The busiest people on Capitol Hill today may be travel agents. Most senators are probably scrambling to change their vacation plans after the GOP’s announcement that the chamber was cutting its August recess short. Instead of adjourning on July 28th for the usual summer break, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell thinks there’s too much unfinished business to leave town. If members are upset about working overtime, McConnell says, take it up with Democrats.

“In order to provide more time to complete action on important legislative items and process nominees that have been stalled by a lack of cooperation from our friends across the aisle, the Senate will delay the start of the August recess until the third week of August.” The jab at Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) party comes after weeks of Democratic hijinks and procedural moves that have slowed the confirmation process to a glacial pace. And although health care is stealing most of the headlines, the reality is that the Senate has plenty on its plate apart from the messy debate over a replacement plan. National defense, judicial nominees, administration appointments, and the start of tax reform are all bearing down on a chamber that isn’t exactly known for its efficiency.

But not everyone is upset about the lost vacation time. In fact, several Republicans had asked to stay and work. Led by David Perdue (R-GA), at least eight senators called on leadership to postpone recess. “Wouldn’t it be a refreshing thing if the American people could actually see a seriousness about doing things on time for a change, even if it meant disrupting a planned schedule?” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD), one of the letter’s signers, said. Across the Capitol, House offices breathed a sigh of relief that their calendars were unchanged. Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) said that his members would only return if the Senate managed to pass an Obamacare repeal. In that case, he vowed, his chamber would be back in DC within 72 hours and eager to get to work fulfilling their biggest promise to America.

McConnell is still hopeful that won’t be necessary, explaining that he still intends to hold a vote next week on one of the two versions of the legislation floating around the Senate. “We’re going to do health care next week, and in the reconciliation process, of course, you get to the end,” he guaranteed. “Sometimes it can be as a result of exhaustion, but you get to the end.” Republicans got a sneak peak at the latest rewrite at Tuesday’s policy lunch. Most senators have probably lost count of the number of bill drafts that have landed on their desks, but McConnell is determined to find the sweet spot of compromise. For right or wrong, part of that will depend on the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) score on the changes, which isn’t expected until today or Friday. And while the CBO is about as accurate as a weatherman, most senators still take their cost estimates seriously.

Meanwhile, the House isn’t exactly twiddling its fingers in the lead-up to summer recess. One of the heaviest lifts of every year — the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) — is winding its way through the committee process on its way to the floor. More than 370 amendments have been filed in the Rules Committee, and although not all of them will get the benefit of debate, several crucial ones will. They include Rep. Mark Sanford’s (R-SC) measure to stop the military from watering down its physical standards in the face of so much political correctness. With the possibility of women joining infantry units or people who identify as transgender in the ranks, Sanford is as concerned as the rest of us that the Pentagon would lower its bar to accommodate the Left’s demands for “inclusion.”

At the same time, our good friend Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-MO) is desperately trying to spare taxpayers the $3.7 billion price tag for the sexual reassignment surgery that would be guaranteed to people who identify as transgender if the Trump administration doesn’t overturn the Obama policy permanently. Under her measure, the military would be barred from spending a single cent on the extreme makeover of troops who, ironically, will be unfit for deployment after the procedure. Instead, she’s fighting to put that money where it belongs: on actual military priorities like equipment, service members’ pay, and vital training.

This ought to be a political no-brainer for both parties. Only 23 percent of Americans think that even allowing the gender-confused into the military is a good idea. Good luck finding that many who think paying for a completely elective sex change operation is a better use of taxpayer dollars than 3,700 tomahawk missiles, 22 F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Planes, or 116 Chinook helicopters. Click here to add your voice to the millions of Americans who want the military to do its job — not the bidding of the fringe Left!

Originally published here.

U.S. Funds Fish Art to the Tuna $10,000

The abuse of taxpayer dollars stings — and not just because it’s funding the saguaro cactus! That’s just one of the highlights in OpenTheBooks.com’s new report on the epic waste taking place at the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities. It’s no wonder the Trump administration is saying it’s curtains for the NEA and other arts projects. Based on OpenTheBook’s findings, these grants are only setting the stage for the liberal agenda.

There are no words for the $20,000 going to the San Francisco Mime Troupe every year, whose latest act suggests it’s safer to fight overseas than to live in “the police state of America.” For the love of cod, we’re spending another $10,000 for an LA dance troupe to build a 15-foot fish. At South Dakota State University, students begged for $11,987 to preserve “National Hobo Day,” complete with a “Bummobile” that drove through the homecoming parade. Cactus makes perfect in Arizona, where it apparently takes $10,000 for the Borderlands Theater to set up chairs for an hour-long “listening session” next to the spiky plants. Another $55,000 went to publish such scholarly works as “The Feminist Porn Book” or produce “queer arts dance” productions like “Boys Bite Back.”

In San Francisco, the Asian American Women Artists Association dropped $10,000 on one of the founding members of the Osama bin Laden fan club. The Japanese-American civil rights leader they honored once said she considered the 9/11 mastermind “one of the people I admire.” There’s spender in the grass at Georgia’s Kennesaw State University, which dropped $20,000 on a fake lawn display (which onlookers said was really just hanging lights).

Unfortunately, that’s just a sampling of the ways the arts are blowing through our tax dollars. Tuesday, on “Washington Watch,” OpenTheBooks.com’s Adam Andrzejewski explained how unnecessary these grants are. “We show empirically that eight out of every 10 dollars of arts and humanities funding isn’t going to the starving artists. It’s going to well-heeled institutions that have plenty of assets. In fact, eight out of 10 dollars goes to organizations that have over one million dollars of financial assets… So they don’t need taxpayer money, but they’re taking taxpayer money.” As I told Adam, it’s not like these are impoverished organizations. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET) has raked in $1.2 million in federal dollars since 2009 despite having more than $3.7 billion in financial assets. Obviously, we don’t need to funnel $25,000 to the Shakespeare festival every year to know their cries for money are much ado about nothing!

Originally published here.

Son Burned by Media’s Donald Jr. Frenzy

On the desk of any liberal media outlet, there are two rulebooks: one for Republicans, one for Democrats. If the election coverage didn’t convince you, then Donald Trump’s first seven months ought to. Despite making good on dozens of campaign promises, the Trump team has faced a lopsided barrage from an unfriendly press since Day One. Dogged by negative press (a record 89 percent of it unfavorable), the 45th president has set new highs for media hostility.

Now, with stories surfacing about Donald Trump Jr.‘s meeting with a Russian attorney last year, the far-Left is licking its lips. Most media outlets are attacking the president’s son with the ferocity they refused to show to the Clintons (despite far more dubious interactions with Vladimir Putin’s country). Desperate to catch the Trump campaign in cahoots with the Russians, they’ve turned Trump Jr.’s search for opposition research into a fantasy of national “treason” (Sen. Tim Kaine’s [D-VA] words, not mine)!

Clearly, the media is only seeing what it wants to in regard to this story. It’s unreasonable to think that Donald Trump Jr., who was a political novice working on his dad’s campaign, would respond any differently than he did to this offer of information about Hillary Clinton. As someone who’s spent a career in politics, I know from experience that there are all kinds of people who offer to hand over incriminating details about the opposition. But getting intel on an opponent isn’t necessarily for the purpose of using it publicly, but rather strategically. Some information is legitimate and helpful — a lot of it is not.

As Donald Trump Jr. said Tuesday night, “For me, this was opposition research. They had something … maybe concrete evidence to all the stories I’d been hearing about, probably underreported for years not just during the campaign, so I think I wanted to hear it out. But really, it went nowhere, and it was apparent that wasn’t what the meeting was about.” In an attempt to be “open and transparent,” he even went so far as to post the entire email string online. At the time, “things are going a million miles per hour,” he explained. “In retrospect, I probably would have done things a little differently.” I’m sure he would — and we would all expect him to, given what we know now about Russia’s efforts to undermine the election. But we have to be careful not to evaluate the decisions of a year ago based on what we know today.

It may not be the “greatest witch hunt in political history,” as President Trump called it, but the media’s double standard is certainly cause for concern. “When it comes to Team Trump, Democrats and their journalist pals are as relentless as bloodhounds chasing escaped jailbirds. And yet, regarding the Clintons, the Democrats and old-guard news people are as ferocious as puppies enjoying a roaring fireplace,” Deroy Murdock writes in a piece laying out the Clintons’ own misdeeds. “By all means, let Congress and the media get to the bottom of what, if anything, Russia may have done to influence last year’s elections and what, if anything, Team Trump did to help. But let’s also root out what, if anything, the Clintons did to advance Russia’s strategic position, while feathering their nests.”

As he points out, “The same folks who spy a KGB agent behind every filing cabinet in Trump’s White House are aggressively apathetic about Hillary and Bill Clinton’s policies, decisions, and actions that gave aid and comfort to Russia.” As Kayleigh McEnany points out in The Hill, Donald Jr.‘s suspicions were warranted.

Bill Clinton had given a $500,000 speech in Russia. Clinton had given her approval in handing one-fifth of U.S. uranium to Russia, after which her foundation received $2.35 million from the Russian-controlled company. Suspiciously, Clinton did not disclose the transaction. Likewise, Clinton campaign chief John Podesta sat on the board of a company that received $35 million from the Russian government alongside fellow board members Anatoly Chubais, a senior Russian official, and Ruben Vardanyan, an oligarch. Given this context, why wouldn’t Trump Jr. be open to taking a meeting that offered evidence of incriminating Clinton dealings with Russia, particularly when most of the media refused to look into Clinton’s question-raising actions?

Most Americans (56 percent) are tired of hearing about Russia and want to focus on issues at home like health care, the economy, and national security. If only the liberal media would stop pushing these lopsided stories long enough to let us.

Originally published here.

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This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.