Every weekend I come back to Kentucky and try to purge my brain of the hypocrisy and stupidity I’ve witnessed in Congress the week before. Otherwise, it just piles up.
It’s noon on Sunday and I still haven’t purged the nonsense I dealt with in person this past week.🧵
I heard the Democrats argue vociferously that a wrist brace is a bump stock. If there was any doubt of their profound ignorance, they removed it by displaying a poster of the wrist brace and reiterated it would facilitate full-auto fire.
I witnessed almost every democrat on the Judiciary committee call the most common rifle sold in the United States a “weapon of war,” and then heard them argue passionately that the Department of Education and the USDA needed these “weapons of war.”
I listened to every single one of them argue that firearms manufacturers should be liable for the acts of criminals, and follow that up by voting against removing immunity for pharmaceutical companies even when they are clearly negligent!
I heard Secretary Buttigieg say that high gas prices would be beneficial, and describe electric cars as very affordable.
I asked the Secretary if he knew what impact Biden’s electric car mandate would have on the grid and he did not, or he chose to ignore it. When presented with the math, he seemed unable or unwilling to acknowledge the magnitude of the electric consumption.
I watched a stacked deck of witnesses argue that inventors do not deserve a day in a real courtroom when big tech steals their inventions. They claim an executive branch tribunal can function independently of politics, even though the Supreme Court ruled that it’s not even legal.
I watched them pass a bill on a party line vote that banned a weapon if it looked a certain way, but not ban that very same weapon if it looked a different way, while they assured the public that this would make them safer.
I could go on. This is just a sampling of what I witnessed personally and pushed back against this past week.
I’ve got a few more hours to get ready for more of the same insanity this coming week.
I appreciate your support!
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🧵 At the time of that breakfast with Scalia, John Boehner was Speaker of the House and Barack Obama was President.
There was concern that Obama was doing things we hadn’t authorized and Boehner had convinced most of my GOP colleagues there wasn’t anything we could do about it.
🧵 Scalia finished his breakfast and began to speak. He started by saying that being a referee between us and the executive branch was not his job.
He explained that his job as a jurist was to determine if there was harm and what the remedy might be.
🧵 Occasionally, constitutionality of a law was a question, but only as a side effect of Scalia’s job, which was to determine if someone had been harmed and what the remedy was.
He was adamant that his job was not to referee disagreements between the executive & the legislature.
🧵I once had breakfast with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and about 18 other members of Congress in a private room at the Capitol Hill Club in Washington DC.
He was invited to speak on the topic of “restoring the constitutional balance of government.”
🧵 At the time of that breakfast with Scalia, John Boehner was Speaker of the House and Barack Obama was President.
There was concern that Obama was doing things we hadn’t authorized and Boehner had convinced most of my GOP colleagues there wasn’t anything we could do about it.
🧵 Scalia finished his breakfast and began to speak. He started by saying that being a referee between us and the executive branch was not his job.
He explained that his job as a jurist was to determine if there was harm and what the remedy might be.
🧵 How does Lucy pull the football from Charlie Brown in Congress?
This $100 billion bill that moves us to the brink of war around the globe…
began as a House bill to help VETERANS get reimbursed for emergency care!
🧵 The Veterans’ bill, HR 815, passed the House as a Veterans’ bill and went to the Senate.
The Senate stripped every word from it, inserted the foreign aid supplemental, and sent it back to the House.
The House will vote on 4 separate bills (Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, +other).
🧵 After the 4 separate bills pass the House tomorrow, a tricky Rule that passed in Rules Committee last night converts them into amendments to the Senate supplemental… HR 815, the bill that started in the House as a Veterans’ bill !
There was a vote on a resolution that would have allowed FISA, as well as 6 amendments to it, including a warrant requirement amendment, and three other pieces of legislation to come to the floor.
On partisan procedural votes like this, Democrats reflexively vote no and Republicans typically vote yes.
19 Republicans voted with all the Democrats to stop everything from coming to the floor today, including the warrant amendment to FISA.
Many of us who are adamantly opposed to warrantless surveillance voted for the resolution, wanting to get a recorded vote on warrants, and recognizing the Speaker can otherwise suspend the rules and bring anything to the floor without a resolution, like he did with the omnibus.
🚨 CDC discloses they have at least a dozen medical industry LOBBYING GROUPS, officially SERVING alongside 15 voting members, on ACIP, the supposedly independent vaccine board that just approved the 9th booster shot.
Here is CDC’s list of “liaison members” serving on the vaccine advisory. I will include publicly available lobbying activity from these organizations in subsequent posts. But pick any one of them and search for their name + lobbying, and you can research this yourself.
BTW, @CNN has the temerity to call these folks independent vaccine advisers. Let’s see about that…
We just scored a big victory against the woke takeover of American financial organizations. After Chairman Jordan and I called them out for potential violations of antitrust law, major corporations dropped their involvement with an Environment, Social, and Governance ESG group. reuters.com/sustainability…
Chairman Jordan and I (as Chairman of the Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust) wrote
@BlackRock, @Vanguard_Group, @StateStreet, and the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero about their ESG coordination.
This is one of the letters:
.@Jim_Jordan, @RepDanBishop, and I warned these companies that their ongoing efforts "coordinating their members' agreements to ‘decarbonize’ their assets under management and reduce emissions to net zero" were potentially illegal under the Sherman Act.