Earlier this week, the United States reached a grim milestone — 800,000 Americans have died as a result of complications from COVID-19. This news comes just as the latest variant — Omicron — begins to spread throughout the country.

Thanks to Donald Trump and Operation Warp Speed, we got vaccines developed in record time, and they were available for distribution at the end of 2020. While the vaccines don’t seem to be nearly as effective at preventing transmission as we had hoped, they do seem to be effective at preventing severe illness and death.

But Joe Biden constantly blasted President Trump as incompetent. During one debate, Biden said that anyone who presided over 220,000 deaths “should not remain as president of the United States of America.” He claimed over and over again that he had a plan to “crush COVID.”

Biden lied, and hundreds of thousands of Americans have died since he took office.

Asked Wednesday about his responsibility for so many COVID deaths and why he isn’t demanding more transparency from communist China regarding the origins of the virus, Biden just laughed.

During last year’s campaign, Biden ran ads decrying all the “empty chairs” caused by COVID because of Donald Trump’s “failed leadership.” Well, there are even more empty chairs now, and Joe Biden laughs it off.

Manchin v. Biden

Democrats were hoping to make major progress this week on Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better Act,” a horrible socialist spending bill. Senate Democrat Leader Chuck Schumer actually thought he could pass the bill this week.

But they suffered heavy back-to-back blows between reports of record inflation and news that Biden’s bill really costs $5 trillion, not “zero.” Suddenly, Chuck Schumer’s deadline slipped to Christmas. And then things went from bad to worse.

Negotiations Wednesday with West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin reportedly were “melting down.” In fact, Manchin had a bit of a meltdown himself when he was confronted by a left-wing reporter. A planned lunch between Schumer and his committee chairmen to iron out key details was scrapped at the last minute.

The latest reporting is that Schumer knows Biden’s socialist spending bill can’t pass the Senate, and he may not bring it up again for months.

And with polls showing strong opposition to more spending and overwhelming disapproval with how Biden is handling inflation, it’s likely that other Democrat senators are relieved they don’t have to vote on this bill now.

To those who took the time to call your senators recently in response to our action items, Thank You for speaking up! I know your calls made a difference!

Back To Voter Fraud

Facing a major setback on their socialist spending wish list, Democrats Wednesday immediately returned to their efforts to steal future elections. They’re trying to carve out a special exemption on the filibuster for matters related to “voting rights.”

First of all, this is not a debate about “voting rights.” Voting rights are secure in America. What’s not secure is the ballot box. Far too many liberal states are not doing enough to ensure that only legal votes are cast and counted. And Democrats are doing their best to make cheating in future elections easier.

The legislation they want to ram through the Senate by circumventing the filibuster (the 60-vote rule) would nationalize all elections. It would repeal popular voter ID laws. It would force every state to adopt ballot harvesting, drop boxes and mail-in voting. In short, it would undo virtually every commonsense measure to prevent voter fraud.

For all the left’s talk about “undermining democracy,” that’s exactly what they are doing with these so-called “reforms” that have only one purpose: Securing their power forever.

We will aggressively fight these efforts and will continue to push election integrity legislation at the state level!

The Anti-Semitic Left

In recent years, the left has used claims of “systemic racism” to push for major changes at virtually every significant institution. One of the left’s demands has been the hiring of “DEI officers,” leftists responsible for pushing “diversity, equity and inclusion” policies, i.e., critical race theory, at those institutions.

This push has been most evident at our so-called “institutions of higher learning,” which are always on the vanguard of fringe absurdity. Earlier this year, the Heritage Foundation discovered that many universities have more “DEI” bureaucrats than history professors. Yes, that’s what your outrageous tuition fees are paying for.

Well, Heritage went a step further and analyzed the social media accounts of those DEI officers, specifically looking at comments related to Israel and communist China. What they discovered was that “96 percent were critical of the Jewish state, while 62 percent of the tweets about China were favorable.”

In other words, these DEI officers are a bunch of anti-Semitic Marxists.

They’re not interested in “inclusion” at all. They are, as Heritage put it, “political activists with a narrow and often radical political agenda.”

But these radicals aren’t just on college campuses. Many major corporations, bowing to the demands of the Marxist BLM movement, are now hiring DEI officers or chief diversity officers. And I strongly suspect that the views expressed by corporate DEI officers vary little from their campus counterparts.

Cheney & Kinzinger Must Go

Wednesday, I and dozens of leading conservatives called on House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy to expel Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger from the House Republican Caucus.

I refuse to refer to them by their titles because they are not representing their constituents at all. Cheney and Kinzinger were elected by conservative Republicans in Wyoming and Illinois respectively.

But they have betrayed their constituents by joining forces with Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff to destroy Donald Trump and to tarnish the conservative movement and the Republican Party with wildly absurd claims of “insurrection.”

I hate divisions in the Republican Party and the conservative movement. Circular firing squads are never helpful.

But Cheney in particular has made it clear that she not only opposes Donald Trump, she opposes any conservative who shares his America First principles. By allying with Pelosi in this sham “investigation,” she has made herself an enemy of the conservative movement.

Wyoming Republicans have already ejected Cheney from the Republican Party. Now I and other conservative leaders are calling on Kevin McCarthy to follow their example and expel her from the House Republican Caucus. If she’s so eager to help Nancy Pelosi destroy the GOP, she can do that from outside, not inside, the party.