“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 Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, called on Donald Trump to unify the Republican Party if he wanted to earn his support.

If Paul Ryan gave his support to Donald Trump he would be unifying the Party.

He’s putting the cart before the horse.

A former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, reproached Ryan by pointing out –

Donald Trump may turn out to be the most effective anti-left leader in our lifetime. He is against political correctness. He is against bureaucracy. He places American nationalism first which I think we desperately need. I’m tired of being told we have to have phony agreements and phony efforts.

The Hill, in its report that Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader, declared his support for Trump, quotes McConnell as saying:

As the presumptive nominee, [Donald Trump] now has the opportunity and the obligation to unite our party around our goals.

The biggest goal, in McConnell’s eyes, is to defeat Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee, and prevent what is largely expected to be a continuation of many of President Obama’s policies if she takes the Oval Office.

That goal is surely one that Trump and (most of?) the old guard of the Republican Party can and do agree on.

But in general: No, Senator McConnell, you have got it wrong. Donald Trump has the opportunity and the obligation to unite the party around his goals. If he drops everything he says he stands for, everything he proclaims as his intention, the very ideas that are drawing the approval of millions of voters throughout the country, in order just to fall in with your old, stale, failed ideas, those millions of voters will not vote for him in the general election and the Republican Party will not win the presidency.

You stalwarts of the old guard must put all your resources behind him, back him up with so much enthusiasm it actually looks like and may even become an amazing Republican novelty – passionate commitment.

It is up to you, Senator McConnell and Speaker Ryan, to unify the party and satisfy the people by joining your obvious nominee, Donald Trump. That is your obligation.

To the extent that there is a deal of sorts between the United States and Iran, it is against the interests of the United States.

To the extent that the Iranian regime acknowledges any such deal, it is only to get sanctions lifted so it can get on with becoming a rich, formidable, aggressive power armed with nuclear weapons.

President Obama must know this. And he persistently and passionately does all he can to help the Iranian regime get its way.

Now it emerges that he has used the apparatus of the state to spy on Congressmen opposed to the deal.

The information emerges because he has had it leaked. He instructed his officials to tell the Wall Street Journal that the National Security Agency took this illegal action.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the NSA spied on Israelis, including Prime Minister Netanyahu, and US citizens with whom they were in communication.

Caroline Glick writes at Front Page:

According to the Journal report, to advance its diplomatic opening to Iran, the administration has knowingly and deliberately spied on both law-abiding US citizens who posed no risk to US national security and on US lawmakers engaged in their lawful, constitutional duties.

As the criminal activity was characterized by the report, to protect Obama’s nuclear talks with the Iranians, Netanyahu was marked as a top intelligence target for the NSA. The NSA monitored all of his communications and all communications of his senior officials – most notably Ambassador Ron Dermer. …

The picture painted by the Journal article is of an administration that made massive, continuous and deliberate use of intercepted conversations between lawmakers and private citizens with Israeli officials.

Consider the administration’s indignant fury when news broke on January 21 of last year that the Republican congressional leaders Sen. Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner had invited Netanyahu to address the joint Houses about the dangers of the Iran nuclear deal.

Obama and his advisers insisted that they were blindsided by the news. Yet … [as] we now know that the NSA was monitoring all of Dermer’s communications – including his communications with US lawmakers – it appears to follow that NSA intercepted Boehner’s call to Dermer.

According to the Journal, the White House’s demand for intelligence on Israel was so intense that the NSA was transferring transcripts of intercepted calls within six hours of their interception. …

From these intercepted communications, the administration learned Israel’s pitch for Democratic lawmakers in its efforts to convince them to oppose the deal. …

Israeli officials asked the wavering lawmakers, “How can we get your vote? What is it going to take?” Given Israel’s failure to convince a significant number of Democratic senators to oppose the deal, the suspicion arises that the administration read the answers and used the ill-begotten information as a means of blocking Israel from securing Democratic opposition to Obama’s nuclear deal.

It ought to go without saying that the administration’s massive efforts to block information about the most radical US foreign policy initiative since World War II from US lawmakers speaks volumes about how Obama and his colleagues assessed the public’s position on Iran generally and Obama’s nuclear talks with the mullocracy specifically.

The nuclear deal with Iran endangers the US directly.

It empowers the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism financially, diplomatically and militarily.

Iran declared war against the US 37 years ago and has been calling for the destruction of America and supporting terrorist attacks against the US and its allies ever since.

As to those allies, the nuclear deal with Iran specifically, and the Obama administration’s decision to embrace Iran as a potential ally more generally, place Israel in jeopardy. So, too, it endangers all of the US’s traditional Arab allies.

Yet rather than reconsider its strategic goal of courting Iran at the expense of its own national security and that of its closest allies, the Obama administration determined that its most urgent goal was to scuttle Israeli attempts to warn lawmakers and the US public about the dangers of the deal. …

Iran still refuses to approve or implement the deal. The American hostages it holds continue to languish in its prisons. Its nuclear sites remain closed to international inspectors. Its ballistic missile program is moving forward …  Iran is so emboldened … that last week it shot a missile across the Straits of Hormuz in close proximity to a US naval ship.

The ayatollahs are convinced that Obama will suffer any and all indignities to keep up the fiction that he has a nuclear deal with them. …

And yet [it is] now, as Iran daily humiliates Obama with its unbridled aggression, that senior administration officials chose to brag to Wall Street Journal reporters about how they spied on Israel in breach of Obama’s pledge not to spy on leaders of US allied nations. It is now, when Obama’s opening to Iran is a self-evident failure, that they chose to share how they broke US law by spying on US citizens and abused the president’s constitutional authority by spying on US lawmakers. …

[This administration is] so contemptuous of US lawmakers and citizens that its senior officials have no compunction about admitting that they are breaking the law.

They brazenly admit that they are undertaking unlawful spying operations against private citizens and lawmakers and in so doing conducting a massive abuse of presidential powers while trampling the spirit and arguably the letter of the US Constitution.

And they expect that no one will call them to task for it.

They are most probably right.

The rest of the world has no comeback against Obama and his gang for the furies he has let loose in it.

But will he ever be made to answer for the great harm he has deliberately done to America?

The bolshie Democrats are hating Scott Brown’s victory. They think Republicans, conservatives, independents, tea-partiers are gloating too much over it.

But when the freedom of America is at issue, there is no point in being gracious in victory. Press on, rather, to administer the coup de grâce.

This whimpering article shows how much they’re smarting from the blow.

It also shows that though they hear what the voters are saying they still don’t ‘get it’.

From the Washington Post:

If Republicans turn up the volume any more in the gloating over their Senate victory in Massachusetts, Americans are going to need hearing protection.

At a Wednesday-morning news conference called by House GOP leaders, Rep. Candice Miller (R-Mich.) claimed to speak for the American people when she asked: “Mr. President and the majority, can you hear us now?”

“The American people spoke in Virginia,” she continued, imitating the Verizon commercial that has been adopted by conservative “tea party” activists. “Can you hear us now?”

“The American people spoke in New Jersey. Can you hear us now?”

“And they certainly spoke last night in Massachusetts,” she concluded. “Can you hear us now?

Of course they can hear you, Congresswoman. A deaf man could hear you.

What the American people don’t hear is any offer by the Republicans to compromise with Democrats on health care, climate-change legislation, fiscal matters or much of anything else.

Nor should they.

If anything, Scott Brown’s surprise victory in Massachusetts on Tuesday seems to have left Republicans with the belief that their “party of no” strategy is working. After the Republican House leaders pronounced all the things they don’t want to do — “end . . . scrap . . . reject . . . has to be stopped . . . no to this . . . no . . . not to embark . . . isn’t working” — they cut off questioning after a couple of minutes and left.

“Is there any specific area of health-care reform where you could cooperate with Democrats?” NBC’s Luke Russert called out to House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio). Boehner muttered something unintelligible and continued walking.

Even if Republicans were inclined to cooperate with Democrats, there’s little political incentive for them to do so. Only 24 percent of Americans have a good amount of confidence in congressional Republicans, according to this month’s Washington Post-ABC News poll. With that lowly standing — even worse than the Democrats’ — Republicans’ best hope is that Democrats achieve nothing this year and are punished by voters in November as do-nothing legislators.

Yet the Democrats, predictably, are falling into the GOP’s trap and trimming their ambitions. Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), in a statement calling on his party’s leaders to suspend further health-care action before Brown is seated, calling it “vital that we restore the respect of the American people in our system of government and in our leaders.” As if that could be accomplished by the November midterm elections.

The Republican reaction to the Massachusetts results could be summarized in four words: nana nana boo boo….

On the House floor, Rep. Ted Poe (R-Tex.) likened Tuesday’s vote to the Revolutionary War battles of Lexington and Concord. “The people of Massachusetts have fired a second shot heard around the world,” he said. “Our government, like the British, would do well never to underestimate the American people.”

The Republican National Committee issued a research briefing titled “O-bandon Ship!” The voluble RNC chairman, Michael Steele, informed the viewers of “Good Morning America” that “the country is sighing a sigh of relief.”

The office of Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the House minority whip, issued a gloating e-mail titled “Dems in Chaos.” In an underground TV studio in the Capitol complex, Cantor was among a quintet of Republican House members who climbed the podium Wednesday morning for the first round of bragging. …

Michigan’s Miller, also avoiding the “graceful winner” label, took the opportunity to call Obama “the most partisan president that America has ever seen” and said Democrats got their comeuppance because they “rammed” the economic stimulus plan “down the throats of this Congress.”

And she spoke the truth.

It was time for the next gloat session, in another studio on the third floor of the Capitol. Mitch McConnell (Ky.), the Senate Republican leader, led half a dozen colleagues onto the stage and flashed a grin. The gesture, a rare one for McConnell, looked more like a grimace. “This was in many ways a national referendum principally on the major issue we’re wrestling with here in Congress,” he announced.

So is the health-care bill dead?

“I sure hope so,” McConnell said.

And the cap-and-trade plan to limit carbon emissions?

“I would say there is minimal enthusiasm, to put it mildly,” he said.

A deficit-reduction commission?

“I’m not going to decide today what we’re going to do in the future,” he said.

Obama’s choice to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel?

“A significant number of my conference . . . have not felt she should go forward.”

“So what are you prepared to work with the Democrats on?” ABC’s Jonathan Karl inquired….

Until all attempts by Obama and the Democrats to take America down the road to serfdom have stopped, the answer should be ‘Nothing’.