We want ‘legislating, not investigating’? Not really

About a month ago, a peculiar talking point started to make its rounds on the news channels. The Republican Party’s national spokesperson, Kayleigh McEnany, claimed, “In the heartland, they want legislating, not investigating.” She has been named Donald Trump’s national press secretary for the 2020 presidential campaign.

Since then, some version of that claim has been repeated by guests on opinion programs in radio and TV alike. Supposedly, the American people would rather Congress legislate than continue to investigate the president. The suggestion is that “real Americans” want Washington, D.C., to create more laws and spend more money.

But really, in the “heartland” people are seething and want to get to the bottom of what the former administration did with all its investigative powers to then-private citizen Trump. We really could not care much less whether any more legislation ever happens.

It is laughable to claim that taxpayers are ultimately interested in having a Congress that wastes their money in a bipartisan manner. It comes from the perspective of Washington, D.C., certainly not the heartland. It comes from the mentality that people in Washington, D.C., are there to better our lives through legislation — something that almost never happens. Most of the time, legislation costs more than they say it will, it does less good and more harm than they say it will, and it chips away at our liberty time and time again.

But somehow, in the midst of all the drama in Washington, D.C., and the absolute dogfight the establishment is in with the president, incredibly tone-deaf arguments like this are made.

Last week, the president walked out of a scheduled talk with Democrat leaders about infrastructure legislation. He told them that there will be no legislation until the investigations he is subject to, through several House committees, have ended. Good for him.

And it’s good for us, too. The Democrats are not interested in stopping their investigations, and so there will be no $2 trillion-dollar-plus infrastructure bill. Unless, of course, the president thinks it will hurt him politically if he doesn’t “make a deal” on infrastructure. And that’s a huge possibility. I’m gonna bet there are a good many advisers now making that case to the president, because that’s what Washington, D.C., does.

It would be much better for all of us if Republicans refused to do anything until Democrats stop the investigations. Then, it would be much better for us if they proceeded only by taking money from existing programs and useless bureaucracies and plugged those funds into an infrastructure bill.

But that’s not the plan. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is propping up any lawmaker who backs a gas tax hike to pay for infrastructure. The AFL-CIO agrees that it’s time to “adjust” the gas tax. Those are powerful forces in D.C.

Though plans have been submitted that would have “little to no impact on the economy,” they are being rejected by lawmakers apparently too squeamish to force their own states to come up with their own money for infrastructure. Once again, Washington, D.C., politicians like to be seen as the grantor of nice things in order to keep their phony-baloney jobs.

If the spokesman for the Republican Party doesn’t get that the people of the “heartland” want Congress to shine the light on the attempted coup and stop threatening to spend more of our money and further financially burden us, 2020 sure looks like a messaging debacle already.

#mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px}

/* Add your own MailChimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block.

We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */