Trump Should Bring a Constitutional Gun to the Senate / Swamp Knife Fight

posted by Vince Coyner at American Thinker 

From the moment of Joe Biden’s coup d’état “victory” in 2020, Democrats, who had spent years telling everyone our elections were vulnerable to manipulation, suddenly began telling us it was the most secure election in American history.

Not long after the inauguration, adding insult to injury, Molly Ball wrote a long piece in TIME describing all of the maneuvers and manipulations Democrats had used to steal the election and their preparations for “protests”—read violence—if their coup didn’t succeed. But it did, and they were gloating about it.

Since that time, we’ve all come to see exactly what happened, much of it described in Mollie Hemingway’s bible on the coup: Rigged. We’ve read the Twitter files, we listened to Zuckerberg on Rogan, and watched Mike Benz on Tucker, not to mention the yeoman’s work done by Jeff Fulgman, who investigated the blatant fraud in Georgia, one of the swing states that was awarded to Biden.

Mad doesn’t begin to express the rage inspired by watching them shred the Constitution and the Republic for four years, trying to kill the golden goose that has produced more prosperity and more freedom for more people around the world than any nation in human history.

But now, after Donald Trump won a second term, perhaps a different perspective is necessary. One of gratitude…

Why gratitude? Clarity. Because of the Democrat’s unprecedented malevolence, Trump has an opportunity no previous president has ever had. More than any politician in our history, Trump knows exactly what his enemies are willing to do to stop him. We’ve watched it play out over 8 years, and now he’s in a position to do something about it. Almost…

Despite Democrat fraud that stole GOP Senate seats in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin, Trump still finds himself with a GOP Senate. That body, ostensibly under Republican control, is as much of a swamp as anything you’ll find anywhere in the Democrat party. The majority recently elected RINO John Thune as their leader.

What’s more, the outgoing leader, the anti-Trump Mitch McConnell, has just announced he’ll be chairing the powerful Rules Committee and the Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense. At the same time, on the Senate Appropriations Committee, the single most powerful chairmanship in the Senate will be occupied by the virulently anti-Trump RINO, Susan Collins of Maine. None of that bodes well for the MAGA agenda.

Trump, however, doesn’t have to acquiesce to RINOs derailing his agenda. Why? Because (in addition to not having a re-election to eat away at his time) he has a not-so-secret weapon: JD Vance. Trump should tell Vance that his sole job for the next four years is to exercise his constitutional role as President of the Senate and preside over the body, something vice presidents regularly did until the 1950s. Article I, Section 3, Clause 4 of the Constitution says: “The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.”

While casting the deciding vote when the Senate is tied is something Vance is likely to be called upon to do, there’s much more that he could do. The Constitution itself says practically nothing about how the Senate should be run. It talks about voting and quorums, passing laws, and more but says virtually nothing about what goes on in the Senate procedurally.

As such, most of what Senators do is done because… that’s how they’ve always done it, or at least for a while. Members voted on some of the procedures while leaders put others in place.

For example, the majority leader is the most powerful person in the Senate because he has the chair must recognize him first: “This perception is based on his ability to make motions to proceed to legislation and nominations…” That “right” didn’t exist for the first 150 years of the Republic until Vice President John “Cactus Jack” Nance Garner created it while presiding over the Senate in 1937.

And this is where President Trump needs to utilize Vance. According to the Senate’s website: “The Senate is governed by the Constitution, a set of standing rules, precedents established in the course of the legislative process, and special rules of procedure adopted by statute for particular types of legislation.” The Senators create and vote upon the rules. Unlike in the House, the rules apply from one Congress to the next. As such, those would be difficult to change without a rock-solid majority, something the President sadly doesn’t have.

However, precedents are something altogether different. Here’s the thing, as we saw with the Supreme Court overturning Plessy and Roe: precedents are precedents… until they’re not. And there are a lot of them: 1,600 pages worth!

At a minimum, Vance should eliminate Garner’s rule about the right of first recognition. From that point forward, he is free to guide the proceedings by calling upon whomever he chooses. Beyond that, Vance should scrutinize the Senate’s 1,600 pages of precedents and figure out which ones can be used to help support the president’s agenda (for example, committee assignments) and adjust them accordingly.

But “Wait!” you say, “That’s not how that’s supposed to work!”

Well, it is true that the Senate was specifically crafted to balance the passions of the masses as represented in the House and, to a lesser degree, the White House. That, however, was when States were considered equal partners in our federal system of government and appointed Senators.

But of course, the leftists eviscerated the Founders’ original intentions about the Senate with the 17th Amendment. As a result, the Senate has become simply a more entrenched version of the House. Therefore, if a cabal of geriatric swamp-loving RINOs wants to try to shanghai the president’s mandate because the close balance of party power in the chamber allows them to do so, to paraphrase Sean Connery in The Untouchables, Trump should bring a constitutional gun to their knife fight and keep them from doing so.

To those who cry that if we do it, they’ll do it later, I say, so be it. The reality is that Democrats don’t need this in order to try to destroy the Republic. They nuked the filibuster, which went back to our Founders. They were prepared to add Puerto Rico and DC as states to permanently alter the balance in the Senate. They yearned to pack the Supreme Court to turn it into a progressive rubber stamp. And, of course, they imported 30 million illegals in order to control the House. The Democrats don’t need precedent to do anything. They do what they want, period.

The fact is that the Swamp is an existential threat to freedom, prosperity, and the Republic. Donald Trump must take advantage of this moment and the powers the Constitution provides to eviscerate it now. If he doesn’t do it now, when the winds of change are so strong and America’s desires so clear, it will never happen. He should not let a handful of geriatric RINOs stand in the way of exorcising the bureaucratic cancer of the swamp that menaces American citizens and ravages America’s prosperity. If he allows them to prevail, he will have betrayed the nation and go down in history as America’s greatest disappointment.