New Thoughts about the Mid-Term, 2018

By Douglas V. Gibbs
Author, Speaker, Instructor, Radio Host

It turns out the political wave that slammed us on Election Day, November 2018, was neither blue, nor red.  In fact, in many ways it was a wave designed to wash away the trash.

I was a guest on the Dave Levine Show today, and he brought up something I had not thought of.

It turns out the takeover by the Democrats of the House of Representatives was inevitable ... and I should have seen it coming.  The loss of the House by the Republicans is not because it is some kind of referendum against President Donald Trump.  The truth is, the changing of the guard in the House of Representatives is actually a referendum against pro-amnesty Republicans.

It began with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a policy put into place by President Barack Obama with an Executive Memo (which is basically an unnumbered executive order) to grant amnesty to the children of illegal aliens.  When President Trump went to repeal it with his own executive order, the establishment went nuts as if DACA is law.

DACA was never a piece of legislation.  There is no authority in the Constitution giving the courts the authority to strike down any of Trump's executive orders, and besides, if DACA was birthed through an executive action, then that is how it can be killed.

The U.S. Congress, and the courts, disagrees, so it became a battle.

Out of that a group of moderate Republicans who support amnesty-lite emerged.  They believed the GOP leadership was stonewalling a vote on DACA, and other immigration issues, so they created a discharge petition which was designed to, once it was signed by a majority of House members, circumvent Republican leadership and bring the four different immigration proposals working their way through the system to the House floor for a vote.

Immigration is a huge issue among voters, and the voters were angry at these Republicans for the discharge petition.  So, on election day, November 6, 2018, those Republicans were discharged from the House of Representatives.

In other words, the Democrat Party did not gain the House of Representatives because people agree with them, or because they were trying to send a message to the President about his stances on issues.  The mid-term election was a cleaning-house project, where conservative voters refused to vote for the RINOs so as to relieve them of their positions.  The good news is that about thirty discharge petition Republicans got the boot.  The bad news is that in order to do what needed to be done, the Democrats would temporarily gain control of the House of Representatives.

If Tea Party conservatives run for those same seats in 2020, the House will return to the GOP, but with a more conservative group of legislators who are ready to make Donald Trump's second term even more eventful and productive as the first two years of his first term.

In short: Suffer a little now so we can get it all fixed later.

-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary