March 28, 2022
As the world seems to be spinning out of control, for Republicans the political situation could hardly look rosier. Eight months away from the midterm elections, Joe Biden’s poll numbers are tanking, and no one in the White House seems prepared to put a brake on any but the most symbolic policies that are the cause for it. On top of this, House Republicans maintain a solid lead on the generic ballot over the Democrats.
The leadership of Elise Stefanik in the House caucus is one reason for this. Since the time she has taken over as House Republican Conference Chair, Stefanik has been singularly effective in prosecuting the case against Joe Biden and an ever-more-radical Democrat majority in Congress. Unlike her predecessor, who is obsessed with the impeachment of President Trump, Stefanik has been laser-focused on standing up to the radical, amoral Biden-Pelosi agenda and promoting a unified Republican message. It appears as well that Stefanik is making sure House Republicans as a group focus on issues that matter, not to media influencers, lobbyists, and Silicon Valley, but to meat-and-potato, hard-working Americans and their families.
That doesn’t mean disengagement from world events, however – rather, to the contrary, because Americans who are proud of their country realize that by and large, American strength is a force for good in the world. That’s why Stefanik did not hesitate last week to say out loud what so many others in Washington consider “the quiet part”: That there would never have been an invasion of Ukraine if not for the Biden Administration’s resumption of the Obama-era policy of affirmatively creating power vacuums and projecting the impression of a weak and irresolute America on the world stage. No one was surprised that Biden would pursue this policy, but few were prepared for Biden’s shameless debacle in Afghanistan, which set the tone for things to come.
Stefanik understood that one job her constituents gave her when they sent her to Congress was telling it as it is. So she rightly pointed out what everyone with eyes in his head can see – that Biden’s weakness, more than any other single factor, is to blame for the carnage in Ukraine. On cue, the usual suspects had a complete and total meltdown, smeared her, and took the statement out of context, namely that, as Stefanik said, Putin is a corrupt thug. Meltdown or not, Stefanik did not back down but instead doubled down on exposing how Biden’s weakness is the but-for cause of a historic flare-up of international chaos. No longer gormlessly believing what the deeply compromised corporate media tell them, a solid majority of the American people agree with Stefanik: Recent polling shows that 62 percent of voters believe that Putin would not have invaded Ukraine if Trump were still President.
Biden’s chaotic policies have resulted in an invasion of Americans’ economic security as well. A year into an inflation crisis, which is ultimately a tax on middle-class families, the American people are paying more for everything, from gas—more expensive than ever thanks to Biden’s hostility to U.S. energy independence—to groceries. In fact, inflation is at the highest it has been since before Elise Stefanik was born. Besides spiraling energy costs and despite the desperate attempts by the corporate media to blame a year of inflation on Vladimir Putin, the blame for this erosion in Americans’ spending power and savings must be laid squarely at the doorstep of the Democrats’ preposterous COVID policies. Crushing small businesses and competition through unnecessary mandates and lockdowns and insisting on maintaining these policies even as the data showed how ineffective and even counterproductive they were would have been bad enough. But their reckless spending and expansion of government have caused prices to skyrocket. Stefanik has led on this issue too, recently telling the New York Times, “I’m the grocery shopper in my family, so I go by my gut,” Stefanik told us. As a new mother herself, she saw prices for diapers and formula blast through supermarket roofs. “And I’ll tell you,” she added, “babies use a lot of diapers.”
That comment struck a lot of notes among many Americans straining to get by and raise young families, and its contribution to Stefanik’s success went beyond the ballot box. She rallied her colleagues around a new economic message as she sought to oust the increasingly unpopular Trump antagonist Representative Liz Cheney from her leadership role. She said Cheney was “leaving these issues on the table” as chair of the House Republican conference. In a May 12 letter to her colleagues, Stefanik promised to go “on offense” every day.” As House Republican Conference Chair, she has done just that.
Conservatives should be grateful that Elise Stefanik is leading messaging as Conference Chair. Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi are putting our country on the wrong track, and perfectly evoke that favored social media meme of the coffee-sipping doggy sitting in a burning room and calmly intoning, “This is fine.” Frankly, there are too many crises to count. We have a border crisis, crime crisis, inflation crisis, foreign policy crisis, education crisis, just to name a few. Since taking over as House Republican Conference Chair, though, Stefanik has kept her promise to unite the Republican caucus and go on offense. At a press conference back in January, Joe Biden asked rhetorically what Republicans even stand for. Stefanik quickly took to social media to clap back with the answer he pretended not to know: lower taxes, peace through strength, energy independence, border security, unborn life, and respect for parents’ involvement in education. These are positive values, but Republicans will also win by continuing aggressively, as Elise Stefanik is doing, to expose Joe Biden’s failures, bringing his and Nancy Pelosi’s long-overdue retirements from public life to save America. Elise Stefanik is leading Republicans in the right direction.
Read the full article here.
