Is Matt Gaetz another RINO?

 

Matt Gaetz has been in the headlines recently over what may be trumped-up charges of sexual abuse.  Assuming those charges to be a means to intimidate Rep. Gaetz and pressure him to resign, what got Republic Journal’s attention was the reflexive support coming from the conservative right.  Republic Journal doesn’t think much of Mr. Gaetz, and here’s an excerpt:

Gaetz was at a school in Fort Walton Beach Florida when a student asked him about Florida legislation that allowed gay couples to adopt kids.  Matt said that he was proud to have sponsored that legislation.  This was a strange and bizarre statement because Matt NEVER sponsored any legislation for that purpose.  Why the lie?  No one knows but what came next was shocking as Matt continued by saying that he didn’t believe young people were as judgmental as the older generation.  By judgmental, he meant that older conservatives believed it’s best for a child to be adopted by a male/female couple to represent mother and father.  No one asked him about the older generation, but he used the same phrase that’s taught by the LGBT community for leaders to use.

What’s the point of my rambling?  Matt isn’t what people think that he is and ALL of us should desire principle above personality.  His supporters can’t point to a single piece of legislation that he’s been behind that we support.  They can’t explain why he received maximum donations from strip clubs or used his committee to expand gambling rights when every member voted against it.  Matt has a gift of gab but lacks leadership qualities and depth of conviction.  If we are to drain the swamp then we must desire character above personality and action above talk.  Because Matt talks a good talk no one noticed that he joined the climate change committee to advance their legislative goals.  No one noticed how he attempted to stop a sex trafficking bill that allowed government agencies to talk to each other in real-time to save children from that evil trade.  No one noticed that he was the deciding vote to push Obamacare 2.0 out of the finance committee when conservatives wanted it dead on arrival.  . . .

And the full article by Republic Journal is here.

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Heather MacDonald: False Testimony

Heather MacDonald recently testified before the House Judiciary Committee on alleged racial bias in law enforcement. It is not a pretty report (“False Testimony: Sworn statements at a recent congressional hearing on policing veered sharply from the truth; here are the facts”). Here’s her opening and closing paragraphs:

The anti-police narrative depends on suppression of facts, and the duplicity of anti-cop forces reached a shameless new high at a congressional hearing last week. Committee members should sanction the false testimony, given under oath, and publicly correct the record.

The House Judiciary Committee, now controlled by Democrats, had called a hearing to address a “series of deaths of unarmed African-American men while in police custody” as well as the “mistrust between police and marginalized communities.” Throughout the four-hour session, a photo array of blacks killed by the police played continuously on video screens around the room, interspersed with statistics allegedly proving that the police harbor lethal racist bias. Committee chairman Jerry Nadler claimed in his opening remarks that the “frequency of these killings and the absence of full accountability for those responsible send a message to members of the African American community that Black Lives Do Not Matter.” Nadler invoked the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, as examples of “police misconduct against African-Americans,” though Barack Obama’s Justice Department found no misconduct in the first case, and criminal charges against the Freddie Gray officers were dismissed either before or after trial.

. . .

The Republicans on the committee failed to push back against this narrative of systemic police bias, choosing instead to tell feel-good stories about “our brave men and women in uniform.” Such tales do little to rebut Black Lives Matter ideology, since both statements could be true:  individual officers display heroism, and policing is infected by “structural racism,” in Davis’s words. The only way to dislodge the “endemic racism” argument is to challenge its factual basis directly. I was the only witness at the hearing with the ability to do so, but the Republicans asked me not one question. This is not a matter of personal ego but rather of the public battle of ideas.

The Democratic committee members and their witnesses clearly laid out their agenda should they retake the White House and Senate: mandatory implicit-bias training for cops, a huge waste of money that could be spent instead on tactical and de-escalation training; mandatory racial-profiling data collection, which will be measured, misleadingly, against a population benchmark; racial quotas for police hiring, which require lowered standards; and more federal consent decrees for police departments, which cripple the ability of cops to engage in proactive policing and divert millions of dollars into the pockets of federal monitors. As inimical as these policy items are to effective policing, the narrative that drives them—that the police are a threat to black communities—is more dangerous still. That narrative rests on duplicity, as amply demonstrated at last week’s hearings. Republicans, who invoke patriotism on a regular basis, are doing the country no favors by ceding the criminal-justice narrative to the activists and race-baiters.

Her full report is here. Sad to say, GOP members of the House Judiciary Committee include Jim Jordan and Steve Chabot of Ohio; Louie Gohmert of Texas; Matt Gaetz of Florida; and Andy Biggs of Arizona. (E-mail links for Jordan and Chabot are embedded in case you would like to email them with the link to MacDonald's report.)

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