The Senate’s do-nothing GOP majority have been doing more than you think. Just ask the Senate Democrats they’ve worked so hard for.
After capitulating like the French Army on an extremely popular election integrity package and bungling a funding bill for federal immigration law enforcement, Senate Republicans are providing invaluable backup for the left’s war on accountability.
“You think the Senate GOP couldn’t be worse, but it looks like their only achievement will be to work overtime with the media and other Democrats to destroy any accountability for Democrat lawfare and censorship,” Mollie Hemingway, The Federalist’s editor-in-chief, wrote Monday on X.
‘Enough Republican Senators’
Pravda press hyenas pounced on reports that the Department of Justice wouldn’t fight an order temporarily freezing the Trump administration’s $1.776 billion anti-weaponization fund as leftist-led legal challenges wind their way through court. The same Democrats who helped or smiled on President Joe Biden’s weaponized Justice Department are attempting to dismantle a fund that would pay restitution to Americans crushed under the weight of an abusive government.
While the restitution pool does raise some transparency concerns, its political critics like to contend the Biden administration did not use the DOJ and outside lawfare bloodsuckers to drive witch hunts against President Donald Trump, his allies, and other Democratic Party political enemies.
Those critics include the Senate Majority Leader John Thune and his team who courageously fled D.C. for their nine-day Memorial Day Weekend getaway without dealing with a reconciliation bill to fund Immigration & Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Border Patrol. They’re so caught up in their temper tantrum over the anti-weaponization fund that they’re willing to hold up the $70 billion funding package to pay for border security and ICE efforts.
Democrats, set on abolishing ICE and reopening the border like in the good old invasion days of the Biden presidency, are loving every minute of the Republican rancor. So, too, are their messengers in the corrupt corporate media — breathlessly reporting every inch of the impasse between Senate RINOs and Trump.
“Enough Republican senators to block progress on the immigration bill, given the united Democratic opposition, said there were unanswered questions that could keep the bill from moving forward without a clear resolution,” Politico reported Monday evening.
Hypocrites
The milquetoast majority, like their Democrat friends, want the justice fund killed in its cradle or they won’t play ball on funding critical Department of Homeland Security operations. Some aren’t satisfied by the DOJ’s statement that it “will abide” by U.S. District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema’s order last week enjoining the Trump administration from “irreversibly” disbursing payouts from the fund.
In its statement, the department said it strongly disagrees with the order from Brinkema, who was tapped to serve on the Eastern District of Virginia bench in the early days of President Bill Clinton’s first term. The Justice Department notes that the fund “was open to anybody who was so weaponized, targeted, or persecuted” — no matter their political affiliation or philosophy.
Those assurances weren’t good enough for many Senate Republicans who have done little to move Trump’s domestic agenda. They’re itchy in particular about renumeration going to any of the Jan. 6 rioters and protesters, many of whom have been crushed under the wheels of the Biden DOJ’s weaponization machine in the name of Democratic Party’s “insurrection” big lie.
“The way the statement is worded, I think it’s clear that they’re not proceeding with the fund, but obviously whether that’s sufficient to satisfy a number of our members is something we’re still sorting through,” Thune, R-S.D., told reporters.
The Republican ransom setters are demanding that the president effectively swear an oath that the anti-weaponization fund is dead, and to promise he’ll never, never, ever bring it up again.
“If it means it’s completely pulled, then that would satisfy me, but I haven’t heard anybody say that that is actually what is happening,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, a perennial contender for most useless Senate Republican, told Politico. She also hinted, according to the left-leaning publication, that she could vote against the immigration enforcement bill no matter how the victim funding debate goes down.
Murkowski, it has long been said, can’t be satisfied. She’s always been frigid to the MAGA movement. She’s a hypocrite. So is Thune and all the other Republicans gnashing their teeth over the ant-weaponization fund.
As Kyle Brosnan, general counsel for the Oversight Project, righty points out, this is the same Senate majority that tucked a provision into last year’s government funding bill that allowed senators spied on in the weaponized Arctic Frost probe to sue for millions of dollars. As Brosnan notes, only after public outrage did they repeal the provision.
“They voted to give themselves a multi-million windfall, and only when they got caught with their hand in the cookie jar and there was rightful indignation from the public, did they relent,” the attorney told The Federalist Monday in a phone interview.
‘For Nearly Six Years’
There are plenty of victims of political weaponization, like Douglass Mackey, who was prosecuted by the Biden DOJ for exercising his free speech rights. He was sentenced to seven months in prison on trumped-up charges of “conspiracy to interfere with voters’ potential right to vote” in the 2016 presidential election. What did Mackey do? He posted satirical memes encouraging Hillary Clinton supporters to vote via text message.
An appellate court last July unanimously tossed his conviction.
“There are many other victims of weaponization. Look at the covid censorship industrial complex,” Brosnan said.
Special Counsel Jack Smith and the Arctic Frost cabal targeted more than 400 Republicans, according to nearly 200 subpoenas released last October by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa. Now Grassley is demanding Trump “say very explicitly that there’s not going to be a weaponization fund,” according to Politico.
Jeff Clark, the Oversight Project’s vice president of litigation, is himself a victim of weaponization. As The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd reported last month, the DOJ sued the Washington D.C. Bar disciplinary machine for its raging “barfare,” leftist lawyers who have spent years “trying to ruin the lives and careers of their political enemies,” including Clark, a Trump-era DOJ official.
Caught up in the leftist lawfare witch hunt following the rigged 2020 election, Clark faced a wide-ranging Georgia election indictment and the FBI raided his home, all with the attorney having committed no crime.
“For nearly six years, I’ve been defending myself against truly vapid and silly charges by the DC Office of Disciplinary Counsel,” Clark said in a statement. “They claim I tried to lie when in reality all I was doing was proposing a different course of action than two of my fellow lawyers in leadership at DOJ. Lawyers disagree with each other all the time. The DC Bar charges aimed at me were at all times an effort at weaponized politics. Nothing more.”
‘Accountability for Abusive Government Actors?’
The Oversight Project in December sent a letter to the DOJ and Trump proposing the legal framework for establishing the anti-weaponization fund. Despite assertions to the contrary, the indemnity legally draws from the congress’ creation 70 years ago of a Judgment Fund and subsequent authority granted to the Justice Department to pay claims.
Now Senate Republicans are working overtime to help Democrats block restitution for those buried under the weight of politically-driven indictments and prosecutions.
Thune’s office did not return The Federalist’s request for comment asking if the majority leader “wants to see justice for conservative victims of Biden’s weaponized Department of Justice and accountability for abusive government actors?”
“Does he not agree that there are plenty of both?” The Federalist inquired of Thune’s spokeswoman.
More so, does the Republican leader not think that the voters who delivered a majority for Republicans in the Senate voted for accountability for the abusive agents who weaponized the government against their political enemies?
If Thune and other Senate Republicans don’t believe that, should they continue to serve in their plumb positions where they’ve done more for far-left Democrats than the conservatives who voted for them?
