Speaker McCarthy & House Republicans United: It looks like the House Republicans have united behind the new Speaker and delivered America its first GREAT policy initiative…to defund the Democrats new 87,000 IRS agents.
The Democrats want to spend more money and “redistribute” your tax dollars to their special interests and constituencies…NOT so fast!
The new Republican Majority in the House had a great start, saving American families and small businesses from another Democrat overreach.
A great start!
Read more below and follow me on Twitter & GETTR – @sanuzis
–Saul Anuzis
60 Plus Weekly Video Rewind
This week: The GOP cuts funding for the IRS, AG Garland appoints a special counsel to investigate Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified material, and Speaker McCarthy prepares to remove prominent Democrats from committee assignments!
Links to the articles discussed in the video:
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House passes bill to reclaim billions from IRS
Republicans flexed their new House majority to take a first swipe at President Biden on Monday, approving a bill that would claw back tens of billions of dollars from the IRS that Democrats had hoped would help the tax agency audit more Americans.
The legislation cleared the chamber on a 221-210 party-line vote. New Speaker Kevin McCarthy oversaw the vote and announced the bill’s passage.
GOP lawmakers said the legislation is necessary to keep Americans from feeling the wrath of a supercharged IRS, after Democrats pumped roughly $80 billion into the agency in last year’s climate-spending legislation.
“Americans want an IRS that works for them, not against them,” said Rep. Adrian Smith, the Nebraska Republican who led the floor debate on the measure.
The Congressional Budget Office said the bill would claw back $71 billion.
First GOP Bill Rolls Back Biden’s 87,000 IRS Agents
The first bill taken up by the House under Republican leadership will rescind tens of billions of dollars allocated by Democrats to the IRS to hire 87,000 new agents to ramp up taxpayer audits.
Majority Leader-elect Steve Scalise (R-La.) in a recent letter announced “ready-to-go” legislation that Republican leadership plans to bring to the House Floor in the first two weeks of 2023. The very first bill at the top of the agenda is the Family and Small Business Taxpayer Protection Act (H.R. 23) which repeals the vast majority of the additional $80 billion appropriated to the IRS in Section 10301 of Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act.
Key Vote Alert: Americans for Tax Reform strongly endorses the Family and Small Business Taxpayer Protection Act and urges all members to vote “YES” on H.R. 23.
Promise kept
The vote will fulfill the promise made in September by Republican House Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) that the number one priority of a Republican House Majority would be rolling back increased IRS funding for tax enforcement.
Democrats spinning dissent…
GOP divisions over Social Security, Medicare cuts forecast tough fights ahead
House Republicans are divided over cuts to Medicare and Social Security, setting up what could be a fierce internal clash over the future of the nation’s top safety net programs when Congress delves into budget fights later in the year.
Entitlements have long been a political third rail, but some in the GOP say everything is on the table and are eager to use upcoming debt ceiling negotiations to extract promises to reduce government spending, including entitlement funding.
That could pit the GOP’s staunchest deficit hawks against other conservatives who insist Medicare and Social Security will be left alone and the cuts will come from elsewhere.
With a narrow GOP majority, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) can lose only four votes on any bill, and will have to find a way to placate the lawmakers calling for hard cuts.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), one of the conservative leaders who extracted a promise from McCarthy to limit new discretionary spending, insisted entitlements are safe.
“It took approximately .2 seconds for everybody to be saying, ‘You’re gonna slaughter defense … You’re gonna hurt Social Security and Medicare.’ Everybody calm down,” Roy said in an interview with conservative radio host Jesse Kelly.
“What we have been very clear about is, we’re not going to touch the benefits that are going to people relying on the benefits under Social Security and Medicare,” he said Sunday on CNN’s ‘State of the Union.’
Biden’s ‘shadow immigration system’ strategy too little, too late
After months of ignoring the problem and demonstrably false claims by his homeland security secretary that the southern border is “secure,” President Biden is finally visiting the area this week as part of a trip to Mexico.
Last week, the administration announced it would immediately begin turning away Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans who illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border. Why are laws against illegal border crossings being selectively applied to this group of migrants? Most people believe laws are supposed to apply to everyone. Try claiming an exemption for speeding if you are pulled over and watch the reaction of the police officer.
NBC News reports migrant crossings in fiscal 2022 alone hit 2.76 million, a record. More than 100 countries are represented among the migrants, including Chinese and Russians. No one knows the exact number of “gotaways,” or how many have smuggled drugs into the country or plan to commit a terrorist act.
Mr. Biden’s attempt to show he is doing something about this reminds me of the idiom “closing the barn door after the horse has left.” It’s too little, too late.
Biden administration admits it killed thousands of jobs by canceling Keystone Pipeline
President Joe Biden’s decision to kill the Keystone Pipeline on his first day in office cost the U.S. economy 59,000 jobs and $9.6 billion in economic growth, according to a study released last month by his own Energy Department.
The proposed 875-mile pipeline would have safely transported up to 830,000 barrels of oil per day from the Canadian border to Steel City, Nebraska, where it would have linked up existing pipelines to American refineries.
Far-Left environmentalists who want to make gas more expensive for working people opposed the project for years before Biden finally denied the last permit needed to begin construction. After Biden denied the permit, Sens. Steve Daines (R-MT) and Jim Risch (R-ID) passed a law requiring the Energy Department to issue a report on how many construction jobs were lost when the permit wasn’t built. On Dec. 23, months after the study was required to be released, the Energy Department finally released it, showing that 50 permanent jobs were lost when the project died, as well as 59,468 two-year temporary jobs.
“The Department of Energy finally admitted to the worst kept secret about the Keystone Pipeline: President Biden’s decision to cancel the Keystone XL Pipeline sacrificed thousands of American jobs,” Risch said. “To make matters worse, his decision moved the U.S. further away from energy independence and lower gas prices at a time when inflation and gas prices are drastically impacting Americans’ pocketbooks.”
Youngkin at a crossroads
Virginia Republicans’ defeat in a state Senate special election Tuesday night has left Gov. Glenn Youngkin at a political crossroads, threatening to derail the national ambitions of one of the GOP’s most promising rising stars.
Why it matters: Youngkin’s efforts to build a robust governing record ahead of a possible 2024 presidential campaign — including closely watched plans for a stricter abortion ban — are at risk.
Driving the news: Democrat Aaron Rouse declared victory over Republican Kevin Adams in the Virginia Beach-based seat vacated by former GOP state State Jen Kiggans, who was elected to Congress in November.
The contest was held in a textbook swing district: It backed Kiggans in 2019, President Biden in 2020 and Youngkin in 2021.
Rouse focused his campaign message on protecting abortion rights, campaigning against Youngkin’s proposal for a 15-week ban that was formally introduced in the Virginia legislature on Wednesday.
What to watch: Youngkin could spend the coming legislative session compromising with state Democrats on tax cuts, education spending and mental health funding. But that’s unlikely to give him the type of conservative victories he’d be able to champion for a national GOP audience in a presidential primary.
Election Integrity 2022 in Review: More Improvements Than Damage
As state legislatures begin their 2023 sessions, Americans should know what their states did in 2022 to improve or damage the integrity of the election process.
They can now easily do that because 2022 marks the second year that The Heritage Foundation has tracked and scored the laws and regulations of every state and the District of Columbia that bear on the conduct and integrity of elections. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
The Election Integrity Scorecard scores the security and reliability of elections on a 100-point scale based on 47 best practices criteria that cover everything from the handling of absentee ballots to the maintenance of clean, accurate voter registration rolls.
2022’s changes were in many respects positive. In total, 14 states improved their election-integrity scores over their 2021 totals, while only three states saw net declines in their scores.
The states moving in the right direction were Arizona, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.
Unfortunately for the voters in Maryland, Rhode Island, and Wyoming, those states headed in the wrong direction, diminishing the security of their elections.
How Russiagate Was Used to Justify FBI Election Interference
The false collusion narrative of 2016 became the pretext for the bureau to put its thumb on the scale for Joe Biden in 2020.
Who was the archvillain of Russiagate? It’s an important question, considering the cocksure certainty of the national-security establishment that Russia is a mortal threat to our democratic process, and the fact that that certainty has been used as justification for thrusting the FBI into our electoral politics as a monitor of what is supposed to be our free press and robust political speech.
Ask any Democrat or the FBI — you might even be able to ask both at the same time, since they seem to collaborate quite a bit — and Donald Trump will be the answer. In fact, Adam Schiff, for the moment the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, is still howling at the moon about collusion. And as for the FBI? Well, it never had a Trump–Russia-collusion case, but that didn’t stop it from swearing to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that it had one — not once but four times.
The other commonly cited villain is Vladimir Putin, another one-stop shop for explaining Democratic electoral woes. Hillary Clinton still won’t let 2016 go. For top Democrats and a certain regrettably common type of FBI official, elections have only two possible outcomes: Either Democrats win them or Russia steals them for Republicans.
Let’s dig a bit deeper, though, because Trump and Putin are too obvious. The surest Public Enemy No. 1 in the Russiagate saga is Julian Assange. Trump’s alleged role in the hack that launched a thousand fever dreams was, pardon the pun, trumped up. Putin’s role — given the opaque chain of command from the Kremlin to Moscow’s intelligence services to the battalions of nameless, faceless Russian hackers — is necessarily elusive. But if the “Russia hacked the 2016 election” narrative is true, then the one person we know was guilty beyond doubt is Assange. He’s the WikiLeaks guy. He’s the stolen-secrets clearinghouse for fancy bears, cozy bears, and whatever other bears there may be. We’re to understand that he encourages politically calculated anti-American hacking, he becomes a repository of the purloined data, and he gets it published in major media.
AMERICA NEEDS A THIRD PARTY
I’m a big believer in America; where it came from, what it stands for, and its future potential. The United States is far from perfect, in both its history and its present. Yet it still represents the best social, political, and economic system to respect and nurture the individual.
But most sense something is very wrong with where the nation is heading. Look around at our national political leaders from both parties of late, is the best we can do? America needs a course correction.
Drastic change is not needed. The nation should not radically tear itself down and then rebuild itself into something perceived to be better abstractly but likely will be much worse. Keep the Electoral College, don’t stack the Supreme Court, defend the Bill of Rights, and preserve the free market.
But our political system is in dire need of new blood. Two parties have enjoyed a stranglehold on governance for too long. Where they were once different shades of similar ideals, today the two parties have split orbits to where they represent extremes that cater to the minority fringes and leave little for the large middle.
Big 10: Insiders give us their early predictions about 2024 race for White House
Biden vs. Trump? Harris vs. Haley? Sanders vs. DeSantis?
With the midterms in the rear-view mirror and talk of 2024 heating up, we asked a supersized panel of political insiders for one early prediction about the race for president.
In the 21st Century, China is Our Main Adversary and Japan is Our Most Important Ally
What a difference a century makes. In the 20th century, Germany and the Soviet Union were the main adversaries of the United States, and Great Britain was our most important ally. In the 21st century–at least in its early stages–China is our main adversary and Japan is our most important ally. But the fundamental geopolitics underlying both centuries is remarkably similar despite the scientific and technological changes. And that is so because of the centrality of Eurasia to global politics.
In his book The Grand Chessboard (1997), Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote that “Eurasia . . . is the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be played.” Eurasia contains most of the world’s people and resources, and is “the location of most of the world’s politically assertive and dynamic states.” Brzezinski called it the “megacontinent” and wrote that America’s security depended upon the geopolitical pluralism of Eurasia. And he described the most dangerous post-Cold War scenario as “a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran.”
A quarter-century later, that “grand coalition” is emerging. China’s economic and military power has grown faster than even Brzezinski thought likely. It has become a peer competitor of the United States and has formed a strategic partnership with a revived Russia that is flexing its muscles again in Eastern Europe. Iran, meanwhile, sees itself as the preeminent power in the Middle East and has formed strong economic and political ties to China and Russia. This has led some commentators to label the China-Russia-Iran relationship (and some add North Korea) an “axis” that threatens the global balance of power.
The United States, however, cannot and should not confront all three powers simultaneously. Contemporary strategists call this approach “strategic sequencing,” and the logic behind such a strategy is to concentrate resources on the most significant challenge and, if fighting breaks out, to avoid a multi-front war. Strategic sequencing harkens back to Walter Lippmann’s prudent advice for ensuring that commitments do not exceed resources. As Hal Brands has noted, today China, Russia, and Iran, even though not formally allied, “are aligned in a critical area–the Eurasian heartland.”
