The Patriot Post® · Compromise, Anyone?

President Joe Biden has been “talking” unity, bipartisanship, and compromise for weeks, but his “walking” has been quite different.

Monday, 10 Republican senators went to the White House to discuss a compromise to Biden’s COVID relief package. There’s a big difference between their version and Biden’s plan — about a $1.3 trillion difference to be exact.

Biden wants another $1.9 trillion, and the Republican senators are recommending something just over $600 billion. Given the way Washington usually works, they’d probably end up splitting the difference and hailing it as a “bipartisan compromise.” But after two hours of talks, the senators left with nothing.

According to press reports, Biden made it clear that “he will not slow down” and would not “settle for a package that fails to meet the moment.” In other words, he has no interest in bipartisan compromise.

To prove the point, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer are taking steps this week that will allow them to ram through this massive $1.9 trillion bill with just a bare majority vote using special rules known as budget reconciliation.

To be clear, I believe more COVID relief is justified. But I believe it should be targeted to people who have lost jobs or whose businesses have been decimated as a result of the government forcing businesses to close and putting people out of work. That is a “taking” under the law, and people deserve to be made whole.

So, I believe it would be a mistake for Republicans to reflexively oppose any additional relief. But we need to be smart about it. As one liberal senator recently put it, “This isn’t Monopoly money.”

It’s Groundhog Day

Yesterday was Groundhog Day — a fun time of year when we consult a furry animal to predict the weather. And why not?! Punxsutawney Phil has a better track record than Al Gore and other environmental alarmists.

When you think of Groundhog Day, many people automatically think of the movie and comedian Bill Murray, who relived the same day over and over again. Well, Joe Biden had his own Groundhog Day in Washington, forcing us to relive the same failed liberal policies on illegal immigration.

Biden’s rhetoric and policies have already resulted in new illegal alien caravans of thousands of people marching north and surging border crossings. It’s only going to get worse as he continues to undermine border security and the commonsense reforms of the Trump administration.

And what impact do illegal immigrants have? They suppress wages. What does Joe Biden want to do? He wants to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.

The people coming across the border are not doctors, accountants, or other white-collar professionals. They are low-skilled and often no-skilled laborers. How many businesses struggling to recover from the pandemic are going to pay someone $15 an hour to sweep floors or bus tables?

The people coming across the border will be competing with American workers (and even other illegal immigrants already here), and many will end up on social safety net programs busting local budgets.

Biden’s actions are going to make things worse for many people struggling to recover from the pandemic’s economic carnage.

America’s Biggest Threat?

What’s America’s biggest threat? To some on the left, it’s not China but climate change. And that’s why the Biden administration is incorporating climate change into its national defense strategy. (I’m serious, folks. You can’t make this stuff up.)

Others, however, see a very different threat to the country. For example, Jalina Porter, deputy spokeswoman at the Biden State Department, says that America’s biggest threat is … cops. In 2016, she posted this on social media:

“The largest threat to U.S. national security are U.S. cops. Not ISIS, not Russian hackers, not anyone or anything else. If ya’ll don’t wake up and rise up to this truth, the genocide against Blacks in America will continue until we are near extinct.”

Meanwhile, yesterday in South Florida, five FBI agents were shot while serving a warrant. Two were reportedly killed. Monday, a Mississippi sheriff’s deputy was shot and killed.

If Ms. Porter is really concerned about the “genocide against Blacks in America,” I suggest she concern herself more with the causes behind the skyrocketing homicide rates in America’s major cities.

But here’s another point to keep in mind: Radicals like Ms. Porter are all over this administration, making daily decisions that will impact our families, communities, and jobs.

The GOP’s Circular Firing Squad

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) is starting a new political action committee to “take [the Republican Party] back.” Back to what? Back to the John McCain Party or the Mitt Romney Party with a platform that boiled down to “I’m going to cut your mother’s Social Security check and send your son off to war”?

Kinzinger is already something of an endangered species. He’s one of just five Republican members of Congress from Illinois. Is that because the Illinois GOP has been a Trump party for decades? No. It’s actually been a RINO party for years.

The Grand Old Party had been shrinking for decades. It was the Tea Party that began to revitalize the GOP, and it was Trump’s America First movement that drew 10 million more voters to the party last November.

Mitch McConnell has decided that the most important thing he can do for the party is to side with Rep. Liz Cheney, who is struggling to survive the backlash in Wyoming.

McConnell also went after an admittedly edgy congresswoman from Georgia, who has embraced some conspiracy theories that are troubling, including questioning whether any plane was involved in the 9/11 attacks. McConnell says someone with such views is like a “cancer” in the party. I understand his concern.

But I remember during the Bush years when prominent Democrats publicly accused President Bush of allowing 9/11 to happen to justify going to war in Iraq to grab Middle East oil.

Many Democrats promoted the conspiracy theory that the rescue effort after Hurricane Katrina was deliberately sabotaged because the Bush administration didn’t want to help black people. And, of course, a lot of Democrats promoted the conspiracy theory that Russia elected Donald Trump.

The Democrats in Congress promoting these conspiracies were never attacked by their party’s leaders.

Will any leading Democrat today condemn Ms. Porter for the “cancer” of her anti-police hatred that is so prevalent on the left today? I’m not holding my breath. Meanwhile, the GOP’s circular firing squad continues.

Our Clueless Elites

Vice President Kamala Harris wants to be president so badly that she’s now sounding as incoherent as Joe Biden. Speaking to a local West Virginia TV station recently, Harris suggested that unemployed coal miners could be put back to work “reclaiming abandoned land mines.”

I didn’t realize that was a big problem in West Virginia! Later Harris’s office claimed that she meant to say “reclaiming abandoned mine land.”

Whatever she meant, it makes about as much sense as John Kerry’s recent suggestion that laid off oil workers displaced by the Biden administration’s radical policies should make solar panels instead.

I guess Kerry wants a lot of Americans to move to China, since that’s where virtually all of the world’s solar panels are manufactured now.