At the Ron Paul Institute, former Congressman and presidential candidate Dr. Ron Paul explains that while there’s no reason to cheer a Democratic victory, the GOP leadership has “earned what is coming to them,” in the coming mid-term elections. Polls indicate that the GOP could lose both the House and the Senate.
It isn’t hard to understand why Americans are so disappointed in the GOP Congress. While the various departments of the Trump administration have been furiously deregulating, cutting waste and fraud, shoring up the border, and at times declassifying documents, Congressional and Senate leadership have seemingly been working against those goals.
Speaker Mike Johnson has waged a campaign against Epstein disclosures, while Majority Leader John Thune has been “too busy” to even bring the SAVE America Act to a vote, despite it being a top priority for Republican voters. Both houses of Congress seem uninterested in codifying the many spending cuts suggested by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Trump and his allies in Congress also worked hard to push some of the voters’ favorite legislators, Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene out of office, and rewarded neocons like the late Sen. Lindsey Graham. Speaker Johnson shut down the entire Congress rather than vote on Massie’s legislation to disclose Epstein information.
Alongside their many legislative failures, or rather, failures to legislate, Dr. Paul explains that Congress has also failed to exercise its Constitutional authority over war. He writes:
Earlier this year, President Trump launched what is the most unpopular war in US history when on February 28th he ordered a full US assault on Iran. Iran had not attacked or even threatened the United States and our own intelligence community continued – and continues – to claim that Iran is not building nuclear weapons.
The February attack followed last June’s US bombing of Iran after which the president claimed that the country’s nuclear program was “completely obliterated.”
Congress over too many years has been used to allowing the President to have his own way on matters of war and peace. Members bask in the false patriotism promoted by the media and special interests as the people “rally around the flag.” Eventually, when the war has gone on for years without “victory” – as in Iraq and Afghanistan – many claim they were never really for the war in the first place.
This time is different. There was no propaganda blitz. There were no attempts to convince the American people that the “smoking gun” could be a “mushroom cloud” as we were told in the run up to the 2003 Iraq war. The majority of Americans were against the war on Iran before it started and only became more opposed over time.
With no pushback from GOP legislators to an unconstitutional war in the Middle East, fatigued MAGA voters who thought they were getting “America First,” and “No new wars,” are understandably confused as to why they should vote for Republicans again. If Republicans are crushed in the upcoming election, they’ve earned it.
