“If Biden becomes president …” The words chill us to the bone, but we cannot now avoid uttering them.

And we cannot avoid hearing Trump supporters comforting one another by saying, “You don’t need to worry too much because we will still have the Senate. The Democrats won’t be able to put any of their dreadful domestic policies into effect because the Republican majority there will stop them.”

Suddenly, they trust the Senate Republicans!

Is there reason to trust them?

Julie Kelly writes at American Greatness:

In February 2020, Mitt Romney became the first U.S. senator in history to vote to convict the president of his own party. Despite a laughable impeachment case concocted by House Democrats and clear evidence of corruption tied to the Democratic presidential candidate whom the impeachment effort was designed to protect, Romney nonetheless supported the removal of Donald Trump from the White House.

“My faith is at the heart of who I am,” Utah’s junior senator claimed while working up tears from the Senate floor on February 5. “The grave question the Constitution tasks senators to answer is whether the president committed an act so extreme and egregious that it rises to the level of high crime and misdemeanor. Yes, he did.”

As we all know, President Trump had done nothing wrong, let alone an extremely egregious wrong. He was accused – to put the case briefly – of bribing a Ukrainian government to investigate whether Joe Biden had bribed a Ukrainian government to protect and enrich his son Hunter Biden and through his son, himself. President Trump had not done it. Joe Biden had done it. And Joe Biden’s party impeached Trump for doing it.

But Romney didn’t just pontificate about the president’s behavior. In that very same soliloquy, Romney defended the actions of both Joe and Hunter Biden.

“Taking excessive advantage of his father’s name is unsavory, it is not a crime.” Romney concluded, therefore, that since no crime had been committed by the Bidens, in his opinion, the president’s request that Ukrainian officials look into their shady business dealings was “political.”

With that, Mitt Romney secured his place in political history for something other than losing two campaigns for president.

In many respects, Romney is the poster child for the present-day Republican U.S. Senate: pandering, feckless, disloyal, and weak.

Yes, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s record on confirming federal judges, including three Supreme Court nominees, is laudable. But the four-year reign of the Republican Senate under a Republican president is a shameful account of missed opportunities, broken promises, and straight-up subversion of Donald Trump. During one of the most fraught, destructive periods in American history, Senate Republicans squandered rather than wielded their immense political power.

Longtime pledges to reform immigration laws and repeal the Affordable Care Act were cast aside. When the president used his legal authority to attempt to secure the southern border in the spring of 2019, a dozen Senate Republicans vetoed his emergency order.

Rather than stand up to the Democratic Party’s race hustlers, Senate Republicans—including McConnell—condemned the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor as racially motivated even when evidence contradicted those claims. A few Republican senators sponsored legislation to replace Columbus Day with Juneteenth as a sop to the Left.

As lawless thugs tore down statues of America’s Founders and Antifa mobs occupied swaths of major U.S. cities, some Republican senators didn’t even bother to attend a public hearing about Antifa’s ongoing threat to the country. President Trump often was the lone voice defending America’s history and ideals; following his riveting July 4 address at Mount Rushmore, where he unapologetically confronted America’s domestic enemies, Republican Senators were silent.

Of course, there’s no greater example of the Senate Republicans’ abdication of power than its complete and total failure to hold accountable any of the perpetrators of so-called Obamagate for orchestrating the biggest American political scandal of all time.

Republicans knew early on that the Steele dossier was garbage; Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and the late Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) were fully aware that the dossier was political propaganda sourced from a foreign operative paid by the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee but legitimized its use as the pretext for the collusion scam.

Rather than put a stop to the phony Trump-Russia collusion plotline, Senate Republicans played along with their Democratic counterparts. Every single Republican senator supported the appointment of Robert Mueller, a Beltway crony and BFF of James Comey. The Senate Judiciary Committee, headed by Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) then by Graham, performed no oversight of Mueller’s destructive probe despite holding the purse strings. When the president justifiably expressed his frustration at Mueller’s “witch hunt”, instead of defending the president, Senate Republicans vowed to “protect the Special Counsel”. 

At the same time, top Republicans did nothing more than write stern letters and give Fox News interviews threatening to “get to the bottom” of the real scandal. Subpoenas were blocked; criminal referrals were ignored by the Justice Department; public interrogations were canceled or delayed until public interest waned.

The flagrantly corrupt chiefs of the country’s law enforcement and intelligence apparatus, rather than face jail time or at least a public tribunal of sorts similar to what House Democrats did to Donald Trump and his loyalists for two years, continue to demean the president on cable news shows and on social media.

The current composition of the Republican-held Senate is a tower of Jello, a quivering, wavering ship of fools, an embarrassing collection of dunces, dupes, and paper tigers.

We’ll call that a string of metaphors rather than a mixed one and give it a pass, because most of the Republicans in power are cowards, fools, dunces, and dupes of their more cunning, more determined, utterly unscrupulous Democrat colleagues.

For example, in a pre-Election Day tirade, Senator Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) insisted the president would cause major GOP losses as voters across the country rejected his antics and tweets. “We are staring down the barrel of a blue tsunami,” Sasse told supporters.

Now that is a mixed metaphor. A prize one. Proof that Republican Senator Sasse is a dunce. An inability to talk sense simply reveals an inability to think sensibly.

And he was wrong about the imminent arrival of a “blue tsunami”:

Not only did Republicans hold the Senate but they’ve picked up at least six House seats with more victories predicted.

Even now, as the president is fighting widespread election irregularities and suspected fraud, he is on his own. “Where is the GOP?!” Eric Trump tweeted Thursday afternoon. “Our voters will never forget . . .” (Late Thursday, Graham announced he would donate $500,000 to Trump’s legal defense fund.)

It’s pure folly to think this Republican Senate will act as a bulwark against a Biden-Harris Administration. Armed with a slim majority, Senate Republicans undoubtedly will play footsie with their former colleagues under the solemn banner of “bringing the country together”.

There is no reason to believe Senate Republicans won’t sign off on a Democrat-backed coronavirus relief package that includes a partial bailout of bankrupted blue states, a lite version of the Green New Deal or at least “climate change mitigation” legislation, expanded Obamacare coverage, more flexible immigration laws, and a variety of taxpayer-funded goodies from college debt forgiveness to some form of racial reparations.

McConnell already is ready to work with Biden on his cabinet after Democrats made life a living hell for every Trump appointee. … McConnell is signaling to Team Biden that he will approve “centrist options” and fight the nomination of any progressive candidates. But that won’t fly with the Democratic Party base; Biden owes them. And once the media goes scorched earth on Republican senators who won’t acquiesce, don’t be surprised when they cave.

Oh, and the little matter of Hunter Biden and the overwhelming evidence of the Biden family’s pay-to-play schemes with hostile foreign entities? Don’t hold your breath waiting for any follow-up investigation. Both Graham and Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) recently refused to commit to issuing a subpoena for the younger Biden.

“And this election did not give the Democrats power,” Ben Shapiro tweeted Thursday morning. “Biden’s most progressive priorities are DOA in a McConnell-run Senate.”

Only people who haven’t paid close attention to a McConnell-run Senate believe that to be true. Do they really believe folks like Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Ben Sasse and Lindsey Graham will hold their ground against Biden? Do they really think Mitt Romney won’t attempt to carve out some “Conscience of the Senate” role that lets him find common ground with Biden and Harris for the “betterment of democracy” or some nonsense?

Pure fantasy.

I hope I’m wrong, but I doubt I am. Listening to the deafening silence of Senate Republicans this week only reinforces my cynical analysis. If you’re disappointed with McConnell and company now, just wait until next year if Joe Biden is president.

If the Democrats get control of the presidency, the House and the Senate, they will do everything they can to stay in power permanently, and America is all too likely to become a one-party state. Ambitious politicians who call themselves Republicans now will happily become Democrats. It will not be a big change; they have been conniving with their opponents for years.

The Republican Party needs to be taken in hand by new young members who will make it energetic, effective, dedicated, and extremely aggressive – starting now before we even know for sure who the next president will be.

The choice is becoming increasingly clear. Stark would be an even better word for it.

Voters can choose between –

Keeping the Republic set up in 1787 and prospering now as never before under the leadership of President Trump, by voting for his Republican followers.

Or changing into the North American Venezuela by voting for the other major political party forming rapidly to replace the Democratic Party, the Democratic Socialist Party, under the leadership of an old communist, Bernie Sanders, and a young communist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The North American Venezuela. It is a vision hovering in the spacious skies over the purple mountains and the fruited plain.

AP reports:

A week ago, Maine Democrat Zak Ringelstein wasn’t quite ready to consider himself a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, even if he appreciated the organization’s values and endorsement in his bid to become a U.S. senator.

Three days later, he told The Associated Press it was time to join up. He’s now the only major-party Senate candidate in the nation to be a dues-paying democratic socialist.

Ringelstein’s leap is the latest evidence of a nationwide surge in the strength and popularity of an organization that, until recently, operated on the fringes of the liberal movement’s farthest left flank. As Donald Trump’s presidency stretches into its second year, democratic socialism has become a significant force in Democratic politics. Its rise comes as Democrats debate whether moving too far left will turn off voters.

“I stand with the democratic socialists, and I have decided to become a dues-paying member,” Ringelstein told AP. “It’s time to do what’s right, even if it’s not easy.”

There are 42 people running for offices at the federal, state and local levels this year with the formal endorsement of the Democratic Socialists of America, the organization says. They span 20 states, including Florida, Hawaii, Kansas and Michigan.

The most ambitious Democrats in Washington have been reluctant to embrace the label, even as they embrace the policies defining modern-day democratic socialism: Medicare for all, a $15 minimum wage, free college tuition and the abolition of the federal department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also known as ICE.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Congress’s only self-identified democratic socialist, campaigned Friday with the movement’s newest star, New York City congressional candidate Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old former bartender who defeated one of the most powerful House Democrats last month.

Two-head Communism

Her victory fed a flame that was already beginning to burn brighter. The DSA’s paid membership has hovered around 6,000 in the years before Trump’s election, said Allie Cohn, a member of the group’s national political team. Last week, its paid membership hit 45,000 nationwide.

There is little distinction made between the terms “democratic socialism” and “socialism” in the group’s literature. While Ringelstein and other DSA-backed candidates promote a “big-tent” philosophy, the group’s constitution describes its members as socialists who “reject an economic order based on private profit” and “share a vision of a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production, economic planning, equitable distribution, feminism, racial equality and non-oppressive relationships”. 

Note that, voters. Even private relationships will be monitored by the planners of the social order. It completes the totalitarian vision. 

Members during public meetings often refer to each other as “comrades”,wear clothing featuring socialist symbols like the rose and promote authors such as Karl Marx.

Four-head Communism

The common association with the failed Soviet Union has made it difficult for sympathetic liberals to explain their connection.

“I don’t like the term socialist, because people do associate that with bad things in history,” said Kansas congressional candidate James Thompson, who is endorsed by the DSA and campaigned alongside Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, but is not a dues-paying democratic socialist. “There’s definitely a lot of their policies that closely align with mine.”

Thompson, an Army veteran turned civil rights attorney, is running again after narrowly losing a special election last year to fill the seat vacated by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Even in deep-red Kansas, he embraces policies like “Medicare for all” and is openly critical of capitalism.

In Hawaii, 29-year-old state Rep. Kaniela Ing isn’t shy about promoting his status as a democratic socialist in his bid for Congress. He said he was encouraged to run for higher office by the same activist who recruited Ocasio-Cortez.

“We figured just lean in hard,” Ing told the AP of the democratic socialist label. He acknowledged some baby boomers may be scared away, but said the policies democratic socialists promote — like free health care and economic equality — aren’t extreme.

Republicans, meanwhile, are encouraged by the rise of democratic socialism — for a far different reason. They have seized on what they view as a leftward lurch by Democrats they predict will alienate voters this fall and in the 2020 presidential race.

The Republican National Committee eagerly notes that Sanders’ plan to provide free government-sponsored health care for all Americans had no co-sponsors in 2013. Today, more than one-third of Senate Democrats and two-thirds of House Democrats have signed onto the proposal, which by one estimate could cost taxpayers as much as $32 trillion.

The co-sponsors include some 2020 presidential prospects, such as Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and California Sen. Kamala Harris.

Those senators aren’t calling themselves democratic socialists but also not disassociating themselves from the movement’s priorities.

Most support the push to abolish ICE [the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency] which enforces immigration laws …

… and want to abolish national borders.

So not even a North American Venezuela?

No nations, no nation-states. No national governments, no voting, no political parties, no law to enforce.

The hovering vision fades.

If the comrades have their way, the reality will be even worse than Venezuela.