August Recess
School’s out for summer.
School’s out forever.
School’s been blown to pieces.
No more pencils.
No more books.
No more teacher’s dirty looks.
Out for summer.
Out ‘til fall.
We might not come back at all.”
School’s Out - Alice Cooper (1972)
…..
Congress is out until after Labor Day. There are only three major deadlines that motivate members of congress to finish things up. They are (1) three weeks before they are up for reelection (2) Christmas Day and (3) August recess. Your “life, liberty and property” are safe for a few weeks if you turn around the famous quip attributed to Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain). Let’s review what happened before they left, and where things stand for when they get back.
Thus far, I think the job Speaker McCarthy has done with his tiny majority, fractious party and hostile press has been nothing short of masterful. That said, I think there is a mistake looming.
The “debt limit deal” was only reached and passed about two months ago. Part of the agreement there was a limit on the total “discretionary” spending for the 2024 fiscal year which begins October 1, 2023. I presumed that this meant that the congress would be fighting about details in the upcoming fiscal year spending but not on the total amount. I was wrong.
Before adjourning for August recess, the House has passed bills with spending lower than the debt limit agreement and the Democrat controlled Senate has passed bills with spending higher than that limit. Perhaps this is all part of a dance to impress the base of each party and they will agree in a conference committee to go back to the amounts in the debt limit agreement. If they do that, I would expect such an agreement to pass both Houses with a majority of both Democrats and Republicans.
But if they don’t do that and each party stays in their respective trench, then we face another government shutdown in October. That would, in my opinion, be a mistake for McCarthy. Republicans have not “won” a government shutdown fight going back into the 1980s regardless of whether they are in the White House or in control of Congress. Unsurprisingly, the media will find fault with the Republican position regardless of the veracity of that position and will praise the Democratic posture. That said, Republicans have in recent decades been on the side of lower spending and it is easy for the Dems and their media allies to highlight the shutdown of the Washington monument or find a little old lady to show McCarthy pushing over a cliff.
Accordingly, I don’t think that trying to get spending below the agreement just passed in June was a smart strategy. First of all, there is no way the president or the senate Democrats will agree to that. And, if it forces a shutdown in a few months, I think that will hurt the House Republicans going forward. There is much to fight about these days and no reason to start a fight in which you will almost certainly lose both the policy and the politics.
As far as the impeachment talk in the House, I actually do support that. It is abundantly clear how corrupt Hunter Biden is and how corrupt the FBI and Department of Justice have been in trying to cover for him. He didn’t pay $2.2 million in taxes and “friends” have since paid that off for him. Do you think you would avoid jailtime if you intentionally underreported income and failed to pay $2.2 million in taxes? If you are my “friend,” sorry, but I am not paying your taxes for you.
But I digress. It is clear that the president lied about not talking to his son. There is a lot of evidence (admittedly circumstantial right now) that he was involved in the whole plot. There is so much wrong here that my computer does not have enough disk space to cover it. The Democratic talking point that every elected Democrat repeats is simply “there is no evidence.” First of all, that is false. You can say that the evidence in not dispositive yet, but there is plenty of evidence. It is hilarious that Adam Schiff who had “evidence” of “Russian collusion” which we know was completely false now sees nothing here.
The press, of course, takes the Dem talking points and repeats them as fact. That is why McCarthy needs to move down the impeachment path. The propagandists at the NY Times will have to cover that. They will spin it in Biden’s favor, but many people will hear the facts anyway. Right now, many Americans have no idea of the level of likely corruption and perhaps treason in which the Biden family has been involved. And, what they are doing within the government to cover it up. This is not a Trump or Clinton impeachment. This would be a Nixonian impeachment.
Over in the Senate, we have seen that minority leader McConnell is having a number of health problems. Senator McConnell has been the most effective leader of either party in the Senate since LBJ in the 1950s, in my opinion. It will be sad to lose that talent and experience. But people get old and eventually die and make way for a new generation of leadership that could be even better. It is simply the way of things. Biden, McConnell, Schumer, Trump, Bernie Sanders and Feinstein are all too feeble, long in the tooth or otherwise no longer fully capable. We need to move on from them.
Back in the 1990s on a trip to take my still young sons to see our nation’s capitol, I was able to arrange a meeting with Senator Strom Thurmond, who my in-laws had known for many years. He was in his 90s at the time. (He died while still serving in the Senate at age 100) He sat there behind his desk like a wax figure and said and moved little. His staff ushered us in and out. I remember thinking “who is telling him how to vote because he certainly can’t know himself?”
I understand that people like Warren Buffett can be effective into their 90s. I would like to be one of those people. And, a person serves in congress because their constituents put them there and if those constituents want to reelect you when you are old and feeble, that is up to them. After all, Senator Fettermen is relatively young but certainly no less feeble than any of the aforementioned octogenarians.
I would like to see Senator McConnell step aside for one of the younger capable members of the senate Republican caucus. And I have been quite clear in these missives that neither Mr. Biden nor Mr. Trump should get another term in White House, in my opinion.
For the rest of this month, we will talk about other things than congress as the members are scattered around the globe. But when they return in September, there will be much going on.
I remain respectfully,
Congressman John Campbell
Drive Fast & Live Free