Vance’s strength is his wit, intellect, and gift for political framing. He’s a verbal sharpshooter who decimated Tim Walz in their vice-presidential debate, and Jewish Republicans surely applauded his withering takedown of El-Sayed. …

Vance came across as reasonable, sincere, fair-minded, and respectful. He acknowledged Israel’s importance to American foreign policy, praised it as an ally, and connected the rise of antisemitism to unchecked Third World immigration — traditionally, one of the GOP’s most unifying issues.

Best of all, he did it without pandering.

But on the other hand, Vance failed to separate himself from Tucker Carlson, whom many Jewish Republicans feel is just as much of a dangerous antisemite as El-Sayed. The event’s emcee, ex-Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), gave him a golden opportunity to denounce Carlson’s rhetoric.

Vance declined, opting to pivot to Nick Fuentes and Joe Rogan …

By failing to cleanly separate himself from Hasan Piker, El-Sayed has shot himself in the foot. He’s now dogged by Piker everywhere he goes — and every time Piker says something offensive, El-Sayed is back on his heels. …

But what’s true about Piker is also true about Carlson: He monetizes outrage and controversy to stay in the headlines, too. That’s his business model as well.

Which means, JD Vance and Abdul El-Sayed share the same political vulnerability.

It’s puzzling why Vance refuses to bandage his wound. It wouldn’t take much. Just two or three sentences.

All he’d have to say is that Carlson has changed — and as a Christian, Vance prays for Carlson’s redemption — but OF COURSE he vehemently disagrees with Carlson about Trump being the antichrist, a slave, and/or Israel “destroying” the United States.

Carlson isn’t some quiet personal friend of Vance’s, he’s a major figure who is (or used to be) on the right, and he is a disgusting blood-libeling Jew-hater who is vocal about it nearly on a daily basis. Vance’s refusal to even criticize him in that regard is very telling, in my opinion.

Vance sometimes utters words that indicate he’s an Israel-supporter, but he has also said many things having nothing to do with Tucker Carlson that show a compromised support of Israel which is sometimes more like the position of a politician on the left than one on the right. I’ve written about it before; please see this from about a month and a half ago. In that post, I quote Lee Smith, who had written:

During his grievance-fueled performance on Rogan’s podcast, Vance lashed out once again at the Jews, alleging, among other things, that there’s an Israeli-funded plot to undermine his negotiations with Iran; some Israelis want war indefinitely for the sake of endless war; and the U.S. government has probably destroyed evidence that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad operative. …

Now that the Iran deal that Vance favored has blown up and he’s taking heat for it, he’s showing that no one puts baby in a corner. So, he resurrects Epsteingate, predictably inspiring the dumbest people in America, and around the world, to flood social media with details from an information operation targeting Trump.

I also think Vance has shown some naivete about Iran.

I am assuming that Vance’s motive for all of this is to not alienate the Tucker wing of the GOP. That’s the kindest interpretation.

The post Tucker Carlson is to J. D. Vance as Hasan Piker is to Abdul El-Sayed appeared first on The New Neo.

The DSA is riding high after the high-profile win of socialist Mamdani in 2025, capped off by a string of primary victories this year that have emboldened its more than 120,000 rank and file members nationwide.

But some DSA leaders are not yet on board the AOC train, and urged caution against getting ahead of the base while still hashing out the big questions regarding their platform, direction and whether her previous stance on Israel should be disqualifying.

The congresswoman previously supported sending defensive aid to Israel, but at a private NYC-DSA forum in April, she vowed to vote against sending any further military aid to the country, including defensive supplies, according to City & State NY.

Can’t have anyone who ever supported Israel, however tepidly. AOC hasn’t moved fast enough for some DSA members.

She’s now thirty-six years old – my, how time flies – and in November of 2028 she’ll be thirty-nine years old. The fresh young thing is being replaced by even fresher and even-more-leftist young things – Mamdani, for example, at 34, although he’s ineligible for the presidency (fortunately) as a non-native-born citizen.

Hard to keep up, things are moving so fast.

The post Is AOC far enough to the left to be the DSA’s pick in 2028? appeared first on The New Neo.

It’s been cumulative, but the Rogan interview is somewhat of a turning point for me. Initially, I was – if not a Vance fan, exactly – of the opinion that he might gain the sort of experience as VP that would make him a good presidential candidate in 2028. He’s clearly a smart guy, and he’s had a way with words when talking to the regular press and pointing out their illogic and lies. In his debate against Tim Walz he was excellent, and he used a delicate and deft touch. Among his other assets, he has a wife who seems as though she would make a wonderful First Lady.

But in recent months, Vance’s refusal to say something about Tucker Carlson’s horrendous viewpoints has been very disquieting. Carlson isn’t just anti-Israel and a spreader of classic lies about Jews, but he’s a historical revisionist, a Qatar and Putin shill, and has become a platform for some of the worst ideas around these days. For a while, Carlson’s son worked for Vance (although he’s quit now), and it’s long been known that it was Carlson who promoted to Trump the idea of Vance as VP. So in a very real way Vance owes his present job to Carlson.

That meant that there was a simple explanation for Vance not speaking out against Carlson as Trump had. That reason was loyalty. Blind and unwavering loyalty is not necessarily a good thing, but as long as Vance kept neutral on the subject of Carlson, I was willing to give him a pass and to wait and see. And then Vance decided to go on Rogan’s podcast, and he began to sound somewhat like Tucker himself. Not just that, but the interview was an exercise in buck-passing, which is not a good look.

This article by Lee Smith describes it quite well:

During his grievance-fueled performance on Rogan’s podcast, Vance lashed out once again at the Jews, alleging, among other things, that there’s an Israeli-funded plot to undermine his negotiations with Iran; some Israelis want war indefinitely for the sake of endless war; and the U.S. government has probably destroyed evidence that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad operative. …

Now that the Iran deal that Vance favored has blown up and he’s taking heat for it, he’s showing that no one puts baby in a corner. So, he resurrects Epsteingate, predictably inspiring the dumbest people in America, and around the world, to flood social media with details from an information operation targeting Trump.

Epsteingate is a reboot of Russiagate, a conspiracy-theory template holding that Trump is controlled by a foreign power. During Trump’s first term, that power was Russia. Now, in the second term, it’s Israel. Epstein became crucial to the narrative because his supposed role in running a pedophile blackmail ring at the behest of the Mossad provided a mechanism by which Israel could extort Trump and other high American officials into doing its bidding.

Smith goes on to explain why this is preposterous, but I think it’s of great interest that Vance was willing to hint at this route despite – as he himself admitted – having zero evidence of it. Vance even explicitly said that there was no evidence Trump was involved in sex with minors. But Vance has to know – unless he’s stupid, which I submit he is not – that Vance’s wink and nod about Epstein and the Mossad, and Israeli influence on the US, not only appeals mightily to the Jew-hating Tucker wing but is an indirect way of saying Trump is controlled by Israel.

I very much doubt Trump is happy about that.

More from Smith, on the origins of the story Vance is pushing or at least nodding along when Rogan mentions it:

The rumor that Epstein was a high-level global intelligence asset—as opposed to a rich pervert and con man—seems to have started with Steve Bannon, who left the first Trump White House in disgrace after leaking to the press. Bannon has ignored calls to release the 15 hours of interviews he reportedly taped with Epstein, presumably because they show Epstein was not a spy—or, at the very least, because Bannon failed to press the late sex offender to address a rumor he continues to popularize. The idea the Jewish financier pimped out underage American girls to compromise liberal elites for the purpose of advancing Israeli interests was most ardently promoted by Vance’s political patron, Tucker Carlson.

This is the Jew-hating Tucker wing. They have their own agenda, and I believe it is somewhat parallel to the DSA agenda for the Democrat Party. The goal is to take over the Republican Party. I don’t think they’ll succeed, but it won’t be for lack of trying. And now I strongly believe that Vance has hitched his wagon to him.

Vance is pragmatic, and may back off from this. It’s a long way to 2028 and a lot can happen. But he has shown, at the very least, that he’s willing to go very low in his own pursuit of power and need to excuse himself from responsibility for the failure of the negotiations with Iran.

It gets worse [emphasis in original]:

And to explain why his memorandum of understanding failed, Vance sourced the reading at a supermarket checkout counter. “There’s a literal foreign influence campaign being funded to tank the very deal that I was pursuing,” said Vance, pointing to a recent article in Time magazine. In fact, the story is about a former Trump deputy paid by Israel to pay pro-Israel influencers to post pro-Israel content, to combat the rising tide of campaigners on the right targeting Israel and paid for by Qatar.

Tom Cotton, chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told the media he is “not aware of any intelligence about a secret information operation to try to change American public opinion on negotiating under the memorandum of understanding.” Also, no one prevented Vance from negotiating the MOU, because it got signed. Yes, there was plenty of criticism on social media, but as Cotton said, it was the Iranians who blew up Vance’s deal by continuing to blow up ships in the Strait of Hormuz, which they declared to be their own private waterway—contrary to long-standing treaties that guarantee freedom of the seas.

But Vance insists it’s on Israel. “There are some people within their system, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt, who are manipulating and trying to change American public opinion to keep the war going on indefinitely,” he told Rogan. “Not toward any objective, but just indefinitely.”

Vance challenges anyone to show how he’s antisemitic. But claiming that Israelis want war for the sake of war, indefinitely, toward no specific objective, is a pretty good place to start. Vance’s denials are part of the act: I didn’t say something recognizably antisemitic; it’s on you to prove that the classic antisemitic conceit I used is antisemitic, you paranoid freak. My point is clearly just that Israelis simply kill people for no reason or purpose because they enjoy spilling blood, and they will continue doing so forever, to satisfy their perverted, inhuman lusts.

That is the part that seems to me to be the most revealing of Vance’s actual position.

Rubio, on the other hand, seems to actually have some integrity, and to have thought more deeply on these sorts of issues. Not only that, but he has a great deal of experience in government and in particular in foreign policy. He’s the child of Cuban refugees, and knows a lot about Communism and its effects. Plus, he’s quite expert on Latin America and has been active in dealing with that part of the world.

Rubio recently gave a much-praised speech on left-wing violence (you can find the text here). And he also gave a speech in Germany against 3rd-world migration that got a standing ovation [ADDENDUM: The video at that link, of the ovation, might be of an earlier speech; hard to say, but I’ve seen some statements to that effect].

The contrast between the two men is stark.

Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson recently said this about J. D. Vance [emphasis mine]:

I think if JD Vance were president, of course he would not be at war with Iran.

It’s impossible for me to imagine JD Vance standing up and saying we need to have two wars to defeat a phantom nuclear program.

It’s too insane. I think he has too much self-respect to say something like that.

I wish he had been elected president in 2024, but that didn’t happen. I love JD.

I don’t agree with him on everything, of course, but I think he’s an honest, very smart, decent person. That puts him above almost all politicians I’ve ever met.

That’s an endorsement.

The post More reflections on Vance – and also on Rubio appeared first on The New Neo.

Conservative pundit Tucker Carlson says he’s “out” of the Republican Party moving forward, arguing the GOP no longer reflects his views. …

“And if I’m out, then I think a lot of other people are out.”

He fancies himself a thought leader. And you know what? He most definitely does have followers and a huge digital audience. The question is about the composition and range of that audience. There is some evidence that a large number of them live abroad, particularly in Pakistan, and that many are of the bot persuasion. But I happen to think that a significant number are real live voting-age Americans, although I’ve read extremely variable estimates of their numbers

Whatever Tucker’s influence, I’d wager many of his followers left the GOP long ago.

I’ve written a great many posts on Carlson in the last year or two, ever since he left Fox and began his very visible political “turn.” I’ve described it in some depth, especially in this, which is the first part of a three-part series I wrote, and contains links to parts two and three of the series.

This political change of Carlson’s resulted in – among other things – his current emphasis on Israel and Jews as the source of most of the world’s problems. It’s an old story, but everything old is new again.

From his recent farewell to the GOP:

Carlson said, adding that the GOP has “betrayed” voters by prioritizing Israel’s national security over America’s.

I think this short clip is a good analysis of some of Carlson’s rhetorical tricks:

Carlson also says he “is unsure how he’ll vote moving forward” but that he’s not a Democrat.

But Tucker already has been supporting Democrats by allying with them in being obsessed with the unique evil he – and they – think Israel is. He also supports Democrats by having worked to split the right for several years now, first on Ukraine but especially after 10/7 and escalating much more after Charlie Kirk’s assassination. He would not have dared had Kirk been alive.

I also believe that Tucker knows pretty much what he’ll do “moving forward.” The question is not how he’ll vote; he’s just one vote, after all. It’s whom he will endorse, whom he’ll choose to interview and about what, and whether he’ll run for office himself. He doesn’t have to do the latter to split the party by endorsing some third-party candidate, either, which he might do.

Or maybe it’s Vance he’ll focus on and support, depending on whether Vance is truly allied with some of Tucker’s worst impulses or whether Vance is just pretending to be Tucker-adjacent the better to keep the party together for 2028. I don’t know which it is and I can’t read Vance’s mind.

The post Tucker Carlson announces something that was already clear: he’s not a Republican appeared first on The New Neo.

The way he was advertised in the campaign was as a military veteran and doctor who saved lives during the Iraq War. And that is true:

I’m Dr. Adam Hamawy. I’m a father, a husband, a humanitarian, a surgeon, a veteran, and a small business owner. I’ve dedicated my life to serving others, and I’m running for Congress in New Jersey’s 12th District to build a government that works for you, not special interests.

Just a great guy, right? He goes on to criticize ICE in typical Democrat fashion, and then segues to some Obama-esque “let’s all get together” pablum:

This is not about Republicans or Democrats. Both parties have failed to address the problems facing our families – affordability, healthcare, education, and so much more. Congress has the power to solve our problems instead of making them worse, but only if we elect Members with the courage to fight for us.

I’m stepping up now to fight for you because the people of New Jersey’s 12th district deserve a leader that puts our interests first, not billionaires and special interests.

Here’s a slightly more detailed bio that he offers. But nowhere does he seem to mention – much less try to explain – what even Politico calls his “controversial past” [my emphasis]:

Hamawy, who lives in South Brunswick and runs a plastic surgery practice in Princeton, entered the race as a political unknown. His campaign quickly gained traction as progressives simmered over Israel and its war with Hamas in Gaza. Hamawy’s work volunteering at a Gaza hospital during the war earned him support. …

Hamawy, 56, led the Democratic field in fundraising even before a new super PAC called American Priorities, founded as a pro-Palestinian counterweight to the pro-Israel AIPAC, spent $2 million on his behalf. …

Hamawy’s campaign planks are unabashedly progressive, including “Medicare For All” and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (which his campaign website says is “full of neo-Nazis at all ranks”) and dismantling the Department of Homeland Security.

So we have a Hamas-friendly, Egyptian-born, MD who is extremely to the left and considers ICE ‘neo-Nazis.” So far, that’s unfortunately not all that atypical for today’s Democrat Party.

But then we also have this:

But the heroic picture portrayed by Hamawy’s campaign and allies met a stark contrast when a publication tied to an anti-Islamic group resurfaced news reports of his 1995 testimony in defense of Omar Abdel-Rahman, the “blind sheikh”who was convicted on terrorism and seditious conspiracy charges, and whose followers conducted the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Hamawy, then a medical student in his 20s, had four years earlier accompanied Abdel-Rahman on a trip from New Jersey to Michigan, where Abdel-Rahman spoke at a conference and talked of “conquering the land of the infidels.” Even after the World Trade Center bombing, Hamawy acknowledged translating a document for Abdel-Rahman for a press conference.

Hamawy said on the campaign trail that he disavowed Abdel-Rahman’s calls for violence and called the critiques against him as “guilt-by-association attacks on Muslim and Arab candidates.”

He’s the victim, of course.

And his opponents among the Democrats were in the odd position of being reluctant to mention it, probably because of the danger of being accused of Islamophobia or the like. So I wonder how many of Hamawy’s voters even knew of his past:

While the Abdel-Rahman controversy got significant media attention and criticism from the right, most of Hamawy’s rivals declined to touch it. Plainfield Mayor Adrian Mapp, an exception, called Hamawy a “radical extremist.”

Hamawy in November faces Republican Gregg Mele, who has run unsuccessfully for several offices in New Jersey as a Republican and libertarian.

That’s not the only thing in Hamawy’s background that’s “controversial.” I’ve cued up just a couple of minutes of the Ruthless podcast discussing some of the rest, which includes an al Qaeda connection:

[NOTE: See also this article on the general theme of the radicalism of the current Democrats.]

The post Hamawy of New Jersey: worse than Platner? appeared first on The New Neo.

In reality, I don’t think it’s either. Trump is as much a reflection and result of opinions on the right as he is a shaper of those opinions. For example, I’ve been seeing significant complaints about Cornyn for quite a while online, Trump tapped into that and also probably escalated it, but it already existed.

Ken Paxton's victory in Texas has, I think, interesting implications for the national political scene.

Coming on top of a string of similar events, this is very bad news for anybody who wants to think MAGA is declining in influence or Trump is a spent force.

I'm not MAGA – I'm…

— Eric S. Raymond (@esrtweet) May 27, 2026

Longer excerpt from the tweet:

Coming on top of a string of similar events, [Paxton’s win] is very bad news for anybody who wants to think MAGA is declining in influence or Trump is a spent force. …

There have been a lot of very determined attempts to fragment the MAGA base and attempt to drive a wedge between them and the Trumpster. I see this on X and other social media – lots of indignant blithering about Israel and the Iran war that seems very light on substance and very heavy on attempting to fracture the Republican coalition.

I don’t think it’s working. [Last night] is evidence that Trump’s endorsement matters, and the base is not kindly disposed towards any Republican pol who’s perceived as not being on his team.

Again, I think the emphasis is wrong there. Yes, there are people who don’t like GOP office-holders who are disloyal to Trump himself, and who consider Team Trump the important thing. But I think the majority of voters support Trump because of what he has done and what he plans to do – that is, his policies – rather than thinking his policies are good because they’re his. Of course,Trump’s personality isn’t separate from his actions, but it’s the latter that most MAGA people emphasize and if he started doing things that were perceived as out of line with those policies he’d be losing their support.

And yes, there are people who want to take over the MAGA movement for various nefarious reasons, including Israel-hatred and Jew-hatred. But there are others who are turning on Trump merely because they are isolationists who perceived him as promising no more wars forever, not just “no forever wars.” But I think that most people on the right understood Trump to be a Jacksonian rather than an isolationist, and see the Iran war as a Jacksonian conflict that is not only necessary but long overdue. In line with that, though, if he ends the Iran war with a bad deal, one perceived as giving away too much to Iran, many of those who have stuck with him so far may become at least somewhat disillusioned.

Also – contrary to the scare propaganda of the left – Trump isn’t going to be running for a third term. If his health holds up, which I sincerely hope it does, he’ll be in office for a little over two and a half more years. Trump’s 80th birthday is only a couple of weeks away, and if all goes well he’ll be 82 and a half on leaving the presidency. At that point, Trump will have a successor or successors. But Trump is sui generis, and there won’t be anyone quite like him again, for good or ill.

The post The Trumpian primaries and Trump’s influence appeared first on The New Neo.

AOC is on the extreme left, or what used to pass for extreme. So was Obama, but he hid it fairly successfully, especially when campaigning for his first time. AOC doesn’t have that option. In that respect she’s more like Bernie Sanders, because she’s been fairly straightforward about her extreme leftism. In 2016, Democrat higher-ups blocked Sanders from winning the nomination when it looked as though he had a chance to do so, using their superdelegates to favor Hillary because they thought Bernie the outright socialist could not win in the general.

Like Bernie, AOC can’t hide who she is, but I think the party calculus has changed. How far has the Overton Window moved in the ensuing years? The party may believe a socialist could win by 2028. After all, Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City.

But New York City isn’t the US, and a 3-way mayoral race isn’t a 2-way presidential race. So I don’t know about AOC and the nomination, but I strongly believe it could happen. And if it does happen, Democrats will be counting on some or all of the following:

(1) Fraud will pull them over the line.

(2) AOC has appeal to two groups. The first is leftists, especially young ones. The Democratic Party is loaded with those. The second is those people who will never, never ever vote for a Republican and think that any Democrat is better than any Republican. Those two groups together make up a not insignificant percentage of the electorate. Enough to win, if turnout is good and they are highly motivated? I don’t know.

(3) Who are the alternative candidates in the party who would be viable in the general and who yet could appeal to the base enough to win the primaries? No one comes to mind.

The funny thing is that I think one good candidate would be Fetterman, because he could appeal to the moderate middle in the general, and yet yellow dog Democrats would also hold their noses and vote for him if he was the nominee. But Democrats will never nominate him because the base hates him and considers him a traitor to the party.

Why am I even thinking about 2028 at this point? Well, it’s not all that far off. I also saw excerpts of an AOC interview recently and it seems to me that she’s positioning herself for a future run. Actually, it’s seemed that way to me almost from the moment she first burst on the scene.

An excerpt:

The people in that room love her.

The post AOC as a presidential candidate appeared first on The New Neo.

But it’s not just about policy, and in fact policy may be way way down on the list. To say it’s about power doesn’t really say much either, although power is a big draw for some people of a certain personality type. But power is also about money. With revelations such as this about the vast sums given to NGOs, for example, or Medicaid fraud (and kickbacks and/or payment in votes from the grateful fraudster community), not to mention speaking fees and insider trading and the like, there’s a lot of money to be had.

Trump in particular is a threat – not because he’s a “Nazi” – they clearly don’t mind Nazis if they’re Democrat Nazis – or an “authoritarian” (likewise; authoritarians are great if on the left). It’s because he’s actually serious about “draining the swamp,” which not only has the potential of cutting off the power they wield even when Republicans are in charge, but cutting off the money spigot or at least reducing it.

There’s still another reason, which is the things they’ve done in the past: leaks of classified information, planting false conspiracy theories such as Russiagate, lawfare for political reasons, and now gerrymandering (which both parties have always done but which the left had especially mastered). They may not go to prison for things like the classified leaks, but when their machinations are revealed they do lose face with at least some voters.

Plus, during the Biden administration they were so very close to so many of their goals. They almost were able to pass their transformative legislative package. The only thing that stopped them was the fact that Manchin and Sinema wouldn’t vote for the nuclear option. Manchin and Sinema are gone now – funny thing, that – and the only possible stopper if the Democrats get power again (accent on the “possible” because I’m not sure how he’d really vote) would be Fetterman.

Put it all together and the GOP must be fought with every tool possible, some of them quite creative. With the help of leftist judges, it might be possible to do a lot of shady things now but especially in the future, if the Democrats can win control. That’s why the Virginia Supreme Court’s decision blocking their redistricting efforts for this year was such a shock and such a blow to the left. That’s why, if they come to power again and gain a majority in Congress plus the presidency, they will pack the US Supreme Court to make sure it always rules for their side.

That’s why Hakeem Jeffries said this recently:

Just days before an apparent assassination attempt on President Donald Trump’s life, one of the Democratic Party’s leaders called for “maximum warfare” against Republicans.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., made the inflammatory remark while warning Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., against redrawing the state’s congressional map ahead of November’s midterm elections.

Jeffries said that if DeSantis attempted to counter Democratic gains in Virginia following the state’s aggressive gerrymander, Democrats would continue to ratchet up pressure on Republicans nationwide.

“We are in an era of maximum warfare. Everywhere, all the time,” Jeffries said Wednesday at a news conference.

Note the subject matter was redistricting, and Jeffries was basically saying to Republicans, “We can do it but you aren’t allowed to do it.”

The post Why are the Democrats so desperate to regain and retain power? appeared first on The New Neo.

Likely 2028 Democratic presidential contender Rahm Emanuel sat down this week with Michael Moynihan, co-host of The Fifth Column podcast. A veteran of American politics, he has served as a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, White House chief of staff to President Barack Obama, a member of Congress, mayor of Chicago, and U.S. ambassador to Japan.

Reflecting on the current state of his party, Emanuel told Moynihan, “Democrats have lost the plot.”

“We lost the plot. We, as Democrats, nationally, from Latinx to defunding the police, to police organizations are all racist, to bringing a set of cultural wars to our schools, we are on the losing side of those cultural wars. Full Stop.

“You are worried about bathroom access and locker room access, why don’t you focus on classroom excellence? You have 50% of our kids not reading at grade level.”

I don’t think Emanuel has a chance of being nominated by the Democrats in 2028, for one very simple reason: he’s Jewish and the party has become highly anti-Semitic. I also wouldn’t trust his “moderate” declarations, although his record is indeed moderate compared to most of his fellow-Democrats these days. But beware: Spanberger of Virginia, to take one prominent example, campaigned as a moderate but once in office became radical in terms of actions.

I do know, at least based on anecdotal evidence of a friend of mine, that there are indeed voters yearning for moderate candidates and willing to vote for them. How numerous this voting group is I do not know.

The post Rahm Emanuel, 2028? appeared first on The New Neo.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., plans to bring the bill to the floor next week, but Republicans won’t take the route of launching into a talking filibuster despite pressure from President Donald Trump and the GOP base to do so.

“We don’t have the votes either to proceed, get on a talking filibuster, nor to sustain one if we got on it,” Thune said. “But that is just a function of math, and there isn’t anything I can do about that. I mean, I understand the president’s got a passion to see this issue addressed, as we all do.” …

While the end result after an exhaustive marathon of debate would allow Republicans to pass the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act at a simple-majority threshold, Thune has time and again warned that the votes aren’t there among Republicans to block Democratic amendments that could completely reshape the bill.

Still, Trump and a sphere of online conservative voices are demanding that the bill pass at any cost. Trump warned that if it does not, Republicans will fall flat in the upcoming midterm election cycle.

The online chatter is that the GOP doesn’t want to pass it. I think it’s much more accurate to say that a certain minority of them don’t, but they hold a lot of power because of the tiny margin the GOP has in terms of numbers.

But I am convinced that – although I strongly support the bill – people are exaggerating what it would accomplish in this election cycle, if passed. There would be immediate court challenges that would probably tie it up so that it couldn’t be implemented prior to the 2026 election.

If the Democrats win the House in 2026, they will impeach Trump again. But I have to say, who cares at this point? It’s meaningless unless they could convict and remove him, which they couldn’t because they would not have those kinds of numbers in the Senate, even with the Murkowskis of the world. Plus, removing Trump would give them Vance. Not really what they want, either.

And what if they do gain the Senate, too? They would definitely nuke the filibuster. But they wouldn’t get past Trump’s veto.

I think the whole thing hinges on 2028, not now. And yet everyone is so fired up about this that a failure to pass it could have the result of many voters on the right punishing the GOP in the midterms. That would be a real self-own, IMHO.

The post Save the SAVE Act? appeared first on The New Neo.