, commissioned a report by the Minority Staff that was published in June of 2020 detailing the potential origins of the virus, but it never made any headway since Republicans were in the minority. They had no power to hold hearings, call witnesses, or subpoena critical information that would have shed light on what had transpired. Now contrast that with a Democrat controlled House that was focusing on impeaching Donald Trump (the first go-round) and wasn’t paying any attention to the goings on in China but had the audacity to blame the administration for not being prepared for the pandemic as it engulfed the world.
During the pandemic Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin was doing the yeoman’s work of pointing out alternative treatments for the virus beyond the ones that were being pushed by the public health/medical establishment, as well as holding sessions with health and medical practitioners who were having success with these treatments. One man can’t do all the heavy lifting in a situation such as the one this country was faced with in 2020, especially since Senate leadership was nowhere to be found. Having control of the lower chamber would have enabled the Republicans to go one step further than their Senate brethren by holding televised hearings and examining all the potential ramifications of masking, school closures, lockdowns, and the development of vaccines that were unnecessary, given the abundance of low-cost anti-viral medicines. They could have also called on the same individuals Senator Johnson was in contact with, giving the American people a contrarian view to the one being put out by the White House pandemic cabal (Fauci, Birx, et al). Fauci’s go-rounds with Senator Paul (the other Senate hero) would have paled in comparison to what the House Doctors’ Caucus and the other health experts would have done to him in side by side testimony before the appropriate House committees. America’s Doctor would have been exposed for what he really was, America’s Dr. Mengele.
With a robust, yet non-intrusive response plan in place, we could have reopened this country before any real harm had been done. Our economy would have gotten back on track, our deficit and debt would look nothing like what they are as of this writing, students would have suffered minimal learning loss (although the secret intentions of the left to pervert our children would not have been exposed), we would have prevented several hundred thousand needless American deaths, the greatest transfer of wealth in human history would have been averted, and the world would be a less dangerous place. More to the point, right about now we would most likely be looking at the culmination of a second Trump term, and efforts to find a worthy successor via the upcoming Primaries. How could anyone ever get tired of winning?
I don’t think that Ryan, McCarthy, and the rest of the establishment cabal could have ever imagined the accelerated decline and decay that this country has experienced with the Democrats in control of the federal government. But then again, all they were concerned about (just like the Dems) was either getting rid of Trump or hamstringing his administration. I guess that’s why the future can truly be called the undiscovered country.
