GOP 2022: Stop Expecting Anything
Plus, the U.S. Capitol Police help Democrats enforce the new hierarchy on Capitol Hill
Good morning! Two new essays from me this week.
The first is a follow up to the piece I did critiquing the agenda put forward by Kevin McCarthy for House Republicans, should they take a House majority in 2022. This time, I’m looking at the other side of the Capitol, where the Senate’s Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has proudly pledged….no agenda.
The agenda for congressional Republicans in 2022 seems to be something like: GOP 2022: STOP EXPECTING ANYTHING. I don’t know about you, but I am wildly inspired to vote in November.
I also have a short piece out today building on Politico’s revelations earlier this week that the U.S. Capitol Police are harvesting the personal details, including social media posts, real estate holdings, and tax records, of the people meeting with Members of Congress. There are a whole host of issues one can take with this, but I link it to the new hierarchy being imposed on us all over the country between the rulers and the ruled.
I was also out in Austin last week speaking on a panel about Big Tech at the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s 2022 Policy Orientation. My other panelists were W. Scott McCollough, who is currently litigating against Big Tech on behalf of a host of clients, and TX State Senator Bryan Hughes, who has one of the leading Sec. 230 bills in the Texas State Senate.
It was a fun convo, and there was a surprising amount of agreement on the need for antitrust enforcement and (possibly) reform, and also….private rights of action! Letting citizens sue! (I wrote about why the right is now embracing private rights of action here.)
Anyway, you know it was a good panel because the Google/Amazon-funded trackers at the event were big mad about it.
Have a great week!
Rachel
Republicans Plan To Win Back The Senate, Then Do Nothing, Per Usual
Republicans cannot afford to do what they have largely always done with a Senate majority: set it on a shelf, polish it, and admire it from afar.
The 2022 agenda for House Republicans may be out of touchwith the current political moment, but at least they can say they’re trying. Over on the other side of the Capitol, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the leader of the Senate’s Republican conference, has announced he’s not even putting out an agenda for 2022.
According to reporting by Axios last month, McConnell told a room full of donors, lobbyists, and in-cycle senators that he would not be putting forward an agenda outlining the priorities for his conference should Senate Republicans regain a majority in 2022. When asked by CNN last week what the GOP agenda would be in a potential majority, McConnell responded, “That is a very good question and I’ll let you know when we take it back.” He went on, “This midterm election will be a report card on the performance of this entire Democratic government, the president, the House, and the Senate.”
In other words, McConnell and GOP senators seem prepared to run solely on a platform detailing how bad the other guy is, and that scrupulously and intentionally avoids discussing what they intend to do about it.
In fairness, this is not completely irrational. “Never interfere with an enemy when he’s in the process of destroying himself,” as the old war adage goes. With their class-shaming Covid protocols, woke militancy, endless race-baiting, and radical cultural crusading, Democrats seem intent on doubling down on an agenda that is turning off Americans in droves.
According to Gallup, voters are turning to Republicans in historic numbers. This doesn’t seem to be because Republicans have done anything noteworthy. All they’ve done is successfully appear marginally less insane.
What McConnell likely means by “I’ll let you know” is that K Street’s concerns will be satisfied. Wall Street will get what it needs, as will the corporate industry titans, including the Big Tech firms. So will the defense industrial barons, who will find every military adventure they engage in, regardless of merit, fully funded and shielded from criticism, much less debate. He doesn’t have to say it out loud. When the GOP had no stated agenda, this is always the result.
‘Keep It From Getting Worse’ Is Not a Credible Agenda
As they approach 2022, the Senate GOP appears to be relying on their decades-old governing philosophy: wink at the status quo while promising you’ll keep it from getting worse. The problem, however, is that the same phenomenon that is pushing voters into the arms of the GOP — the facts that people’s lives are being ruined, their livelihoods upended, and the fundamental nature of individual liberty distorted by Democrats in both the public and private sector — is likewise raising the stakes for what’s expected of the GOP.
As more voters turn to Republicans in desperate hope they’ll make the beatings stop, Republicans have to commit to doing it. Simply promising to defend the status quo won’t cut it this time, particularly for new voters who have no long-held attachment to the party.
The multi-directional onslaught unleashed on voters by Democrats, public health tyrants, and the corporate sector requires a bold and kinetic response from Republicans.
Joe Biden and the Centers for Disease Control are not going to stop issuing cultish, draconian, class-shaming, and completely un-scientific Covid restrictions unless Congress refuses to fund them. School children, under the guise of critical race theory, will still be told their skin color is what makes them worthy unless the abetting federal funding prohibits it. The price of consumer goods will continue to climb until Congress addresses the systemic issues in our monetary policy and supply chains.
America’s leading corporations will still willingly entangle themselves with genocidal Chinese communists unless it is made painful for them to do so. Big Tech will continue to tyrannize small businesses and de-platform Republican elected officials (and millions of others) from the public square unless Congress makes changes to current laws and passes new ones.
Moreover, the left has a grip on major federal institutions, not to mention universities and major cultural entities all over the country. It’s laughable to think their relentless march will stop simply because McConnell now runs the Senate instead of Schumer. Rather, it will take creative lawmaking and sustained pressure from congressional majorities to even begin to turn the tide.
“But!” the immediate retort from Very Smart People goes, Biden will veto whatever Republican majorities may send to him. So this entire exercise is pointless. Instead, House congressmen are suggesting they should work with Biden on immigration — as if Biden would support any legislation that doesn’t contain massive amnesty. Or find ways to cooperate on other goals, as Sen. Lisa Murkowski recently pondered, like “making Social Security more sustainable.”
It’s true, the Biden White House will likely veto anything that comes out of a Republican-controlled Congress. To that, I say, good! Let Biden veto whatever he wants. The voters will be much better served by forcing clarification on the major issues plaguing millions of Americans around the country than some half-baked compromise on Social Security that robs future Peter to pay present Paul, inevitably shields the Boomers from sacrifice, and ultimately changes nothing. Or worse, a massive amnesty deal.
Although establishment Republicans love to mock the call to “fight” on behalf of the voters, sustained and focused action, even when ultimately unsuccessful, resonates with voters more than the usual establishment game of tut-tutting conservatives as unserious, lowering expectations through the floor, and pivoting instead to discussions of “what’s possible.” (Which is, predictably, always code for K Street wants.)
All Senate Republicans Are On the Hook
In a sense, though, this is broader than McConnell. Unlike the House, where majorities rule and the speaker has an iron grip on what comes to the House floor, the Senate is uniquely permissive.
Most of McConnell’s authority over the floor is deferred to him by the GOP conference. Each senator has the ability to proceed to whatever legislation he or she wants (and get at least one vote) when other matters aren’t pending. And each senator has the ability to push back against the grip McConnell and his predecessors have exerted over the Senate floor, internally, and by leveraging the power of their consent.
McConnell may have no agenda and an ill grasp of the political moment, but that doesn’t mean his conference must. Whether or not a future Republican Senate can rise to the task of actually meeting voter concerns — providing even the most baseline function of a legislative body in letting voters see their concerns addressed, discussed, and considered in the Senate — is a prerogative that sits equally on the shoulders of Republican senators.
Every election is always tagged with the “most important election” of our lifetimes, but this one does feel more burdened. Working-class voters are in a power struggle against elite forces who hate them. Democrats and their handmaidens in local and state government have planted themselves firmly between living freely and living according to mandates, rules, and social credit. In Washington, they’re literally coming up with ways to jail their political opponents.
This is not a status quo that can be sustained. Republicans cannot simply rally voters with a promise not to make it worse. Republicans cannot, in other words, do what they have largely always done with a Senate majority: set it on a shelf, polish it, and admire it from afar while checking off a Beltway-driven agenda designed solely to protect incumbents.
Rather, a majority must be used. Not only for the purpose of giving new GOP voters a reason to stay, although that is a benefit, but because it’s the right and urgently necessary thing to do. Democrats have so aggressively overstepped, which may send their congressional majorities over a cliff, but it won’t stop their allies.
The left’s institutions and public health bureaucrats aren’t going to simply stop torturing us because they feel like it. If Senate Republicans cannot find it in them to stand up for their voters now, when the stakes are so perilous and the moment so fraught, then what are they good for?
Rachel Bovard is The Federalist's senior tech columnist and the senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute. She has more than a decade of policy experience in Washington and has served in both the House and Senate in various roles, including as a legislative director and policy director for the Senate Steering Committee under the successive chairmanships of Sen. Pat Toomey and Sen. Mike Lee. She also served as director of policy services for The Heritage Foundation.
Report: Capitol Police Are Spying On Members Of Congress And The Americans They Meet
Police surveillance is another way of keeping voters and the accountability they might bring at a healthy distance.
As part of their job in screening visitors to the U.S. Capitol (should the complex ever re-open to the public, that is), U.S. Capitol Police often rummage through backpacks and purses. Lately, they may also be rummaging through more than that: your tax records, real estate holdings, and social media posts. All without your knowledge.
Besty Woodruff Swan and Daniel Lippman broke the details this week of a new Capitol Police initiative that involves deep dives into the speech, background, and lifestyle details of who members of Congress are meeting with, including donors, Hill staff, mayors, state legislators, and other Americans exercising their First Amendment right to petition their government.
In one example Swan and Lippman cite, a donor meeting attended at a private home by Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, meant the homeowner and attendees had their social media scrutinized and evaluated for foreign contacts by Capitol Police. A donor meeting with Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., the House Republican whip, received similar treatment. The Capitol Police were directed to “search for any information about event attendees, including donors and staff, ‘that would cast a member in a negative light.'”
In both cases, the lawmakers and the attendees were unaware these checks were taking place.
All of this is occurring under the guise of the “enhanced security measures” deemed necessary after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. However, it is unclear how such measures would have actually prevented the Jan. 6 events in the first place.
The Capitol Police have provided no detailed justification. Nor have they said what they are doing with the records, how long those records are being stored, or what other purposes they have. The agency is only subject to congressional oversight — not to public records requests.
One can imagine how easily these searches could become politicized: Personal details on Capitol Hill staff, state legislators, or donors are dispersed to partisans and suddenly leaked at an opportune political moment by some agency conveniently immune to the Freedom of Information Act and subject to limited oversight. After the aggressive leaking, spinning, and shaming that bureaucrats engaged in during the Donald Trump years, we’ve seen what’s possible.
This practice also comes dangerously close to burdening the free exercise of political speech, which includes the right to petition the government “for a redress of grievances” without fear of reprisal. As Rep. Kelly Armstrong, R-N.D., a former criminal defense attorney, pointed out to Swan and Lipmann, these measures also walk right up to the line of “spying on members of Congress, their staff, their constituents and their supporters.”
“Anybody involved with implementing this without making it known to the actual members of Congress should resign or be fired immediately,” Armstrong went on. “And I’m not big on calling for resignations.”
Intentionally Keeping Voters at a Distance
Subjecting American citizens to a virtual cavity search in exchange for petitioning the government they elect in the buildings they pay for is more than just a one-off, however. It is yet another hurdle thrown up by the Democratic regime in Washington to separate the rulers from the ruled.
The Capitol, as well as the House and Senate office buildings, remain closed to visitors as they have been since early spring 2020, the longest stretch in the country’s history. It’s been longer than any closure for the Civil War, or even the 1918 outbreak of Spanish flu.
Football stadiums all over the country are packed, lawmakers fly to and from the Capitol on full flights and attend in-person events and fundraisers, and the Senate still votes in person (the House is still shamelessly proxy voting). But the corridors of self-government remain closed off to the people to whom they belong.
In addition to being transparently unnecessary, this undermines the nature of our self-government. Access to and interaction with those we elect is central to our representation. One of the qualities that makes America exceptional is our citizen legislature. That those we elect do not sit higher than us, but equal to us.
Placing heavier and heavier burdens on entry to the U.S. Capitol — the seat of our democracy — as well as access to those who represent us strikes at the heart of that relationship, and a central feature of republican government. It changes the detachment of our representatives from their constituencies from merely a rhetorical formulation into a literal one.
But perhaps that is the point. Security and safety theater in and around the Capitol keeps out the engagement that is part of accountability. It ensures the hoi polloi don’t accidentally get to interact with the people they elect. It keeps the participation of the masses of unwashed voters and the accountability they might bring at a healthy distance.
A Physical Hierarchy of the Ruling and the Ruled
Limiting access to the halls of our representative government is, in this way, a physical manifestation of the hierarchy that we now see all around us: between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, the people who follow The Science and those who have the gall to question it, between the corporate class and the underclass. Using theatrical excuses about Covid or Jan. 6 is a convenient proxy to further remove the political elite from the rabble they would rather rule than represent.
But this is our reality now. Working-class employees around the country are fired for rejecting a vaccine and blocked from going to restaurants and bars (including in the nation’s capital, which is overseen by Congress), “wrong thinkers” are cut off from the financial system, and bad social credit gets you cut out of the digital public square. The IRS is now requiring Americans to submit facial recognition data to access their tax records.
The hierarchy is here. Republicans in Congress should aggressively fight the new class system wherever they find it. And they should start within their own house.
Shut down the Capitol Police surveillance and re-open the Capitol, House, and Senate. Welcome Americans back into the seat of their democracy and the buildings that belong to them. In doing so, restore at least a modicum of the equality and access that has always been the hallmark of American self-government, but is now so desperately missing from D.C. and the rest of the country.
Rachel Bovard is The Federalist's senior tech columnist and the senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute. She has more than a decade of policy experience in Washington and has served in both the House and Senate in various roles, including as a legislative director and policy director for the Senate Steering Committee under the successive chairmanships of Sen. Pat Toomey and Sen. Mike Lee. She also served as director of policy services for The Heritage Foundation.