GOP clowns are aiding the Democrats’ biz agenda
After the midterms produced a new, GOP-led House of Representatives, chances were pretty high that President Biden’s economic agenda — a Bernie Sanders wish list of high taxes and radicalized choices for key regulatory posts — would be moderated by the force of a unified Republican majority in the House.
Not any longer.
The clown show that took place in the House over what’s usually a simple task of electing a speaker is actually emboldening Sleepy Joe to double down on his socialist remake of the US economy, I am told.
The whole spectacle would make for a great Broadway comedy if the stakes weren’t so high. A recession is looming and corporate America is slashing jobs. The economy is in dire need of pro-growth policies that only the GOP can promote and hope to advance, if it weren’t so busy self-immolating.
After 14 failed ballots, GOP leader Kevin McCarthy barely won the speakership on the 15th, following four days of bitter debate among Republicans that included a near-physical confrontation on the House floor.
McCarthy had been the House GOP minority leader for the past four years, but that apparently did him little good in unifying his party to vote him in without a fuss.
OK, he’s not perfect.
He’s no AOC either. Check his record of raising money and how he votes on most issues and you see a pretty conservative member, albeit with some blind spots.
But the crazies in the Republican Party want perfection — not that any of the holdouts are perfect in any sense of the word. (Do a Google search on Matt Gaetz.)
As McCarthy twists, the Biden administration is plotting.
First, I am told by Wall Streeters with ties to the White House that the Bidenistas have no plans on moderating their economic progressivism because why would they give in to the GOP gang that can’t shoot straight — and are shooting each other.
Second, there are signs that the Bidenistas are doubling down on their approach to remake the US economy into something that Saul Alinsky would love and Ronald Reagan wouldn’t recognize.
A telling move
The best tell, in the opinion of some of my sources, came Tuesday night when the White House renominated Gigi Sohn to the Federal Communications Commission.
Yes, I know the House doesn’t approve such appointments. That’s the job of the Senate, where the Dems have a one-vote advantage given the other GOP clown car of weak, upper-chamber candidates who somehow made it through the primaries because they kissed Donald Trump’s ring and God knows what else.
But Sohn’s reemergence is a sign from the Biden administration that it sees the GOP as a weak, disjointed adversary too focused on petty internal feuds to become a serious opposition party in the next and possibly final two years of Sleepy Joe’s presidential term.
Just to recap: Sohn’s a super-smart academic and super-aggressive progressive advocate of left-wing causes as they apply to the telecom sector. Her renomination came after she failed to garner enough Democratic votes in the Senate in the last session — because she was so radical that Joe Manchin and other moderate Dems feared an election-year backlash with control of the Senate on the line.
The FCC regulates a large, important swath of the American economy: media & telecom, and tech — the very engines of growth in the modern era. Sohn wants to remake it into a progressive paradise.
Among her greatest hits: She has called Fox News, where I work, “state-sponsored propaganda,” and has more than hinted that another network appealing to conservative voices in its programming should essentially be denied a license to operate.
She worked for a left-wing economic and social advocacy group funded by lefty billionaire George Soros and wants to ramp up net neutrality, a legal edict that would treat telecom companies as regulated utilities under the thumb of central planners.
She is so immersed in left-wing politics, she has even tweeted in favor of the defund-the-police movement. (She might be the only FCC nominee ever to have been opposed by the national Fraternal Order of Police.)
As a board member of a broadcast outfit named Locast, she was involved in an effort to use a supposed loophole in the copyright laws to pirate cable signals from major carriers on the premise it was providing programming free to people who couldn’t afford cable, until a judge shut it down.
Few sensible Dems
You get the picture. What I described above was enough to get a handful of sensible Dems to back off agreeing to push her nomination through during the last election cycle. Hell, as I reported on Fox Business, the Biden administration began a stealth search for a replacement at one point last year.
But she’s back, because with the GOP failing to take the Senate and with party disunity in the House, the White House is betting Manchin & Co. will cave in this go-round so Sohn and her ilk can do the work of Soros to help burn down capitalism while the GOP’s Neros are fiddling.