After Democrats’ breakneck-speed impeachment of President Trump, conducted in secrecy in some dank Capitol basement with only selective leaks intended to shape public opinion, Republicans finally called the gig up and stormed the barricades.
Led by Rep. Matt Gaetz, they startled and surprised the Democrats with a very un-Republican storming of the secret hearings, busting their way in to be allowed in and calling for transparency, not just for themselves, but in the name of the voters.
What were Democrats going to do — holler about decorum? Some did, and it rings hollow as hell, given what Democrats like to do. They even got videos. The Washington Examiner’s is a thing of beauty:
Republicans knew nobody was going to get arrested if they just charged in because Congress is already a law unto itself. Impeachment is being conducted the sneaky way Democrats like, with no courts to appeal to, and that’s emboldened them to make up rules as they go along, ignoring transparency, respect for the voters, and precedent. It’s just a Schiff-show now, and with all that power, but just slightly more than half the representation, they’ve had it good.
Yet what they didn’t calculate for is Republicans using the Democrats’ own tactics against them this time. Democrats set the rules; now Republicans are using them. Storming the joint, after all, is so Code Pink, so leftist, yet these guys did it. So long as rules or fairness no longer matter anymore, why not blow into the joint without an invitation? What are they going to do — start yelling about manners? As if manners had ever mattered to them in the past, given the monsters they’ve evolved into.
Gaetz and Co. recognized this, and that’s why what he’s done is so praiseworthy.
To what can we attribute this newfound gutsiness from the Republicans? Probably President Trump himself, actually. He’s the ultimate disruptor. He’s rude, he’s boorish, he’s bombastic, everything that makes the lefty establishment scream. But that’s precisely why he was elected. As one well known pundit (name escapes me) has observed: if he were presidential, he wouldn’t be president. In 2016, voters elected him to be the junkyard dog to dig out all the corruption of the utterly comfortable monopoly leftist establishment. More specifically, he fights. The fact that Trump is a fighter is why voters broke for him, even against a talented GOP field of competition in 2016. He sees the rigging, he calls it out, and he busts through.
Now we’re seeing a whole field of mini-Trumps emerging, doing like Trump, being like Trump, doing the things that made Trump such a turning point for American history. Democrats need this, because they’ve been ensconced in power for so long. Doing this opens the door for comity again, because if Democrats don’t recognize this, Republicans will just give them more of it.
It’s the Trump effect.
What’s more, it’s spreading well beyond the political sphere.
Two other news items leaped out — Dennis Prager, a radio commentator who also has PragerU, a wonderful educational outfit that is quietly turning Millennials into conservatives (according to Mother Jones of all places), and, by the way, one of the most civil people out there, is sending his shock troops today in a truck to figuratively storm the YouTube headquarters barricades, surprising the leftists there with movies on the headquarters walls of all the Prager videos that had been censored by the Google-linked tech giant. Trump opened that gateway.
And over in the Vatican, conservative Catholics, that most obedient of Church members, stormed a church, taking a pile of Pachamama pagan idols being put out as some new substitute for religion by Vatican leftists, and tossed them into the Tiber. It’s a slightly different group of players, but it’s the same recognizable shock-and-surprise rebellion. The leftist National Catholic Reporter tut-tutted them as “vandals.” The rest of the Catholics cheered. It actually wasn’t very different from Jesus casting the moneychangers from the Temple. One can’t help but feeling that Trump was some sort of reminder.
GOP and recently rediscovered “balls”.
Let’s see if it continues.