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'When senior officials entrusted with safeguarding our nation’s security choose deception over duty, they undermine the very institutions they swore to uphold.''When senior officials entrusted with safeguarding our nation’s security choose deception over duty, they undermine the very institutions they swore to uphold.'Slotkin’s lawfare warning will outlast Trump
Peace among political rivals often depends on deterrence. Each side understands that destroying its opponents today invites the same treatment when power changes hands tomorrow. That understanding is supposed to keep a republic from becoming an endless exercise in retaliation revenge. Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) seems eager to test it.
At an October 13 appearance at the University of Chicago, Slotkin called for “signature cases” against people she believes enabled President Trump. She wanted graduates considering administration jobs to worry that they might be “buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want” and to avoid taking those jobs. “I want that deterrence message sent,” she said.
Democrats are not hiding the ball. They plan on bringing lawfare back with a vengeance. Americans should take them at their word.
Slotkin says she meant accountability for actual violations of law, not punishment for accepting a government job. Then why advertise scaring young people away from public service as a desired result? Holding criminals accountable is one thing. Making prospective employees fear the next election is another.
She says she wants to pursue the people who “enabled” Trump’s “corruption.” Who defines enabling? Who decides whether carrying out a lawful policy, drafting a legal argument, or simply working for the wrong president is corrupt? Slotkin and her fellow congressional HR ladies, apparently.
Political appointees serve an elected president and help carry out his agenda. That does not relieve them of responsibility for their own unlawful acts, obviously. But neither does it make every aide personally culpable for every decision made above him. A junior employee at the Department of Homeland Security might execute a lawful order without ever having devised the policy. Does that make him an enabler worthy of an investigation?
Perhaps he should have resigned, saluted Our Democracy™, and gone to work for the Bulwark instead. “I was just following orders” is no defense to a crime, of course. But “I worked for an administration you despise” is not evidence of one, either.
This is what is alarming about Slotkin’s language. She says accountability. I hear a political warning directed at people who have not yet taken a job, much less committed an offense. Once the process itself becomes the punishment, prosecutors do not need to win every case to discourage the next generation from entering government.
And where does this lead? A departing Republican president could feel compelled to issue sweeping pardons for his staffers before they leave office. That would be a grotesque transformation of a constitutional safeguard into a routine parting gift.
Even then, presidential pardons cover federal offenses, not state charges or civil litigation. They cannot immunize crimes that have not occurred. A president could never make the threat of politically motivated litigation disappear by signing enough papers.
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Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) put the objection plainly: “I’m not aware of any Republican in office who has advocated the mirror-image approach — using the threat of prosecutions to deter people from serving in a Democratic administration.” His point deserves an answer. Is Slotkin trying to deter misconduct or Republican public service? Her own remarks invite the question.
Conservatives should not respond with a folksy, foolish “Schoolhouse Rock” pep talk about the glories of public service. Young people considering government jobs deserve to know that an incoming administration may examine their work. They also deserve confidence that investigators will pursue evidence of actual crimes, not guilt by association.
Democrats were serious about lawfare the first time around, and they will be again.
One-party rule has always been the goal. Young people need to be clear-eyed about what they are signing up for by working for Republicans, and voters need to understand the gravity of Democratic threats.
Democrats are not hiding the ball. They plan on bringing lawfare back with a vengeance. Americans should take them at their word.
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Democrats are poised for a good night on November 3. The only question is how far into Republican territory their gains will reach. Yet unlike the Democratic waves of 2006, 2008, and 2018, this election has no unmistakable leftward pull. Watch the ads. Democrats are attacking Republicans on issues that conservatives should own.
Trump won Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Ohio, and Texas by double digits in 2024. Now Republicans must defend Senate seats in every one of them, along with North Carolina, which Trump also carried. Georgia, another Trump state, has a Democratic incumbent senator that Republicans appear unlikely to unseat. Some of the fiercest contests are unfolding where the GOP should be cruising.
Trump’s endorsements helped protect milquetoast incumbents from serious primary challenges. Now Republicans must spend millions defending them. It’s political malpractice.
Does this mean voters have embraced the left? The Democratic Party’s commercials suggest the opposite. They seldom lead with abortion, transgender ideology, or illegal immigration, though those issues will surely figure in their governing agenda. Instead, Democrats attack inflation, health care costs, insider trading, data centers, Big Tech surveillance, and the Epstein scandal. Some of these spots would fit comfortably in a conservative primary.
We’re losing an election for things we don’t even believe in. Republicans embraced the cost of living as the “golden economy” while Democrats run on affordability, corruption, and opposition to corporate favors. Voters hear one party attacking powerful interests and another defending them. Guess which one holds the White House?
Take Texas. James Talarico, the radical leftist running against Ken Paxton, recently attacked Paxton for tax breaks and campaign donations tied to data centers that are “selling off Texas — our land, our water, our communities.” Talarico also promoted an ad calling out Biden for “failing us on the border” and promising to put Texas first. I could have written those attacks against a corporatist Republican myself!
In Ohio, former Senator Sherrod Brown (D) casts Republican attacks on transgender issues as distractions from gas prices, groceries, and health care. He goes after Senator Jon Husted (R) for promoting data centers across Ohio. Rather than defending their cultural agenda, Democrats make Republicans look like the ones obsessing over it while families struggle.
Independent Dan Osborn is doing something similar against Sen. Pete Ricketts (R) in Nebraska. His ads tie Ricketts to Epstein, challenge the importation of foreign beef over Nebraska cattle, and promote right-to-repair laws — a cause I have championed while few Republicans joined me. Osborn also condemns Ricketts’ vote to pardon a convicted rapist who had already served his prison sentence. That is a political opening no tough-on-crime conservative should offer.
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I have no faith in Osborn to govern as a conservative. But why hand him those openings? He is hammering Ricketts over sprawling data centers and casting himself as the champion of farmers and ranchers. The Senate Leadership Fund is pouring another $8 million into Nebraska, a state Trump won by 20 points.
Trump’s endorsements helped protect milquetoast incumbents from serious primary challenges. Now Republicans must spend millions defending them. It’s political malpractice.
In Kansas, Democrats are running an ad condemning Sen. Roger Marshall (R) for voting against releasing Epstein files and quoting his remark that the matter was “not of much interest to me.” Trump won Kansas by 16 points. The state hasn't elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932. Yet a toxic mix of corporate baggage, scandal, and a rudderless Republican agenda has put even this seat in play.
Campaigns have aired more than 160 different Epstein-related ads this cycle, backed by more than $35 million in airtime, according to CNN’s analysis of AdImpact data. Democrats have found an issue that lets them sound like the outsiders demanding accountability while Republicans defend the status quo.
The same pattern holds in Georgia. Incumbent Democrat Jon Ossoff is attacking Flock cameras and Big Tech surveillance, issues most Blaze readers would recognize as legitimate threats to liberty. I don’t trust Ossoff to get them right. But my kind of Republican would never give him such an easy target. Why did the GOP?
Michigan offers another example. Abdul El-Sayed, perhaps the Democrats’ most radical Senate nominee, isn’t running ads about making the Muslim Brotherhood great again. He’s attacking Republican Mike Rogers for promoting government surveillance and saying officials would love to get “one-tenth of what Google has on you.” Once again, Democrats have seized ground conservatives should occupy.
Then comes Iran. The war has battered energy prices and supply chains. Trump opened with two weeks of bombing and failed to plan for Iran's predictable disruption of the Strait of Hormuz. Even from a hawkish perspective, what meaningful objectives did he accomplish? That is another glass jaw Republicans did not need to inherit.
After Nov. 3, conservatives will face a long conversation about what went wrong. No single issue explains it. For two years, the movement has been pimping Big Tech, protecting Epstein, defending corporate welfare, and selling an economic message that bears little resemblance to what voters experience. None of that is inherent in conservative principles.
Democrats may be on the cusp of a blue wave, but they’ve written it with a red script. If conservatives refuse to learn, Democrats will repeat the performance in 2028 while Trump remains president. We need to break out of the paralysis of the Trump era and write our own script — so we can finally win or lose on what we believe.
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