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Cracks in the Onslaught?
Mitch McConnell takes a stand, and other stories
I would have thought it would be a cold day in hell when I would have anything good to say about Senator McConnell, who is arguably the reason the Trump circus got to DC in 2016. But yesterday he joined Murkowski and Collins in a mini Republican revolt against the confirmation of Pete Hegseth for Defense Secretary.
Hegseth was confirmed, but McConnell signaled that Trump’s grip on the Senate may not be as solid as he’d like. Trump fired a slew of Inspectors General across the government, people whose role was to serve as agency watchdogs. The action was illegal as these positions were confirmed by the Senate and require Senate approval to be terminated.
The question now is whether any Republican Senator will realize there is an opportunity for a power play by tipping the scales against Trump. It would be a dangerous thing to do but we constantly hear that many in the Party are privately aghast at the scope of Trump’s actions in just his first week in office.
He has essentially shut down the entire health and science segment of the government, cut off foreign aid across the board, approved illegal raids to round up immigrants, both legal and illegal, and that’s just a small part of it. Most of his actions are a direct challenge to the Senate, which controls major budget changes. There will be a flood of lawsuits challenging virtually everything this President has done.
As I’ve noted before, many of Trump’s scattershot actions will negatively impact the states that he carried and will be very unpopular when they start affecting things back home. The phones in congressional offices will be ringing. This week farmers with orchards awoke to find no workers anywhere to be seen with crops ready to be picked. Iowa cattle and corn farmers are already complaining about labor losses, though how they didn’t see this coming is hard to fathom.
After all, Trump told us ad nauseum what he intended to do, yet these midwesterners overwhelmingly voted for him. There was a lot of that going around. The question remains whether these voters will turn on him as they gradually start to understand what they have unleashed.
