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The American Spectator
Steve Baldwin’s Republican STRATEGY
11/20/2018

There’s a quite a bit of talk about how the two parties will work together to pass some policy initiatives over the next two years but don’t believe it for a minute. It is unlikely the Democrats will compromise with the Republicans on any issue that would give Trump a win. The reality is that when it comes to important issues such as border security, tax cuts, and health care, the Democrats simply don’t share the same underlying principles with the Republicans. We need to realize that today’s Democrat Party is not the same one that existed in the pre-Obama era when they were often able to find common ground with the Republicans. The last decade has seen the Democrat Party transform itself into a socialist party with little in common with traditional American governance.

Indeed, there are no more moderate Democrats in any key party positions whatsoever and those who today set the party’s agenda have a socialist orientation, despise capitalism, and support identity and group politics over merit and individual accountability. They have rejected the traditional norms that undergird the Christian-based value system America was founded upon. They defer to globalist institutions over U.S. constitutional law and don’t even support basic governing principles such as sovereignty and the concept of citizenship.

If JFK ran for office today, he would not only get clobbered, but he would be denounced for his whiteness, his elitist background, and his support for capitalism, tax cuts, and a strong military. He wouldn’t even make it past the Democrat primary.

Whatever compromise legislation offered by the House Democrats would almost certainly be something that violates basic conservative principles and should be rejected by the Republicans. Even on the issue of “infrastructure,” what the Democrats will likely do is to turn such a bill into a “Christmas tree” pork bill, whereby hundreds of state and local infrastructure projects will be placed into the bill for federal funding.

Understand that most infrastructure projects have historically been funded by state and local governments. But such a bill would change all that and create a horrible new precedent whereby the feds would take over the funding of all these projects. The Federal government is already in gross violation of the Constitution by funding many activities the Constitution reserves for the states, i.e. education, welfare, etc., so why should the Republicans escalate the destruction of our limited-government Constitution? No matter what Trump thinks of this idea, the GOP should oppose such legislation.

The best thing the GOP can do for the next two years is to embrace gridlock and ignore the “compromise” rhetoric being spouted by both the Democrats and establishment Republicans. The real agenda of the Democrats is to use the next two years to create phony narratives that will feed right into their 2020 presidential campaign themes. The Democrats have made it quite clear that they care far more about accumulating political power than pursuing good policy, so everything they will do in the next two years will be about setting the stage to recapture the White House. Every act by the Democrats will be about creating and promoting a narrative that Trump is evil, corrupt, controlled by the Russians, etc., etc. The incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Congressman Adam Schiff, will grossly exaggerate the Russian collusion narrative and is already spreading the conspiracy theory that “the Russians may have laundered money through the Trump organization, and if that’s the case, then we need to be able to look into it.”

As the incoming chairwoman of the Financial Services Committee, Congresswoman Maxine “Mad Max” Waters will demand the release of Trump’s tax returns, giving her a platform to prattle on and on about how Trump is hiding illegal activity. Congressman Jerry Nadler is already claiming his Judiciary Committee will investigate the FBI’s background check of Brett Kavanaugh’s accusers, even though they performed a rigorous investigation of all the witnesses cited by the women who made the allegations. He also claims, erroneously, that “there’s a real indication that Kavanaugh committed perjury” and wants to impeach him. And on and on.

The object of these phony investigations is to find a justification to impeach Trump, since, to date, they haven’t found any impeachable crimes as defined by the Constitution. The Democrats also hope that spending two years creating fake narratives about Trump — all covered extensively by their media allies — will sway enough ignorant voters against Trump to win the White House in 2020.

So what are the Republicans to do? Well, for starters, the GOP-controlled Senate needs to vote out a series of clean bills on issues that working-class Americans care about in order to show a clear contrast with the Democrats. For example, they should send to the House a number of bills that introduce free market approaches to health care such as Medical Savings Accounts and forcing insurance companies to compete across state lines, a policy that would drive rates downward. Let the Dems vote these bills down and they will.

On the immigration issue, the Senate should send to the house a border security bill that authorizes the construction of a few hundred miles of border wall in heavily populated areas and funds more border patrol officers and immigration judges. With thousands of people heading toward the border in what now appears to be an endless number of “caravans,” border security will be a hot issue for the next few years. It would be very short-sighted not to force the House Democrats to vote on such border security issues. Ditto for bills addressing our broken asylum system, our visa process, chain migration, and anchor babies.

Even on taxation bills — which must originate in the House — House Republicans should put forth a middle-class tax cut which the Democrats loudly claimed to be in favor of while denouncing Trump’s tax cut last year. Despite being in the minority, House Republicans can still, of course, introduce bills and then let the Democrats kill them. In the past, the Republican minorities have introduced watered down bills in an effort to pick up Democrat support. Those days are gone. We’re at war and congressional Republicans need to start acting like it. No Democrat is going to help any Republican pass any bill that will make Trump or the GOP look good, so they need to ditch that notion. Nor will the Democrats’ rabid socialist base allow them to do that. House Republicans instead need to focus on introducing solid legislation that puts American workers first and if the Democrats kill them, so be it.

The main goal of the Republicans for the next two years should be to put the Democrats on record, over and over again, as being against the policies that elected Donald Trump: border security, the renegotiation of trade treaties, less taxes, policies that unleash our manufacturers and energy producers, an America-First foreign policy, etc. They need to expose the Democrat Party for who they really are: a party completely unconcerned about working class Americans but obsessed with taking back power so they can continue the socialist transformation of America begun by Barack Obama.

With the lame duck session now in progress, the GOP needs to take advantage of the last few weeks of Republican control by passing legislation funding a border wall, reforming asylum, and passing a middle-class tax cut bill. Or is that asking too much? If the two parties switched sides, there’s little doubt the Dems would pass a slew of legislation before the Republicans took control of the House. They know how to fight. Our side wants to be “nice.” That needs to end.

But there are a number of actions the GOP can do without control of the House. The Senate should be prepared to expand its investigations of the FBI’s effort to interfere with the 2016 election, the related FISA court illegalities, and the collaboration with Russian entities by the DNC and Hillary’s campaign to fabricate a phony dossier, not to mention Hillary’s role in the Uranium One scandal. These are all ongoing investigations by House Republicans but will surely be shut down or severely crippled by the Democrats come January. The Senate needs to pick up the ball where the House left off. It also needs to be prepared to expose the lies and exaggerations that will surely come out of the various House investigations of Trump; indeed, the Dems are already boasting they have a target list of 85 issues to investigate.

We know, for example, that Schiff will fabricate all kinds of Russian collusion allegations as he has in the past.

The Senate Intelligence Committee should be prepared to immediately challenge bogus allegations by Schiff. If Schiff’s House Intelligence Committee, for example, charges that Carter Page is a Russian spy but refuses to give Page the opportunity to rebut this charge, the Senate Intelligence Committee should immediately ask Page to testify and ask other experts to appear who have knowledge of how Page actually worked with the FBI to expose a Russian spy. They need to show that the Democrats have zero evidence that Carter Page ever colluded with anyone to affect any election.

The Senate Republicans need to assume that numerous House investigations will make dozens of outlandish claims over the next two years and they need to be prepared to have hearings ready to go that simply report the truth and use that opportunity to expose how it was the Democrats that actually engaged in illegal activity during the 2016 election. In short, the Senate needs to show the American people that the Democrats have unleashed a circus of investigations that have no basis in fact and are only designed to create a campaign narrative for 2020 and to cover up their own criminality in using our intelligence agencies to illegally interfere with a presidential election.

Yes, one can argue that the Senate has had committees investigating these scandals all along, but the reality is they were woefully weak and run by never-Trumpers who often echoed false allegations by Schiff and others. The painful truth is that with the exception of a few Senators such as Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham, the Senate Republicans as a group have been AWOL in pursuing the truth regarding the biggest scandal in a generation: the effort by Obama holdovers to use our intelligence agencies to affect the outcome of a U.S. election. This is why Senate Republicans such as Intelligence Committee Chairman Senator Richard Burr have received so much praise from the mainstream media; the more he was duped, the more praise he received. Burr needs to start putting his country ahead of “bipartisanship.”

Fortunately, it appears that Senator Graham will likely be the new chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and he has already commented to the press that he will investigate how the FBI handled the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections and Hillary Clinton’s email controversy. Praise God, we may finally see some real Senate leadership on prosecuting Democrat criminality.

If some of the more timid Senators don’t get on board with aggressively investigating and exposing the criminal activity of the Democrats, the House Democrats’ sensational narratives will dominate the media and not only create a climate for Trump’s defeat in 2020 but the defeat of many GOP Senators as well. They need to wake up and realize they are in a battle not just for our country, but for their own political survival as well.

Moreover, Judicial Watch has managed once again to pry away more documents that confirm that Hillary not only used her private server to send classified emails but that the FBI did everything it could to cover for her.

Incredibly, Senate investigators have not even acknowledged these new documents. People need to be prosecuted and the Republican Senators should get off their lazy backsides and start urging the AG’s office to initiate prosecutions. The evidence of criminal activity by both the Deep Staters within the FBI and Hillary is now abundant and the time has come for the Senate to quit being “nice guys” in the face of massive Democrat criminality and start getting serious about their constitutional requirement to check out-of-control agencies.

Moreover, AG Jeff Sessions is gone and the appointment of Matthew Whittaker, and soon the permanent appointment of a new attorney general, almost guarantees that thousands of incriminating documents sought the last two years by various House committees will be released, but with the House investigations now crippled, the Senate needs to step up to the plate and act on the criminal activity some of these documents will likely expose. There is nothing in the Constitution that prohibits the Senate from taking the lead on investigating the massive criminal enterprise undertaken by Obama holdovers within our intelligence agencies.

The Senate also needs to be prepared to kill what will likely be the most radical group of House bills the Senate has ever encountered. Already, we know there will be bills to eliminate ICE, subsidize all college education, undermine the Second Amendment, socialize health care, and force all employers to pay $15 an hour wage. There will be bills to reverse the Trump tax cuts and to implement a radical “Green Deal” agenda which will essentially stop oil exploration and drilling.

If these reckless bills actually passed, they would bring our economy to a screeching halt and return America to the pervasive stagnation of the Obama era. Our Senators should give clear speeches as to why these bills are bad for America and use this opportunity to educate Americans about the difference between socialism and capitalism, between stagnation and growth, between liberalism and conservatism and between a strong America and a weak America.

And, of course, the Senate needs to expedite the confirmation of all the judges needed to fill the 79 vacancies and vote on the existing pending nominees for another 56 openings; altogether they could be responsible for placing 135 conservative judges onto federal courts over the next two years. In case the GOP loses the White House in 2020, the Senate needs to make sure they do not get behind in filling these vacancies. These judges will have far more impact on the country than anything Congress is able to accomplish in the next two years (nothing). The Obama White House left hundreds of judgeships vacant when they left office. The Senate should not be so stupid as to do the same thing.

There should also be some thought given to the way subpoenaed Trump officials will testify. With 85 investigations being pursued by the Dems, there will be hundreds of subpoenas issued to Trump officials from the White House, ICE, DHS, DOD, FBI, etc. Rather than have all these appointees sit there looking like subdued bureaucrats, the White House should encourage all of them to be confident and to make it clear in their opening statements that the Democrats are wasting millions of taxpayer dollars investigating phony crimes while at the same time refusing to pursue policies that benefit working class Americans. They should all be civil but their remarks should expose these kangaroo court type hearings for what they really are: a circus designed to help Hillary or whoever win the White House in 2020.

There are also other things the White House could be doing to prepare for 2020. Trump’s new Attorney General, whoever that will be, will be sitting on a large accumulation of evidence of felonious actions by Obama era officials, FBI leaders, and even Hillary Clinton, that were not acted upon by Sessions. Not only will the new AG have access to incriminating internal documents — some of which were withheld from congressional investigations — but the next DOJ Inspector General report, if it’s an honest report, will be chalk full of additional evidence of criminal wrongdoing by FBI/DOJ personnel in regards to illegally interfering with the 2016 presidential campaign.

The next two years may be the last time any of these Deep State people will be held accountable. Not only is prosecuting such criminal conduct the proper thing to do, but politically, it will educate the American people about how indeed there was collusion but not of the kind the media kept yapping about. Rather, the new AG will have the opportunity to lay out the facts about the real collusion between Russian entities, Hillary’s campaign, and the DNC to interfere with the 2016 election by fabricating a dossier full of sensational allegations which was then used to justify the wiretapping of Trump campaign aides and to create phony media stories.

Another thing that the White House can do is to address the issue of illegal alien voting. A number of academic studies have confirmed that 2-3 million illegal aliens are now voting in our national elections, which makes it imperative that voter ID laws be passed in as many of states as possible in the next two years. This should have been done the last two years when the GOP controlled more states than they do today, but they didn’t and the Republicans are now paying the price. This is why conservative leaders often refer to the Republican Party as the “stupid party.”

It is likely illegal aliens put Kyrsten Sinema over the top in the Arizona Senate race and if Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis had lost their races for the Senate and Governorship in Florida, it would have been in no small part thanks to the large illegal alien community there. Many of the ballots that arrived after the deadline in Florida and Arizona are absentee ballots and the reason why they are mostly Democrat votes is that absentee voting is the chosen voting system of the illegal alien community. This is why Obama AG Eric Holder spent much of his time threatening states with legal action for even thinking about implementing voter ID laws. Registering for an absentee ballot is easy to do, requires no identification, involves no face to face meeting with anyone, and the application can be easily filled out by those who coach illegal aliens how to vote.

Indeed, the USA is the only industrialized country in the world without voter ID laws. Even Mexico — which is often critical of our efforts to restrict illegal aliens — is far stricter when it comes to voting and every Mexican citizen must prove who they are before they can vote.

The White House should have created a task force two years ago within the Department of Justice that works with GOP legislators in every state to create and pass voter ID laws, but they didn’t. It’s not too late to do it now and Trump should immediately ask Kris Kobach, who just lost the Kansas Gubernatorial race, to head up such an effort. Kobach is one of the nation’s leading experts on vote fraud and has been crafting voter ID legislation for years.

Part of the problem with illegals voting is the Trump administration itself. The Obama administration dumped all kinds of money into programs and groups that allegedly help “immigrants” acclimate to the USA, but as Judicial Watch discovered, these grants were used “to register new, immigrant voters that likely supported Democrats in the presidential election.”

We have no idea how many of these immigrants were illegal but there is no evidence such programs restricted their efforts to only legal immigrants. Indeed, Obama’s efforts were headed by Cecilia Munoz, the former VP of La Raza, a radical open borders group which supports voting by illegal aliens. The ideal person for the job.

In the final months of the Obama regime, $29 million was pumped into this program. Incredibly, the Trump administration naively continues this program, granting at least $20 million to groups engaged with this work in states with the largest “immigrant” communities, such as Arizona and Florida. The agency that funds these efforts is the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Can someone please tell Trump that his own agency may have contributed to the GOP’s electoral losses in these states? Moreover, aside from the government funded efforts to register illegals, socialist billionaire George Soros funds many private groups who engage in this activity as well.

Given the efforts to register illegal aliens to vote, there’s a good chance that by 2020, the number of illegal aliens voting will be much higher than 2-3 million. While the GOP dithered on passing state vote ID laws the last two years (only four states now have voter ID laws), the left was busy canceling out the votes of legal Americans by registering illegals. If five million illegal aliens come out to vote in 2020, you can say “bye-bye” to the USA as the Republicans will never again win the White House. It’s game over.

We are in a battle for the soul of America. It’s time for President Trump and Republicans in both houses to get on war footing, fight the incoming wave of socialist legislation, expose and prosecute Democrat criminality, restore integrity to the voting process and prepare for 2020 by using every opportunity to show the American people the difference between an American-first agenda and an agenda that returns the country to Obama-style economic stagnation, military weakness, and a borderless country. If we don’t fight, the country we pass on to our children will have nothing in common with our founding principles.