I wouldn’t call it a fascinating article that Alexander Bolton wrote at the Hill, the newspaper probably best identified with the out-of-touch Washington ruling elite, but it certainly was a clarifying piece of journalism.
Bolton tells us that some of the Republicans in the U.S. Senate have simply had it with the ingratitude and dissatisfaction of the party’s voters — yes, Alexander, tell us something we don’t already know — and his poster child for this argument is one Lisa Murkowski, who finagled reelection despite losing the support of Republican voters in her state. Bolton writes:
Republican senators believe their party has a good chance to take back control of the White House and Senate, given President Biden’s low approval ratings and the favorable map of Senate seats up for reelection, but they regularly face political headaches caused by populist members of their party who say the rest of the GOP is out of step with mainstream America.
“We should be concerned about this as Republicans. I’m having more ‘rational Republicans’ coming up to me and saying, ‘I just don’t know how long I can stay in this party,’” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). “Now our party is becoming known as a group of kind of extremist, populist over-the-top [people] where no one is taking us seriously anymore.
“You have people who felt some allegiance to the party that are now really questioning, ‘Why am I [in the party?]” she added. “I think it’s going to get even more interesting as we move closer to the elections and we start going through some of these primary debates.
“Is it going to be a situation of who can be more outlandish than the other?” she asked.
This is both hilarious and utterly predictable, but Bolton should probably recognize that he literally could not have picked a worse protagonist for his piece than Murkowski, who for the average Republican voter signifies everything wrong with our ruling class.
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Lisa Murkowski should have been out of the U.S. Senate in the 2010 elections, when she was beaten in the Republican primary by Joe Miller. Instead, she conducted a write-in campaign in the general election and managed to survive when Democrats fled from their candidate and wrote her name in to deny Miller, a tea party conservative, an opportunity to serve.
And then Murkowski had her allies pass the chaotic, corrupt, and infamous ranked choice voting system, together with a jungle primary, in advance of last year’s election. Had there been a Republican primary, she would have been crushed by Kelly Tshibaka, whom the state GOP endorsed. But with the jungle primary and some $5.8 million in PAC money spent by the GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell — money that could easily have flipped two or more seats to the GOP had it not been wasted in Alaska, where a Democrat had no chance to win — she managed to survive in a virtual dead heat with Tshibaka.
Murkowski’s victory came courtesy almost completely of Democrat voters crossing over in order to keep Tshibaka, like Miller a populist conservative, out of the U.S. Senate. It was a classic case of the Washington ruling class conspiring to game the system to keep middle-class voters and other ordinary folks from gaining representation from someone who thinks and acts as they do.
That could have been Lisa Murkowski, you know. She could have remained in touch with the people who initially put her in the U.S. Senate. She has these problems because she explicitly chose to screw them over. And voters in Alaska are so exasperated by the corruption and arrogance that after the ranked choice voting scam was imposed on them, they responded with the lowest turnout in a federal election in their state in decades. Less than a third of them even bothered to vote.
In a poll conducted by Preserve Democracy June 12-24, 73% of those polled said they didn’t vote in ’22–the election with the lowest voter turnout in AK history. The most common reasons Alaskans gave for not voting can be fixed by pushing voters to apply for absentee ballots. pic.twitter.com/yQeceBxNVa
— Kelly Tshibaka (@KellyForAlaska) July 5, 2023
But their rejection of her doesn’t reflect how out of touch she is. Oh, no. It reflects how crazy they are.
They’re crazy because they don’t want to have a U.S. senator imposed on them by Mitch McConnell and the D.C. ruling class.
But then there’s this from Bolton’s piece:
A second Republican senator who spoke with The Hill said the growing strength of radical populism “makes it a lot more difficult to govern, it makes it difficult to talk to constituents.”
“There are people who surprise me — I’m surprised they have those views. It’s amazing to me the number of people, the kind of people who think the election was stolen,” the lawmaker said. “I don’t want to use this word but it’s not just a ‘red-neck’ thing. It’s people in business, the president of a bank, a doctor.”
I can hear this coming out of Bill Cassidy’s mouth, but he isn’t alone. I can totally hear it coming from John Cornyn and a few others as well. And it’s hilarious.
“The kind of people who think the election was stolen” is a pretty big kind of people, you know. Last month Rasmussen Reports did a poll on concerns about election integrity, and the results were startling. By a 54–41 margin, likely voters said they “believe it is likely that state and federal officials are ignoring evidence of widespread election fraud.” Some 54 percent also said that they think “cheating is likely to affect the outcome of the next presidential election.”
And if that “makes it a lot more difficult to govern” or to “talk to constituents,” then maybe that’s a function of being utterly out of touch and refusing to fight for the voters who elected you.
Capitol Hill, and especially the Senate’s chamber and cloakroom, is such an impenetrable bubble that it’s barely even America at this point.
The rest of us don’t think these people are all that legitimate. In Murkowski’s case, it’s an awfully tenuous argument to say that she’s been popularly elected in the first place. For the others, it’s a function of GOP voters recognizing that they’re treated as second-class citizens, intentionally or otherwise, by their own senators. In Cassidy’s case, he was overwhelmingly reelected in November of 2020 by running a campaign as the Trumpiest Trump Who Ever Trumped, and then turning right around and voting to impeach Trump over the Jan. 6 riots.
Which most Americans believe were at least partially a Reichstag Fire job by the feds, according to another Rasmussen poll in March, which found that 65 percent “think it’s likely that undercover government agents helped provoke the so-called J6 riot.”
How many of Lisa Murkowski’s friends in the Senate are really actively fighting to investigate that? Not many — the only Republicans in the Senate showing any interest at all in the subject are the very populist conservatives she thinks are crazy and whom her friends are doing everything they can to sabotage, lest their numbers grow large enough to displace McConnell and the rest of the people responsible for the GOP’s chronic underperformance in Senate races since he became the leader of the caucus.
And the effect is that when Tommy Tuberville holds up more than 250 Defense Department appointments in a power play attempting to stop the Biden regime from stocking our armed forces with anti-American critical race theory cultists, he gets smeared as a “white nationalist” Klansman, and Lindsey Graham leads the lynch mob. Or John Thune goes berserk at the idea, floated by House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, that Americans shouldn’t have to pay for a weaponized Justice Department meddling in our elections by prosecuting Trump on spurious and stupid political charges. Those are things most Americans, or, at the very least, a huge majority of Republican voters, want action on.
But are they listening? Hell, no. You have to elect the supposedly “unelectable” people, like Blake Masters, Kelly Tshibaka, and Don Bolduc, to get that from the U.S. Senate, and that becomes pretty difficult to do when they get sabotaged by the party’s own establishment.
Time and time again.
We went through this after McConnell and friends blew a shot to retake the Senate last year and then blamed the “Trumpy” candidates who lost in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, and New Hampshire. Maybe there was a little validity to that, but, then again, maybe Republican voters across the country are starting to see this whole exercise as a waste of time.
And that isn’t crazy, either. Rigging the game so that liars and losers who shave points — or worse — on Capitol Hill when they’re not openly surrendering on issue after issue, and then insulting their base voters as extremists for positions they share with most of the country, will have that effect on a sane voter.
Here’s a good barometer for just how bad some of these guys are. Tuesday, J.D. Vance of Ohio, one of the Republicans in the Senate who isn’t grotesquely out of touch with the folks back home, submitted a bill that would institute a federal ban on pediatric sex-changes and sterilizing “puberty-blocker” drugs given to children. It’s a bill that mirrors that which most red states are passing, it polls exceptionally well with Republican voters, and it’s sound as a matter of medicine (the horrors of those operations are only now becoming known to the public) and ethics (two in five post-op transsexuals are suicidal — how can you drag kids through such an abattoir?).
It would seem utterly impossible for a Republican not to stand with Vance on his bill. Especially when we all know that while the Democrats control the Senate, it will never get a vote, and the bill would never survive Joe Biden’s veto pen. So it’s a complete free shot to come out publicly in support of it.
But it’s a virtual sure thing that these so-called Republicans, these ruling class twits with R’s next to their names, will be silent as church mice on the bill. They won’t even moon for it for the benefit of the rubes back home.
And that’s how you’ll know how much they hate you. It’ll be far clearer than even Alexander Bolton at the Hill can make it for you.
