Tag Archives: GOP

national news

Trump goes to ‘war’

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Donald John Trump no longer occupies the White House. He is the first-ever U.S. president to be twice impeached. He escaped conviction both times, but his reputation is scarred forever.

Does that silence the former president? Does it consign him to the back of the room where he would sit silently?

Hardly. He is now going after Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell in a personal, insulting and denigrating way.

I guess the two no longer are the pals they became after Trump got elected in 2016. I mean, all McConnell did for Trump was delay a Supreme Court confirmation until after Trump took office in 2017, enabling him to nominate Neil Gorsuch to the seat that should have gone to Merrick Garland. If Trump had an ounce of gratitude in his overfed body, he would realize he owes McConnell bigly for that opportunity.

Trump, in Scorching Attack on McConnell, Urges G.O.P. to Replace Him (msn.com)

No, he’s angry now because McConnell managed to tell us what he should have said long ago, which is that Trump provoked the riot that damn near could have resulted in harm to Vice President Mike Pence. McConnell did cast a not guilty vote in the Senate trial, but then kinda/sorta walked it back by saying he voted that way on a technicality.

Hey, I am not going to shed any tears for McConnell. I figure he can hold his own against the numbskull ex-president. Besides, I think he’s acted in a detestable manner, just not for the reasons that Trump cited in his lengthy statement.

Donald Trump has just shown us — as if we needed reminding — that he is going to keep flapping his yapper.

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GOP can’t face truth?

(AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

The TV cameras didn’t allow us to watch the members of the U.S. Senate jury that heard the arguments presented by the House of Reps’ managers prosecuting the case against Donald J. Trump.

The managers wrapped up their presentation today in the second impeachment trial of Trump, who is accused of inciting an insurrection. It occurred on Jan. 6. The mob stormed Capitol Hill seeking to prevent Congress from certifying the 2020 presidential election results.

Some reporting from the Senate, though, takes me back to something I witnessed in early 2019 in Amarillo, while covering a school board meeting. I’ll get to that in a second.

The Senate reporting tells us how Republican senators looked away from the hideous video of the riot presented by the House managers. They were seen doodling on note pads, leaving the Senate altogether, looking away, not paying attention to what senators were asked to watch. Why is that? They appear to be hiding from the reality of the ghastly insurrection for which Donald Trump stands accused of inciting.

In January 2019, my wife and I traveled back to Amarillo — where we lived for 23 years — to visit our son. The Amarillo public school district’s board was meeting one night. The board had just received a resignation letter from a high school girls volleyball coach, Kori Clements, who accused one of the school trustees of bullying her and of interfering in her coaching decisions. The trustee’s daughter played on the high school team and she believed the coach wasn’t giving her little darlin’ enough playing time.

The school board had a public hearing one evening. Residents were invited to speak to the board about the coach’s resignation, which caused quite an uproar in the community.

Every one of the residents who spoke to the board scolded them for the way the coach was treated. They admonished the trustee in question — Renee McCown, who has since resigned — for her conduct in pressuring the coach, forcing her to resign from a vaunted high school athletic program.

Where am I going with this? McCown never looked up from whatever she was looking at while her bosses — the taxpayers — were scolding her; nor did her board colleagues. They all should have looked them in the eye. I thought at the time it was a disgraceful display of arrogance. And I said so.

Trustees should have looked at those who scolded them | High Plains Blogger

The same sort of arrogance played out in the Senate as GOP senators didn’t bother to look at the horror that an ex-president wrought with his inciteful rhetoric.

national news

Lesson needs to be learned

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Well, my fellow Americans … we have been treated to a serious lesson on the fragility, yet sturdiness, of our democracy.

The first half of the Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial has concluded in the U.S. Senate. The House of Representatives prosecutors — members of the House, the managers — made, in my view, a compelling case for conviction. That Trump incited an insurrection against the government he took an oath to protect and defend.

He didn’t do either during his single term as president. He incited a riotous mob of terrorists on Jan. 6, exhorting them to march on Capitol Hill and intervene in Congress doing its job on that day, which was to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election.

We saw in graphic terms how close the terrorists came to bringing physical harm to Congress, and to the system of government we cherish.

They didn’t succeed. Our democracy stands to this day. It stands strong and it will survive this horrendous episode.

Donald Trump’s legal team takes the Senate floor on Friday. They say they can make their case in a single day. I am going to go out on a limb here: Trump’s team will talk past the House managers. They will divert the argument, send it down another path.

They cannot argue against the constitutionality of the trial. The Senate has voted already that the trial met constitutional standards. Nor can they possibly defend what transpired on Jan. 6. I double-dog dare them to suggest that Donald Trump’s remarks on The Ellipse didn’t incite the mob to attack the Capitol Building, egg the mobsters to smash windows, to ransack offices, to injure and kill people.

They won’t go there. Instead, I am going to presume Trump’s lawyers might hang their defense on the First Amendment, suggesting that Trump merely was exercising his constitutional free-speech guarantees by declaring his opinion that the election was stolen from him. You know, though, that it wasn’t.

Sigh …

I am left then to salute the founders of this great nation for establishing a governing framework that can withstand the assault that developed on Jan. 6. It was a full-on frontal attack incited by a lame-duck president.

He is likely to get away with what he did; the Senate won’t convict him of the deed I happen to believe he committed. However, his hideous conduct is now on the record for history to judge. Americans have seen it unfold in real time. I don’t know about you, but I never will forget what we learned on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

We must not commit such a horrendous error — electing someone of this individual’s ilk — ever again.

Joe Biden, national news

Collegiality still MIA

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I must admit to a certain level of naivete.

My hope had been that with the election of Joe Biden as president of the United States that the nation would see a fairly rapid restoration of good manners among members of Congress and congressional interaction with the White House.

President Biden built a lengthy Senate career marked by the former senator’s long-standing and nearly legendary ability to work with Republicans. He calls himself a “proud Democrat” but he managed to forge friendships with colleagues from the other side of the room.

He served 36 years in the Senate before becoming vice president in the Obama administration. He worked hand-in-glove with GOP senators.

Then he ran for president against Donald Trump, whose term as president was marked by constant battles with Democrats. He took a lot of Republican members of Congress along with him in those fights.

What I never quite banked on was that the animosity would outlive Donald Trump’s departure from the White House. I am saddened to realize that the residue of that anger and animosity has infected many GOP House members and senators, even as the nation has sought to recover from the tempest, tumult and turmoil of the Trump years.

The nation’s divisions run deep. I am not going to concede that the divisions are deepening at this moment. I will cling to the belief that they have reached rock bottom. Until we are able to bind up those wounds, I fear that President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are in for a long slog through the morass.

I heard today that Merrick Garland, the president’s nominee to be attorney general, can’t get a hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee to consider his confirmation. The current chair, Republican Lindsey Graham, won’t schedule a hearing.

There’s good news, though, on the horizon. Graham will hand the chairman’s gavel over to Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy soon and Leahy then will get the hearing scheduled.

What is remarkable about Graham’s intransigence is  that he once described Joe Biden as one of “the finest men God ever created.” The men’s friendship was long thought to be a model of bipartisan chumminess. Then Graham slipped into Donald Trump’s hip pocket and that all changed.

I use that example to illustrate the anger that continues to infect the governance of this country.

The lingering anger likely will be one of the many distasteful legacies that Donald Trump leaves behind.

national news

Count ’em: 11 GOP heroes emerge

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Eleven Republicans emerged this afternoon during a vote to kick a fellow GOP House member off two committees because of insanely offensive remarks she has made.

Just 11 of them. Out of more than 200 members of the GOP caucus. Sad. However, the number of Republicans with courage exceeded experts’ predictions.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene no longer serves on the Education and Budget committees. The House today voted her off the panels because she is a QAnon follower who has said some amazingly crass things about tragic events. Such as that the Sandy Hook and Parkland school massacres were made up; that 9/11 didn’t really occur; that Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to hold elected office; that Speaker Nancy Pelosi should be assassinated.

It was a bipartisan vote today to remove her from any committee assignments. However, many of us with there would have been more Republican House members to join their Democratic colleagues in speaking out against the hate spewed by Rep. Greene.

I am sorry to say that no one in the Texas GOP congressional caucus rose up against Greene. They all stood with her. I intend to ask my congressman, Republican Van Taylor of Plano, why he voted “no” on removing her from Education and Budget panels. I hope he answers me directly instead of sending out a boiler-plate helping of platitudes.

For now I want to salute the 11 House Republicans who mustered up the decency to do the right thing by rebuking a colleague for the hatred she represents.

national news

Wrong audience, Rep. Greene

Staff photo by C.B. Schmelter 

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Well now … that is nice. I guess.

U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia — the QAnon queen of the House of Representatives — met with her Republican colleagues behind closed doors.

She reportedly offered an apology to her colleagues. We don’t know what she said because it was done behind closed (and presumably locked) doors. Then, when she finished, she got a standing ovation — again, reportedly — from roughly half of those in the room.

I do not accept her apology. Because she made it to the wrong audience.

Rep. Greene needs to apologize to the parents of the first- and second-graders who were slaughtered at Sandy Hook Elementary School; she called their murder a hoax.

She needs to apologize to the survivors and the loved ones of the Parkland, Fla., who died in another horrible school massacre. She has said that event also was made up

Greene needs to apologize to the family members, friends and assorted loved ones of those who died in the Pentagon on 9/11. She has declared that the Pentagon never was hit because there is “no evidence” of a plane flying into the office building.

Rep. Greene needs to apologize to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in person, for declaring her desire to see the speaker “executed” for committing an act of treason.

Finally, Greene needs to apologize to the rest of us out here who are utterly appalled that a member of Congress could hold the hideous beliefs that fester in what passes for this woman’s heart.

None of that likely will happen.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is a disgrace.

national news

Heading for the congressional outhouse

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Marjorie Taylor Greene appears to be heading for a location way past the back bench of the U.S. House of Representatives.

The first-term Georgia congresswoman — who’s become infamous with her QAnon conspiracy sympathies — might be consigned to the congressional outhouse if her colleagues do what they must in a floor vote Thursday.

Greene has made a “name” for herself by fomenting conspiracy lies about school shootings, about the 9/11 terror attacks, about Muslims, about gay Americans. She is a crackpot who somehow got elected from the 14th Congressional District of Georgia.

The full House will vote on whether she should be stripped of her committee assignments. The House GOP leadership has placed her on the Education and Budget committees. It’s the Education post that has rattled so many Americans in light of what Greene has said.

House to vote Thursday to drop Greene from all committees | TheHill

Greene has suggested that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre that killed 20 first- and second-graders along with six teachers was a made-up story. She has castigated survivors of the Stoneham High School massacre in Florida as well.

For this loon to be able to discuss matters involving public education is so far beyond the pale it defies anything approaching logic.

Expulsion from the House is unlikely. What the legislative chamber well could do is virtually silence her in the manner it has done with other members of the body, the most recent of whom was former Rep. Steve King of Iowa, who had this horrifying tendency to speak well of racist organizations.

There has to be a reckoning for Greene back home in Georgia when her seat is up in 2022. Congress must not become a dumping ground for the filth that pours of this individual’s mouth.

national news

Compromise anyone?

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Let’s see how this plays out.

President Biden wants Congress to approve a $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill that kicks out more money for families and helps educators, while speeding up the vaccinations aimed at killing the pandemic.

Congressional Republicans want a $618 billion package that is more “targeted” for specific needs.

Here’s a thought. Why not meet in the middle? Congress could approve a $1.2 trillion package, which is just about the mid point between the president’s pitch and the counter offer from the GOP.

Isn’t that what effective legislation is all about? Compromise, anyone?

national news

Time to ‘move on’? Not just yet!

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Republicans in Congress want to “move on” from the events of the Sixth of January. They are calling now for “unity” in the nation, that Americans do not want to see Donald Trump put on trial for inciting an insurrection against the government of this great nation.

I don’t think I will move on. Nor should any of us put the horrendous events of that terrible incident behind us. We need a full, thorough hearing on what the nation witnessed in real time and the U.S. Senate needs to put all its members on record on whether they believe Donald Trump committed a crime on that momentous day.

The Senate is preparing to conduct the second impeachment trial on Donald Trump’s conduct as president. The Senate acquitted him in early 2020 on charges of abuse of power and of obstruction of Congress.

Now comes this event. To my way of thinking, what Donald Trump did on Jan. 6 was tantamount to launching an attempt coup against the government. The terrorist mob marched on Capitol Hill with many terrorists intent on harming Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Their “crime”? They were presiding over Congress’s sworn duty to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election, which Joe Biden won.

Is it really time to “move on” from this incident? Do we just throw up our hands and say that none of it matters any longer just because Trump is no longer in office? Good God in heaven, no!

I say this understanding that Trump is likely to walk away once again with an acquittal. That outcome will cause me some internal grief, but I’ll get over it.

There must be a full hearing of what Trump did that day. What the mobsters did in response to his egging them on. The consequences of what could have occurred had they achieved their stated aim of overturning a free and fair election.

They attacked our democratic process.

Once we hear it all, every detail of it, only then can we move on.

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Welcome to the pit, Rep. Kinzinger

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Adam Kinzinger has joined Liz Cheney in the purgatory pit of the once-Grand Old Party.

What did the two Republican members of Congress do to qualify for the roles as political pariahs? All they did was stand by the Constitution and vote to impeach Donald J. Trump while Trump was still president of the United States.

They aren’t the only lawmakers headed to the Trump cultists’ version of hell. Eight others also voted with their Democratic colleagues on Jan. 13 to impeach Trump for the second time in his term as president.

Cheney’s tenure as the No. 3 ranking member of the GOP caucus is now being threatened by the Trump suck-ups within Congress. Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida ventured to Wyoming to drum up support for someone to mount a primary challenge against Rep. Cheney in 2022.

We are witnessing in real time the cratering of a once-great political party. Adam Kinzinger is looking to create a new conservative political action committee dedicated to what he calls real conservative values.

Politico reported: “Look it’s really difficult. I mean, all of a sudden imagine everybody that supported you, or so it seems that way, your friends, your family, has turned against you. They think you’re selling out,” the Illinois congressman said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Rep. Kinzinger: They claim ‘I’m possessed by the devil’ – POLITICO

The visible and conscious anger being expressed by many Republicans against those who dared to challenge their guy in the White House has drawn some fierce push back in the media … from some surprising sources, I should add.

Chris Wallace, the Fox News Channel stalwart, over the weekend suggested that Republicans should devote more of their energy toward condemning the spewage that comes from QAnon conspiracist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and less time criticizing those who followed their conscience and the Constitution in impeaching Donald Trump.

Adam Kinzinger’s family and friends accuse of him being “possessed by the devil.” That kind of idiocy tells me all I need to know about what has infected the GOP.