New Rules Bite Brass in the Backside

At long last, Republicans have begun to embrace the New Rules bestowed upon our society by the Marxist Left. Just yesterday, my colleague Chris Queen reported on Georgia’s Attorney General Chris Carr following the example recently set by Fulton County DA Fani Willis and wielding the state’s RICO laws. But unlike Willis’s acrobatic interpretation of the statutes to go after Orange Man Bad, Carr is using them to bust up the passel of actual domestic terrorists who have been terrorizing Atlanta over its plans to build a public safety training center.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if prosecutors in other states followed suit and began applying the law to left-wing domestic terrorists in their jurisdictions? After all, protestors on the right are routinely tracked down and raided in their homes in front of their families, hauled before courts, and even jailed sometimes — all for doing far less than the average Antifa goon and sometimes nothing illegal at all. But I digress.

Legal entanglements and targeted prosecutions are but one of the New Rules the Left has foisted upon us. Another one occurs in legislative bodies. It’s called the slow walk.

Once upon a time, Republicans and Democrats (although Republicans more so than Democrats) were respectful of voters’ wishes when they elected executives to public office. If the new executive wanted certain people in his administration, the nominees were generally waved through except in rare cases when there was something egregiously wrong with the selection.

When the Bad Orange Man won the White House in 2016, Democrats torched that civility. Suddenly, resistance was all the rage, and all of Washington, D.C., applied itself to resisting the will of the people as embodied in President Trump.

One way they did this was to “slow walk” the new administration’s nominees for federal posts. Senior legal fellow with The Heritage Foundation Thomas Jipping explained the process to The Western Journal back in 2019:

The Capitol Hill veteran explained that once nominees clear the committee, they must be scheduled for a full Senate confirmation vote, but Schumer is refusing to cooperate with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky to do so.

When the minority party does not cooperate, it requires a cloture vote by the Senate to end debate on each nominee, which, if successful, still triggers 30 additional hours for deliberations before the full vote can be held.

The effect is to slow down the vote for two to three legislative days [per nominee].

“That is unprecedented in American history,” he added. “That has never happened before, where across the board you have the opposition party in the Senate just automatically opposing a president’s nominees simply because of the president who nominated them. It’s never happened before.”

Lest you thought being nominated to fill an administrative post was a tony ticket to Easy Street, you should know that it was expensive and time-consuming for the nominee even under the old, more courteous circumstances. “Many nominees hire lawyers to walk them through the confirmation process, spending tens of thousands of dollars — or much more for wealthy people with complicated financial situations — for assistance in filling out ethics and financial disclosure forms,” Politico detailed back in 2017. “The process requires nominees to review and document nearly every major financial decision in their adult lives, and the finished paperwork has been known to run more than 60 or 70 pages, lawyers said.” And that was before Democrats rolled out their New Rules for appointee approvals:

About 100 of President Donald Trump’s nominees have been kicked back to the White House, prolonging an unusually high number of vacancies across his administration and escalating the Senate’s long-running nomination wars. …

That means the White House will have to renominate them if Trump wants them installed. …

That will trigger a requirement that nominees’ paperwork be up to date — a gargantuan task for some nominees who’ve been languishing in the Senate for months, especially if their net worth changed dramatically because of the surging stock market.

That has some lawyers worried that nominees could throw in the towel, frustrated by the already laborious process of winning Senate approval. …

In a less divisive political atmosphere, lawmakers would have approved a unanimous consent agreement allowing the nominees to carry over into next year. Such agreements have rarely been controversial.

In fact, I personally know several good, honest people who went through that hell. In preparation for serving their country, these people put their employers and clients on notice that they would be leaving for Washington, put their houses on the market, and got their kids ready to change schools and leave their friends.

And then they waited … and waited … and waited. Years dragged by. Some of them were never ultimately able to take the post for which they had been nominated. It was a disgusting chapter in left-wing nastiness. And now it’s one of the New Rules.

Thus, today, the top brass is outraged at Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) for blocking military nominees, beginning last March. The senator took the action as a protest against the Biden military’s adoption of woke policies and especially against its February 2023 decision to use DOD funds to pay for servicemembers and their families to travel to get abortions.

Tuberville and other Republicans decried the military’s decision as illegal because it violates the Hyde Amendment. That 40-year-old law prohibits federal money from being used to pay for obtaining abortions.

“This [DOD] policy on abortion is way overboard,” Tuberville told Counterpoint host Lyndsay Keith. “They’re not supposed to be making laws and I’m not going to allow them to do it. They’re going to have to change this policy back and bring it to the floor, and let’s vote on it.” You know — like they’re supposed to do.

I didn’t start this.

The Biden Admin injected politics into the military and imposed an unlawful abortion policy on the American taxpayers.

I am trying to get politics out of the military. pic.twitter.com/5Rgd0MZJKC

— Coach Tommy Tuberville (@SenTuberville) September 2, 2023

And this is where I feel nothing but retaliatory mirth at the plight of the inconvenienced swamp commanders and their minions whose appointments have been held up.

Among the 300 or so appointments on hold are the Chief of Naval Operations, the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, and the Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps. So Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, and Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall wrote an op-ed in the Monday edition of the Washington Post, in which they whined, “Placing a blanket hold on all general and flag officer nominees, who as apolitical officials have traditionally been exempt from the hold process, is unfair to these military leaders and their families.”

Aw, gee, that’s rough. Maybe you should have told your Lefty pals not to do it to every person President Trump tried to nominate or appoint when he was in office.

“Across the services, many generals and admirals are being forced to perform two roles simultaneously,” the beleaguered brass further lamented. “The strain of this double duty places a real and unfair burden on these officers, the organizations they lead, and their families.”

via GIPHY

“These military leaders are being forced to endure costly separations from their families — a painful experience they have come to know from nearly 20 years of deployments to places such as Iraq and Afghanistan,” they wept. “All because of the actions of a single senator.”

Sux when the shoe’s on the other foot, don’t it?

Great job, Republicans! You didn’t make the New Rules, but you can sure as heck apply them. Keep up the good work!