Jimmy Carter’s funeral was Thursday, so you’d figure that might be one of the items in this week’s 5QT.
It isn’t. Melissa summed up those proceedings exceedingly well, and I don’t have much of anything to add. Besides, I was informed via e-mail that my take on Carter’s death was “rude,” a characterization with which I wholeheartedly and unapologetically agree, and so I’m happy not to beat that dead horse — or the shameful treatment of the president-to-be at that ceremony — any further. (READ MORE: The Uniparty v. Trump at Jimmy Carter’s Funeral)
What I will say is that Carter’s funeral had to show off the worst collection of living current and ex-presidents ever assembled in American history. Trump is the only one of the five you can say didn’t directly contribute to American decline, and I don’t know when that could ever be said of five current or former presidents still living and present in one place at any point since our founding.
Wow.
Anyway, on with the show…
1. Those Fires in Los Angeles Feel Like They’re California’s Katrina
You’ll forgive me if my frame of reference is a little local for the taste of much of our readership, but ever since the images started coming out of those fires spreading all over Southern California and piling up the billions of dollars in lost homes and businesses, I haven’t been able to shake the comparisons to what happened in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans some 20 years ago.
You’ve got to admit the analogy is substantial. In New Orleans, the infrastructure failure was poorly made and shoddily maintained levees, while in California it’s the intentional neglect of the reservoirs and water capture infrastructure in an area that is constantly water starved and prone to wildfires in the first place.
Then you have an out-to-lunch governor. Louisiana had Kathleen Blanco, who was instantly overwhelmed by the organizational challenge of a hurricane response. California’s Gavin Newsom is certainly that, but he’s also badly out of touch and has no understanding of the dynamics of an emergency situation, either.
There’s the analogy of the mayor. Karen Bass was in Ghana when the fires first broke out, and when she returned, it was clear Los Angeles’s emergency management wouldn’t really profit from her presence. That isn’t so different from the performance of New Orleans’s Ray Nagin, who camped out in a suite at the Hyatt Regency Hotel next door to the Superdome and ran up a massive food and drink tab while doing rambling interviews with CNN as his constituents turned into a mishmash of refugees and looters.
George W. Bush was castigated as an out-of-touch president as the levees broke after Katrina, and perhaps that was true. Bush probably deserved the media opprobrium he got for staring out the window of Air Force One as it flew over the Katrina floodwaters in New Orleans, but that shouldn’t have been half as destructive a set of optics as Joe Biden interrupting a briefing on the Los Angeles fires to announce that he’s now a great grandfather.
But mostly, the reminiscence for me is the collapse of the frauds. In Katrina, those floodwaters exposed just how poorly run a city and a state it was inundating, and how utterly wasted the billions of dollars of local, state, and federal funds were in producing a sustainable and safe city. Mother Nature passed judgment on progressive policy in New Orleans that late-August day when the levees broke, and the test failed.
I would venture to say those fires have exposed Los Angeles as even worse than New Orleans after Katrina.
You surely know about Bass having cut the fire department’s budget by $17 million last year. You know about the donations of firefighting equipment to Ukraine for some reason. You know they’ve refused for YEARS to clear away underbrush and tree-trash in the woods near populated areas and thus left those areas wide open to destruction from turbocharged wildfires.
You know about the DEI idiocy and vaccine fascism that has gutted the various fire departments in Southern California. And you know about the intentional failure to maintain a bankable water supply, so that when it became time to fight those fires the hydrants went empty almost immediately and the only source of water to save those houses were swimming pools the firefighters could pump out.
Breitbart’s Joel Pollak was putting out fires near his house with buckets of runoff from fire trucks. That didn’t last long.
Louisiana changed for the better after Katrina, at least for a time. People recognized the cost of incompetence and idiocy among their political leaders and, at least for a time, voted better. If there’s a silver lining amid the massive property loss in Southern California — how many of those people who’ve been burned out of their homes and businesses will simply take their insurance or disaster relief payoffs and recognize that windfall as a ticket out of California? — it’s that the folks there will now have an object lesson in the damage progressivism does when real life intrudes.
Of course, there’s one major difference. Namely, liars like Bernie Sanders are now running around with political gas cans claiming “climate change” as the cause of those fires, and decrying the lack of rain in Southern California — when the fall and early winter saw more rain there than usual; it was the failure to capture that rainwater, in order to save some species of baitfish or other, which left those fire hydrants dry. There was some climate alarmism strewn about after Katrina, but it largely died away when it became obvious that the levee failure was the problem in New Orleans more than the wind and the rain.
And there is this: Spike Lee used to go around claiming Bush blew up those levees when Katrina hit, and that was idiotic. Not idiotic is the contention by a growing number of people that those fires in Los Angeles were deliberately set for very nefarious purposes, whether political or “environmental.”
We’ll see about that.
2. May You Get Carpal Tunnel, Mr. President
How many times will Donald Trump have to sign his name on Jan. 20? It sounds like it’ll be at least a hundred…
President-elect Donald Trump met with the Senate GOP on Wednesday night and during that meeting that he and top advisers reviewed plans for 100 executive orders to be signed after Trump takes office on January 20. Senators who were in the meeting spoke to Axios and revealed that among those orders were plans for immigration and border security.
Trump has promised that on Day 1 he would address the border debacle left behind by President Joe Biden and his “border czar” Kamala Harris, who Trump bested in the recent presidential contest. Top adviser Stephen Miller was reportedly in that meeting with Republican senators and spoke to those present about their plans, which include reinstating Title 42, the public health law that allows for the mass refusal of illegal immigrants over concerns about the spread of disease. It was widely used during the COVID pandemic.
Additionally, Miller said that the administration would make aggressive use of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which permits state and local law enforcement officers to aid Immigration and Customs Enforcement in carrying out deportations and other activities that have been strictly the purview of ICE. Trump has also been considering reimplementing the “remain in Mexico” policy, where those who come to the border to seek asylum must wait in Mexico or a third country, and not the U.S., while they await their hearing. Biden’s policy was to allow illegal border crossers to apply for asylum and then be released into the United States.
The Trump administration will also get back to building the border wall, which was abandoned by the Biden administration. The building of a wall between Mexico and the U.S. was a key campaign promise of Trump’s first run for president in 2016 and propelled him into the White House. That wall was a point of contention with the Biden administration as many Democrats said it was inhumane.
On Biden’s first days in office, he essentially flung the border wide open for illegal immigrants of all nations. He extended temporary protected status for those in the U.S. from dangerous nations, reversed Trump-era policies to keep Americans safe, and ushered in the largest wave of illegal immigration the U.S. has ever seen. His secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, even told immigrants “we’re not saying don’t come, we’re saying don’t come now,” as caravans of people lined up at the border to gain entry.
Good. There’s so much work to do right now it’s mind-blowing. Other than someone like Harry Truman, who took office in the middle of a war, Trump is inheriting a bigger mess as president than anyone in American history. The border is a crucial piece of the problem, but it’s so much bigger than that.
It sounds unsympathetic to wish him carpal tunnel from signing all those executive orders, but that’s probably what it’ll take to set this place straight.
3. Our Relations With Mexico Are Not Going To Be Very Good For Some Time, and They Shouldn’t Be
This is not cool.
The argument against designating the Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations is that to do so, and then commence military operations against those cartels, would destabilize the Mexican government.
But it’s getting hard to deny the cartels actually are the Mexican government, or that it’s a distinctly hostile entity that probably ought to be destabilized.
Mexico increasingly shows that it’s unwilling to do what’s necessary and proper to keep good relations with the United States. If our relations deteriorate and if Trump decides that airstrikes or special-ops raids to decapitate the cartels are in our national security interests, that’s on Commie Claudia Sheinbaum’s head, not Trump’s. She may not have created these circumstances but she seems to be reveling in them, and there are consequences.
4. “One Big, Beautiful Bill”
Newt Gingrich has a piece out talking about the likelihood that Congress is going to pass a reconciliation package that knocks out a massive amount of Trump’s legislative agenda — border/immigration policy, making the Trump tax cuts permanent, and other things. It’s worth a read. Here’s a taste (I’m giving you the link to the RVIVR article rather than the one at RealClear Politics because the image at the top is just plain better)…
The No. 1 goal for the Trump administration and congressional Republicans must be to pass what I would call the Tax Cuts, Jobs, and Affordability Act. President Donald J. Trump has described it as “one big, beautiful bill.”
A powerful economic bill must be the Republicans’ top priority, because it is key to the 2026 election. We know the economy, inflation, and affordability are by far the American people’s biggest concerns. The southern border and illegal immigration are also important — and additional border security measures should be included in the bill. But they are still second to the economy. Furthermore, the President can get a fair amount done on illegal immigration and the border without an act of Congress (for instance, enforcing laws the Biden administration is currently ignoring).
Quick timing is vital. It takes time for new laws to impact the everyday lives of people.
Republicans should have learned this lesson twice: First with President Ronald Reagan in 1981, and then with President Trump in 2017.
When President Reagan got his three-year tax cuts through the Congress in the summer of 1981, he allowed it to be written so the tax cuts would only kick in in 1983. The economic result was no real stimulus in 1982. The political result was the House Republicans lost 26 seats in the 1982 off-year election.
Similarly, in 2017, the congressional leaders convinced newly-elected President Trump that they could not get to the tax cuts until they abolished Obamacare. They spent months focusing on Obamacare — and failed to repeal it. The lost months meant that the Trump tax cuts only passed in December 2017. The result was little economic impact in 2018. House Republicans lost 40 seats that year. Speaker Nancy Pelosi then unleashed Hell on the Trump administration. Tearing up his State of the Union speech and impeaching him twice were mere opening volleys. The ensuing investigations, harassment, and blocked actions made the last two years of the first Trump presidency incredibly difficult.
Gingrich notes that getting a booming economy going by the summer of 2026 is crucial because that’s how you can stave off the dreaded midterm electoral slump a president’s party usually suffers from — and any slumping at all will lose the House, and any real opportunity for legislative headway in the second half of Trump’s term.
He’s right about that.
What I’d say, though, is that the one big, beautiful bill should contain a nice chunk of election reform action in it.
For example, get rid of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which essentially mandates affirmative action for black Democrat politicians by mandating a certain amount of majority-minority congressional and legislative (and other) districts. This is obsolete and unnecessary. When Byron Donalds, Burgess Owens, John James, Tim Scott, Winsome Sears, Mark Robinson, Daniel Cameron, and lots of other black Republicans can win in majority-white districts or in statewide elections and nobody even bats an eye anymore, there is no longer an evidentiary basis for requiring x-amount of districts that black Democrats whose electoral appeal is based almost solely on radical progressivism and racial hatred are guaranteed to win.
Plus we need a federal voter ID requirement. We need a ban on noncitizens voting in any elections, not just federal. We need to ban the Census from counting noncitizens for the purposes of apportionment. And we need a federal requirement of regular cleanups to the voter rolls in every state.
A while back, Melissa and I had Cleta Mitchell on as a guest and she noted that every time Democrats fall into a governing majority with control of both the legislative and executive branches, whether in D.C. or a state, they immediately go to work bringing legislation to rig the electoral process in their favor. This ought to be done by the GOP, right now. If you really want that big, beautiful bill to be drop-dead gorgeous, put this stuff in there. (LISTEN FOR MORE: The Spectacle Ep. 159: Cracking the Case of Stolen Elections)
5. Amy Barrett Stinks.
John Roberts, I can understand, as I’m used to his cowardly rulings. But Barrett has to rank as one of the biggest disappointments in recent Supreme Court history. How could this possibly have happened?
President-elect Donald Trump can be sentenced Friday in his New York hush money case, the Supreme Court said in a 5-4 ruling.
The high court on Thursday rejected Trump’s emergency request to delay the proceeding, setting the stage for him to be sentenced just days before he is inaugurated on January 20 for a second term.
Four conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — said they would have granted Trump’s request.
Judge Juan Merchan, the New York judge who oversaw Trump’s trial, had ordered sentencing in the case for Friday morning but has signaled that Trump will face neither penalties nor prison time.
In a brief, one-paragraph statement, the court said that some of Trump’s concerns could be handled “in the ordinary course on appeal.” The court also reasoned that the burden sentencing would impose on Trump’s responsibilities is “relatively insubstantial” in light of the trial court’s stated intent to impose no penalty.
There is so much manifest, publicly visible, reversible error in that stupid case, so much obvious conflict of interest with Merchan and his daughter who raised millions of dollars for Democrat politicians off that trial, that the idea of allowing a sentence to potentially interfere with Trump’s inauguration is absurd. (READ MORE: Judge Merchan: Dismiss Trump’s Case or Recuse Thyself!)
And yet we have it, thanks to Roberts and Barrett siding with the leftists on that Court.
Here’s hoping that when Pam Bondi gets confirmed as attorney general, she appoints a special prosecutor to investigate Merchan and his daughter for RICO and Conspiracy Against Rights, and that effort has the same effect on them that federal prosecutions had on, say, Mike Flynn or Rudy Giuliani, who were rendered paupers thanks to the Democrats’ lawfare schemes.
And if Merchan does anything to interfere with Trump’s inauguration, maybe it isn’t RICO. Maybe it’s treason.
The public has had enough of these shenanigans. Either they end, or it’ll be time for some very unpleasant escalation.
READ MORE from Scott McKay:
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