Blocked At The Gaetz

When Senate Republicans chose to be led by John Thune, I told you that there was still a lot more to the Grand Old Party than Donald Trump. I assumed that he was smoking them out for primary purposes. But it turns out that the nomination of Matt Gaetz, at least, will never even be put to the vote. If anything, the confirmation of Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will be even more difficult.

On Gaetz, Lee Fang set out that, "His record speaks for itself. From his perch on the House Judiciary Committee, Gaetz has promoted a surprisingly consumer-friendly agenda, routinely breaking with his GOP colleagues on crucial votes. He previously supported legislative measures to break up Silicon Valley monopolies, sharply regulate the online data broker industry, ban noncompete employment contracts, and an end to the practice of forced arbitration, among other corporate accountability votes. He has also taken maverick positions on reducing FBI surveillance powers, cutting certain arms supplies to Saudi Arabia and [boo, but this is a wakeup call for Trumpolatrous social conservatives] legalising marijuana." Do read the whole of Fang's article. Kamala Harris would certainly not have nominated an Attorney General as good as the undeniably imperfect Gaetz. Will Trump?

Hegseth and Gabbard have annoyed all the right people, making them better than Marco Rubio, Michael Waltz, Kristi Noem, Elise Stefanik or Mike Huckabee, none of whose views and not all of whose persons would have disqualified them from the same positions in a Harris Administration, and none of whom the Republican-controlled Senate will decline to confirm. All that the likes of John Bolton can find to bemoan about Hegseth is his inexperience; sadly, Hegseth's Jerusalem Cross and Deus Vult tattoos would be unlikely to translate into pro-Outremer policies. Churches would continue to be burned down, priests would continue to be spat on, the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem would continue to be destroyed, and Maronite villages in Lebanon would continue to be bombed. But we are unlikely to find out.

Gabbard, on the other hand, had driven the neocons, so to speak, Crazy. For all that she was yet another pro-doper, you could not have said better than that of a Director of National Intelligence. On so many other issues, she was so good, and often far better than Trump had been last time. She would have placed all the war pigs in both parties on the Quiet Skies domestic terror watchlist on which they had placed her. Just as Gaetz would have avenged himself upon those in the Department of Justice who had tried the oldest trick the liberal book against him. They had already been trying the other one, too.

As they are doing the same in reverse against Kennedy. While he is broadly anti-war, economically egalitarian by American standards, and accordingly averse to erosions of civil liberties, he is also an anti-industrial Malthusian, an anti-vaxxer, and a very liberal Catholic indeed, who therefore lacks the philosophical foundation of a truly radical alternative. Those of us who preferred serious politics never had any truck with ethnic or generational sentimentality at all, much less even in the face of this. You know who, for a time, you were. But should it ever make it that far, then only for the first three of those reasons would his confirmation be refused. By the Republicans.