Chapter 15: Obamacare Entrenched
As part of my TEA Party +15 celebration I am serializing my 2019 book The Rise and Fall of the TEA Party. A chapter will appear each Tuesday until the 15th anniversary on February 27.
“If Republicans cannot repeal Obamacare now, they’re going to have to call hospice because their majority is not long for this world.” Tony Perkins, Family Research Council, July 19, 2017.
On November 9, 2016, the world was a little brighter for those who opposed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known to the world as Obamacare. After six long years of struggle, the pieces for its repeal were finally in place: the House was still in Republican hands as it had been since 2010, the Senate stayed in the GOP's grasp after their 2014 takeover, and at long last Barack Hussein Obama would be on his way out of the White House, which was now to be occupied by a man who had promised to repeal Obamacare, President-elect Donald J. Trump.
But, as I've said previously in this volume, governing is the hard part. And it's even more difficult when you are elected as the electoral loser (with the exception, of course, of winning the all-important Electoral College vote) as well as having to deal with a partisan mainstream media hellbent on making your one term as ineffective as possible. Before the Trump term began these forces were pulling out all the stops to neutralize the President and the Congress, the majority of whom ran for years on the pledge to repeal Obamacare.
However, the door to disappointment was opened well before Trump's election. Despite the GOP's solemn vow to rid us of the Affordable Care Act, at several stops along the line to eliminating Obamacare we began to hear those two dreaded words, “and replace.” It started out as the talk of moderate and establishment Republicans, but by the time the 2016 campaign was in full swing Donald Trump was among those uttering the two-word phrase that pains.
And there was a lot of pain and heartburn endured by the TEA Party when it came to Obamacare. Despite the fact the TEA Party derived much of its early impetus from Barack Obama's attempts at stimulating the economy through a Keynesian fiscal solution on steroids, it came of age in the summer of 2009 as the people's opposition to socialized medicine. As onetime TEA Party Express spokesman Mark Williams noted, “Obamacare was the fiscal issue that was the final straw for Americans. We had stood by for generations while citizens' rights have been eroded, our melting pot culture fractured and radicalized and we citizens economically enslaved.”1
Perhaps the TEA Party's first victory was helping to stave off the “public option,” a prized Democratic addition to Obamacare which would have set up a government-funded health insurer to undercut private plans – after all, who has deeper pockets than the government that can raise whatever taxes they want? However, after independent Senator Joseph Lieberman, who caucused with the Democrats, threatened to join Republicans and be the 41st vote in a filibuster if the public option was not removed from the bill, the idea was scrapped.2
Granted, that was a minor victory, a skirmish won in a war that was ultimately lost when Democrats passed the PPACA in March, 2010. But the second-biggest heartbreak was when the Supreme Court used tortured logic to “rule against the American people”3 and determine Obamacare wasn't unconstitutional because its penalty for non-compliance was a tax. “In this case, however, it is reasonable to construe what Congress has done as increasing taxes on those who have a certain amount of income, but choose to go without health insurance. Such legislation is within Congress's power to tax,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the 5-4 decision on National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius.4
The wake of that decision also brought an early usage of the term “repeal and replace.” A news release from the Tea Party Patriots talks about Senator John Cornyn's use of the term to a local news radio station, quoting Cornyn as saying, “We've got to repeal (Obamacare) and replace it with a patient-centered bill, not a government takeover.”5 And it was already a question6 whether Mitt Romney, who originated the idea of a governmental mandate for individuals to carry health insurance when he green-lighted the Massachusetts plan in 2006,7 would do away with Obamacare or just tinker around its edges to make it a more efficient big-government entitlement.
But when Romney fell in defeat to Barack Obama, even the election of a Republican-controlled Senate in 2014 couldn't put a dent in the program. However, a few legislative maneuvers passed by the GOP curtailed critical portions of the original bill, with possibly the most important one addressing the open-ended fiscal temptation of “risk corridors.”
Risk corridors were, as intended, an accounting trick of sorts where profitable insurers were supposed to support a federal fund which would then be divvied out to their less-successful peers. Instead of subsidizing this with federal money as originally envisioned over the three-year life of the program, though, Congress managed to pass a provision that required the risk corridors to be a zero-sum game within the insurance industry, taking taxpayers off the hook but leaving the risk corridor fund billions of dollars short.8 To the left, it was example #1 of Republicans “sabotaging” the Affordable Care Act.
As we now know after Obamacare's full 2014 implementation, it's done little to increase the number of insured – save for a massive expansion in the group depending on Medicaid around the nation due to relaxed income eligibility requirements – and those who buy insurance on the individual market have often had to endure double-digit percentage increases in their premiums as well as rapidly appreciating deductibles and co-pays. Those who remain on employer-based plans have fared little better as employers pass more of their increased costs to their workers.
In short, Obamacare was a mess, and people were expecting the newly-elected Donald Trump to jump in with both feet to address the issue.
But knowing that Trump was elected with only the second-best plurality, and secure in their place among the bitter enemies he made along the way by his brash and uncompromising rhetoric, those opposing Trump made their displeasure known very quickly. I've previously pointed out these progressives who called themselves the “Indivisible” movement (or just “the Resistance”)9 openly admitted they were borrowing tactics, particularly when it came to townhall meetings, used by the TEA Party eight years earlier.10 As Ezra Levin, one of the Indivisible leaders, told Dave Gilson of Mother Jones:
We point to a two-pronged strategy that made the tea party successful. One, you have to be local. You have to focus on your local members of Congress. Looking around at all these great groups that have popped up, we’ve seen people say, “Hey, contact the committee chair. Contact the leadership or this member of Congress.” What we knew from our time on the Hill is that members of Congress care about reelection most of all. And that means they care about their constituents. So you have to be a constituent to make your voice heard.
The second strategy that the tea party smartly embraced was one of being almost entirely defensive. They consciously decided not to figure out which of their really abominable conservative policy priorities to prioritize. Instead, anything that came out of the Obama White House they were against. What they recognized is that when you’ve lost the White House and the House of Representatives and the Senate, you’re not setting the agenda anymore.11
And Levin recognized that Obamacare repeal would be among their first priorities:
Their goal is to quickly pass as much bad legislation and regulatory changes as possible because they know their ideas aren’t popular and they know they don’t represent the vast majority of the country.
(…)
Obama had a mandate for change and Trump clearly does not. The Democrats had much larger majorities in Congress when Obama first took office. Our position now is actually stronger—though it’s hard to imagine. But it’s only stronger if people act. If people don’t get as engaged as the tea party was, we’re going to lose.12
Bear in mind, of course, another thing the Left has that the TEA Party did not is a sympathetic mainstream media. However, because of that information silo Ezra Levin and company didn't understand the mood of ordinary Americans, with the prima facie evidence of Donald Trump being elected in part as a reaction to the policies of the last eight years and how they devastated the heartland of this nation. If those average Americans were happy with the situation, Donald Trump wouldn't have won state after state thought to be safely in Democratic hands.
Yet this new political wave worked in a manner completely backwards from the TEA Party: they began with the large-scale protest of the Women's March that drew as many as a half-million participants in Washington, D.C.13 as well as hundreds of thousands more globally – events that had no shortage of network news coverage.14 From there they reversed field to smaller, local protests which were attempts to garner more local news coverage.15 (Perhaps this was a sign their original protests were Astroturf?)
This may be a time, though, for me to remind you they did not change that part about harassing members of Congress at townhall meetings.16 17 They just did it to Republicans instead of Democrats.
Nor did the Indivisibles miss out on the TEA Party aspect of the “leaders” trying to cash in:
The Indivisible Project’s founders, married couple Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin, didn’t think they were starting a mass protest movement.
(…)
Within a couple of months Greenberg and Levin had both quit their jobs to head up the new movement full-time.18
I'm curious to find out how many left-wing scribes are going to go through the finances of this effort, which had “hired 16 other staff members with funding from donations”19 by May, 2017 and by the following October was boasting “a mostly Washington-based staff of about 40 people, with more than 6,000 volunteer chapters across the country… (which) has raised nearly $6 million since its start,”20 with a fine-toothed comb. Wait, are those crickets I hear?
Fortunately, enterprising Capital Research Center journalist Matt Middleton has documented some of the Astroturf ties21 of this so-called “grassroots” movement, which are far more extensive than those from which the TEA Party ever benefited.
What this so-called resistance accomplished, though, was unlike what the TEA Party did – or maybe came about in reaction to what longtime members of Congress remembered from the 2010 election. (One other key lesson learned by Indivisible: they skipped the third-party flirtation tried by the TEA Party in 2009 and set their sights straight away on radicalizing the Democrats.)22
Despite a number of great ideas23 about alternatives to Obamacare which could have been enacted – or just the straight-out repeal sponsored by Sen. Rand Paul24 – in the spring of 2017 Congress led off with a weak, watered-down repeal and replacement package that was hardly worth the effort. Conservatives panned it for not going far enough – two cases in point, from outside of Congress as well as within: writer David Harsanyi groused about the “watered-down repeal effort that offered states some meager level of federalism in the form of block grants”;25 meanwhile, Senator Paul Tweeted that, “Keeping 90% of Obamacare is not ok and it's not what we ran on. Conservatives should say no.”26 Meanwhile the Left (and the media, but again I repeat myself) howled about anyone touching their sacred cow.
And the pressure worked to an extent, although the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed late in 2017 eliminated one key Obamacare provision: penalties enforced by the Internal Revenue Service as a “shared responsibility payment.” (In the later bipartisan budget deal, the so-called “death panels” – which never were actually created – also became a thing of the past.)
While the Trump administration and Congressional Republicans couldn't stitch together a coalition large enough to fully repeal Obamacare, one victory that was perhaps TEA Party-influenced was the passage of the aforementioned Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. It was a measure that, just like Ronald Reagan's and George W. Bush's were previously, will forever be referred to as the Trump tax cuts. Yet even that fell short of initial expectations, as the original goals of cutting seven income brackets to three or four and eliminating a number of deductions were chipped away to a barely simpler tax package – but a significant reduction in the corporate tax rate, which may be its longer-lasting legacy.
In the midst of that fight, however, came yet another electoral battle that showed the confluence of the ragtag remnants of the TEA Party, the Republican establishment, and a press that always seems to be willing to spread dirt about Republicans yet be silent about the foibles of Democrats until they become too obvious to ignore.
When Senator Jeff Sessions was selected by the Trump administration to be Attorney General, his temporary replacement was Alabama's own Attorney General, Luther Strange. Chosen by then-Alabama Governor Robert Bentley, Strange's selection was seen by critics as a way to reward one of Bentley's political friends as he had called for impeachment procedures against Governor Bentley to be delayed. (Two months after the February, 2017 appointment of Strange, Bentley pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges related to the coverup of an extramarital affair and resigned.)
While Strange was appointed to the Senate, he was not there intending to be a caretaker as some placed in this position have pledged to be in order to avoid a nasty political fight. Instead, Luther fully intended to run for the seat permanently, but, like a field of clover attracts bees, the race drew several other Republican aspirants: most prominent among them were Congressman Mo Brooks – the choice of former TPP/TPX leader Amy Kremer and her newest group, Women for Trump27 – and former Judge Roy Moore. The popular jurist, who had twice been ousted from the Alabama Supreme Court – once over a monument depicting the Ten Commandments and the second time over refusing to enforce the Supreme Court's Obergefell decision legalizing same-sex marriage (which was not legal in Alabama prior to the SCOTUS ruling) – upset Strange in the primary and again in the runoff election.
Moore's victory was considered a setback for the Beltway establishment, particularly the “lackluster leadership styles” of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, whose support was with Strange.28 As Congressional leaders, they were the ones being blamed for the lack of legislative accomplishment in the early months of the Trump presidency. “If Moore 'threatens' a GOP majority in the Senate, it is a meaningless one,” wrote George Neumayr at the American Spectator. “The rank-and-file is supposed to be terrified at the prospect of losing a 'majority' led by the likes of (moderate Maine Senator) Susan Collins?”29 But with Alabama as solid of a Republican state as one can find – its 28-point margin for Trump was the largest among the states in the old Confederacy – after his primary win it looked like a fait accompli that Judge Moore would soon be Senator Moore.
All that changed on November 9, a month out from the December 12 special election. In that morning's edition the Washington Post pulled out its own October surprise: scandalous decades-old allegations against Moore that included the molestation of a 14-year-old girl that Moore (then a 32-year-old bachelor) was dating.30 A total of four primary accusers stepped forward to reveal to the Post something the paper assured us was not a secret in Alabama – “a Post reporter heard that Moore allegedly had sought relationships with teenage girls”31 – despite the fact Moore had run for office several times before.
Within hours, the calls for Moore to drop out were being screamed from inside the Beltway32 and the Republican Party was at war with itself. Establishment types were convinced by the stories of the accusers and considered Moore – whose brand of God-fearing conservatism was looked at with horror by Republicans always concerned about the women's vote – as fatally damaged goods. Conversely, many who considered themselves TEA Party faithful were sure they had seen this movie before, but run backwards as the media covered up stories which could have been fatal to the electoral chances of Democrats. (In an earlier chapter I alluded to an example of this: what if the Post had been as diligent in debunking the “it was caused by a video” excuse given for the Benghazi massacre? Chances are we would be considering the second term of President Romney as a mixed bag for the TEA Party.)
As the election date drew closer, though, the Andrew Breitbart assertion that culture was upstream of politics was once again being proven true. The deepening Hollywood scandal of sexual harassment and abuse centered on movie producer Harvey Weinstein spread itself into the political world and led to change in Congress on both sides: Arizona Rep. Trent Franks, a Republican, resigned thanks to allegations he was offering female staffers in his office cash payments to be a surrogate mother for his wife, who could not bear children; meanwhile, on the Democrat side both Senator Al Franken of Minnesota and long-standing Rep. John Conyers of Michigan left thanks to harassment allegations. At the time of his resignation, Conyers was the House member with the longest seniority, first elected in the Goldwater massacre of 1964.
The Franken case was intriguing because it also thought to provide convenient cover for Roy Moore in dealing with his accusers. While Moore's accusation was more serious, nearly forty years had passed since then and it was not indicative of a known pattern of abuse, as Moore has been married for more than 30 years. (Moore's wife, though, is 14 years his junior and he has known her since she was a teenager.) On the other hand, Franken's accuser alleged the incident was but a decade or so old and others also stepped forward to accuse Franken of similar, more recent acts. (This despite the fact Franken also has a long-standing marriage of over 40 years.)
Given the source of the accusations and their timing, some observers saw the Moore case as a Democratic ploy. Dov Fischer at The American Spectator:
No Democrat is pushing Franken out because Democrats know how many Senate seats it takes to pass or preserve Obamacare. To keep taxes high. To prevent conservatives from naming federal judges and Supreme Court justices. To keep the border porous. So Al is staying put – on the Senate Judiciary Committee, yet.
That is how Democrats do it. They make Republicans feel guilty. They con Christians and religious Catholics and observant Jews into feeling that, somehow, there is a religious or moral imperative to abandon a critical United States Senate seat. Then they cynically scoop it up, cobbling together Congressional majorities built on the hands and in the trousers of their House icons and their Senate royalty like Al Franken, Ted Kennedy, Chris Dodd, and other gems. All backed by a quarter-century iconization of Bill Clinton and Hillary, who only now – finally – are being thrown under the bus as the Donna Braziles, Kirsten Gillibrands, and others belatedly race to dissociate from them because, now that the Clintons finally are dead in Democrat politics, the survivors who fed off their teets for years rush to tell us that they just never knew about Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Corbin Jones, Kathleen Willey, Monica Lewinsky… or the young rape victim over whom Hillary giggled when describing how she got the rapist off.33 (Italics in original.)
As the drumbeat went on and Moore seemed closer to victory, recovering in the polls after an initial drop in support, Democratic Senators eventually prevailed on Franken to leave. On December 7, five days before the Alabama election, Franken announced he would leave “in the coming weeks.”34 (Eventually Franken left on January 2, 2018; Tina Smith was sworn in to replace him a day later.)
The second angle pursued by those wishing Moore had left, though, was that of putting more clouds in an already gloomy outlook for the 2018 midterms. Democrats, they claimed, would be happy to have the issue left on the table. “If you’re running in 2018 (as a Republican), Roy Moore’s going to be your new best friend,” Senator Lindsey Graham told Politico.35
And there was wailing and gnashing of teeth about the effects TEA Party-style politics were having on the political discourse in general. RedState's Joe Cunningham:
Many in conservative media, from reporters to editors to pundits, choose to overlook the evidence (against Moore) and feed these conspiracy theories and defend the indefensible. Where once we accused the Democrats of having a wagon-circling echo chamber, we now copy their tactics.
And, I readily admit that the atmosphere that created Trump and Moore is on me. That in my zealous attacks on certain Republicans in Washington, I fed the masses that were looking for someone to buck it all. I do not like Mitch McConnell, and wish that Matt Bevin had won that Kentucky primary. But, in my anger over McConnell’s rule of the Senate, I stoked certain flames.36
In the end, the Washington Post managed to cobble yet another Senate seat, and the Democrats snatched victory from the jaws of defeat by the slimmest of margins: their candidate Doug Jones won with a plurality of the vote. His 21,924 vote victory was by fewer than the number of write-in votes, many of which were cast for a last-minute Republican challenger.37
For all its bluster, though, the Alabama Senate seat and a handful of other electoral results (particularly in Virginia) were pretty much all the so-called Resistance had to show for Trump's first year. “The Resistance is a try-hard, embarrassing, ineffectual adult temper tantrum that has nothing to show for all the stupidity it forced on everyone,”38 wrote RedState's Brandon Morse. If anything, though, the threat of Indivisible proved the Republican establishment was a batch of sunshine patriots who wilted when their time came to make their promises a reality.
But the Democrats' house is split much as the TEA Party eventually rent the Republican Party – radical leftists who supported Bernie Sanders are working just as hard to pull the Democrat Party farther from the mainstream to the left as the early TEA Party did to push the nation toward a Constitutional, limited government direction. “Many in Sanders’s legions of supporters criticized the mainstream Democratic Party for not being left-wing enough, and – with the phrase “democratic socialism” in their minds – some were drawn what they see as the natural heir to their campaign: the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA),” explained Chace Paulson of the Capital Research Center.39
Also just like the TEA Party and their deepest fears of Barack Obama, there are those on the far left who believe the Democrats aren't going far enough to stop Donald Trump. “The Democratic base needs to know there are members of Congress who are willing to stand up against this president,”40 said Rep. Steve Cohen, who introduced articles of impeachment against Trump in November, 2017.41
And while establishment Democrats vowed to listen to voter concerns42 – admittedly, more than the Republicans did with the TEA Party – surely their goal is to bring the disaffected voters into their fold like the GOP did eight years earlier. This tactic of paying attention to what the district wants and not to shifting political winds worked exceptionally well in the March, 2018 PA-18 special election, where Democrat Conor Lamb narrowly prevailed in a district Trump won with a 22-point margin 17 months earlier by localizing the election and not focusing on the President. Instead, Lamb pointed to issues like access to health care, fighting opioid abuse, fracking, and investing in infrastructure to promote union labor.43
On the other hand, Trump supporters like national TEA Party leader Michael Johns can passionately and rather truthfully point to areas of success, too – speaking before an audience at Cornell University Johns proclaimed an impressive list of Trump accomplishments in several areas: employment, economic growth, debt, taxes, poverty, regulatory reform, health care, immigration, and trade among them.44 I'll grant that many of these were aims of the TEA Party but Trump's means of accomplishing them haven't always been the remedies prescribed by the Constitution.
As one who was elected to Congress as part of the TEA Party wave in 2010, Idaho's Rep. Raul Labrador summed up the entire effect of the TEA Party inside the Beltway in his waning months in office:
Armed with what they felt were clear mandates from their voters, Labrador and his fellow Tea Party freshmen came to transform Congress itself – to stop Washington’s spending binge and to return the Republican Party to its small-government foundations.
(…)
“I thought it was a revolution. I thought we were going to completely change the way that Washington worked,” Labrador says. “Within one week – I’m not exaggerating – I saw a large majority of my class saying, essentially, ‘Whatever you need us to do, we will do.’ And I was sick inside.”45
I'm sick inside, too, because in my political naivete – I still have something of a Polyannish view of politics despite being active as a local party official for a couple decades – I thought we elected TEA Party representatives to help in “draining the swamp.” By that token, perhaps a President such as the ideologically impure but politically fearless Donald Trump was necessary.
To conclude this book, I need to take a look at one last election. For the TEA Party it took four election cycles (2010 through 2016) to put themselves in a position where some of their policies could be enacted. Would the “blue wave” prophesied by supporters of various factors of the Democrat Party actually crash ashore in the 2018 midterms and wipe out everything for which the TEA Party had labored so hard and sacrificed so much?
Notes - bearing in mind some of these links may now be dead ones:
1 Social media conversation with Mark Williams, January 26, 2018. I lightly edited this for clarity.
2 https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/full/10.1377/hlthaff.2010.0363
3 https://www.teapartypatriots.org/content/supreme-court-rules-against-american-people/
4 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/documents/supreme-court-health-care-decision-text.html
5 https://www.teapartypatriots.org/content/cornyn-on-obamacare-repeal-and-replace/
7 http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/13/us/13health.html
8 http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20171114/NEWS/171119935
9 https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/resistance-tea-party/516105/
10 http://d35brb9zkkbdsd.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/townhallactionmemo.pdf This was a “leaked memo” alluded to in a separate story – see https://www.freep.com/story/opinion/columnists/nancy-kaffer/2016/12/22/donald-trump-tea-party/95757610/. “When a quiet town hall turns feisty, well, it's a good story.”
11 http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/12/progressives-tea-party-tactics-stop-trump/ This is actually a very in-depth playbook of how the Left was going to stop Trump.
12 Ibid.
13 https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/01/womens-march-protest-count/514166/
14 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/21/us/womens-march.html
15 An example from my adopted hometown: https://www.facebook.com/events/266508697103490/permalink/266811363739890/ I covered the event for readers of my website: http://monoblogue.us/2017/02/18/point-and-counterpoint-in-salisbury-some-observations/
16 Here's a local example of my Congressman's meeting gone national: http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/31/politics/maryland-town-hall-harris/index.html
17 https://qz.com/1065652/the-american-left-has-its-own-tea-party-and-its-coming-for-donald-trump/
18 Ibid.
19 https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/05/13/anti-trump-indivisible-tea-party/ Bear in mind this story was written about five months after Klein and Greenberg began.
20 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/07/us/politics/democrats-resistance-fundraising.html
21 https://capitalresearch.org/article/indivisibly-divided-faux-insurgents-for-the-professional-left/ This was almost literally hot off the press as I began this chapter.
22 https://www.redstate.com/joshkimbrell/2017/10/01/socialists-democratic-tea-partiers/
23 This is a great “Cliff's Notes” version of outside-the-box thinking: https://www.conservativereview.com/articles/20-ideas-to-crush-obamacare-and-cure-americas-health-care-crisis/
24 http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/07/26/obamacare-straight-repeal-fails-on-senate-vote.html
26
https://twitter.com/RandPaul/status/909776871411392512
28 https://patriotpost.us/articles/51630
29 https://spectator.org/the-establishment-gops-meaningless-majority/
31 Ibid.
32 http://www.newsweek.com/these-republicans-demand-roy-moore-withdraws-alabama-senate-race-710461
33 https://spectator.org/a-crazy-week-of-moore-reasons-to-vote-for-roy-moore/
34 http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/07/politics/al-franken-resignation-decision/index.html
35 https://www.politico.com/story/2017/12/10/democrats-alabama-roy-moore-doug-jones-288631
36 https://www.redstate.com/joesquire/2017/12/08/conservative-media-honesty-problem/
39 https://capitalresearch.org/article/socialism-the-tea-party-of-the-left/
40 http://thehill.com/homenews/house/360856-hoyer-heads-to-the-heartland-on-a-listening-tour
41 https://cohen.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/members-introduce-articles-impeachment
42 http://thehill.com/homenews/house/360856-hoyer-heads-to-the-heartland-on-a-listening-tour
44 http://michaeljohnsonfreedomandprosperity.blogspot.com/2017/02/trumpism-can-make-america-great-again_82.html This speech before the Cornell Political Union drew 75 spectators and 15 protestors – who got most of the press. As noted when I cited Johns earlier, the event was made private when the university decreed the CPU pay for security to the tune of $2,000.
Next Tuesday will continue my series with Chapter 16: Endgame: The 2018 Midterm Elections.
In the meantime, you can buy the book or Buy Me a Coffee, since I have a page there now. And remember…