Opinion
By Jeff Childers
3/24/25
Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! Your roundup includes: Bernie bros are having a moment as Democrats trot out fossilized socialist to shore up the base; progressive message pivot alert; GOP Congress eyes ways to reign in rebellious judges; SADS story sabotages record-setting Republican congresswoman; and the North Carolina Supreme Court delivers a fantastic jab ruling and hints at a much bigger problem for Democrats.
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They called Trump’s positions “radical.” Now, the Democrats’ most radical senator is busily adopting Trump’s positions. Yesterday, The Hill ran the story under the headline, “Sanders recognizes Trump’s efforts on border, fentanyl: ‘Nobody thinks illegal immigration is appropriate’.”
Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is having a moment. Corporate media is increasingly spotlighting the wispy-haired octogenarian socialist as some kind of emerging voice or even, dare they say, a new leader to unite the party. Another antique one.
You have to hand him credit. Fueled by some arcane wizardry, just like the 1980’s Energizer Bunny, he keeps banging and clapping and marching all over the United States. He seems to be everywhere. A garden party here, a public park there, and then suddenly he’s right behind you! The grizzled communitarian has been railing, fists to sky, against billionaires in a new rally series named, “Fighting Oligarchy.” Not all oligarchs, mind you. One in particular.
The dastardly Snidely P. Whiplash clone Elon Musk.
Oh, Bernie waves his wrinkly hands around and cites “the billionaire class” and “corporate elites,” and occasionally sprinkles a few Jeff Bezos into the fruit salad. But he carefully and meticulously avoids mentioning any left-leaning oligarchs like, cough, George Soros, or any other Democrat donor or progressive tycoon. It’s working. It’s the only message that seems to be attracting much interest on the left, and media is grabbing the geriatric cartoon character more desperately than a drowning border-crosser clutching at a National Guard life buoy.
A stellar example was prominently placed on this morning’s New York Times op-ed page.
The “guest essay” was penned by Times’ ‘regular correspondent’ Megan K. Stack. Megan seanced with attendees at Bernie’s recent Las Vegas rally. From that narrow sample, Megan has drawn some broad conclusions. “Many Americans,” she divined, without estimating exactly how many, “are reaching a breaking point.” They are afraid, Megan said, about all the apocalyptic things the media keeps telling them could happen.
“They fear that, before all is said and done, President Trump will come for Medicaid, public schools, veterans’ services and Social Security, too,” she spelled out, adding, “Maybe take our freedom of speech, while he’s at it.”
And so we begin to see early signs of good news. After spending four years squashing misinformation, Democrats have suddenly rediscovered the priceless nature of free speech. They’re also beginning to dread the dangers of elites and oligarchs, perils that conservatives have railed against for decades.
Not the same elites and oligarchs, of course, but hey, it’s a start.
🔥 Best of all, to mockingbird media, is that its fear-mongering is working. “I just got the worst of fears,” a recently retired sheet metal worker told Megan. “You get up in the morning, you don’t know what you’re gonna go to bed losing.” True, it’s happening astonishingly fast.
But most importantly, after a brief nod to Latin-X darling AOC, who warmed up the crowd by attacking the Democrat party, Megan gushed that Bernie is the only progressive to rise to the moment. “Only Mr. Sanders seems to understand how to tap into the dissatisfaction of the crowds,” she said. She heaped praise on the seasoned Senator. “Mr. Sanders looks, at once, prescient and thoroughly relevant,” she enthused.
Basking in the “roars” of the small crowd applauding Bernie’s entrance, she marveled at the Senator’s fiery rhetoric. “We will not accept an oligarchic form of society where a handful of billionaires run the government,” he groused in his lazy dialect to eventual wild applause. But nearly all the actual complaints offered by Megan’s various interviewees related to rising prices; prices of homes, prescription drugs, and credit card interest rates.
Many questions remained unanswered. Like, why weren’t these folks not incensed about the same rising prices under Biden? Or, what exactly in his first two months did they think President Trump should have done about them? While repeatedly returning to her favorite theme of billionaires enriching themselves at the work class’ expense, Megan somehow forget to mention Trump’s pledges to strip taxes from tips, Social Security, and anyone making less than $150,000 a year.
🔥 Back to the Hill’s article. Bernie’s rally message might be decorated with thinly veiled anti-Elon violence, but his greater vision seems to be, well, evolving. Over the weekend, in an interview on ABC, Bernie was asked whether he agreed with anything Trump is doing. Sanders immediately fingered two topics: illegal immigration and fentanyl traffic. “I think cracking down on fentanyl, making sure our borders are stronger,” Sanders said. “Look, nobody thinks illegal immigration is appropriate, and I happen to think we need comprehensive immigration reform, but I don’t think it’s appropriate for people to be coming across the border illegally.”
My goodness. Talk about a pivot. Where, one wonders, was Bernie storing all his anti-illegal-immigration sentiment two months ago? And when did he start calling it “illegal immigration” instead of the bevy of humane euphemisms listed in the AP’s style guide?
Of course, Bernie disagrees that illegals should be deported or anything. Why not? Because they are Democrat farm slaves. “I got news for you, Trump’s billionaire friends are not going to pick the crops in California that feed us. They’re not going to work in meatpacking houses,” the superannuated Senator explained. “That’s what undocumented people are doing.”
Nobody at ABC challenged Bernie’s false dichotomy. Nobody has argued that, if the illegals are deported, the only option is to employ billionaires in meatpacking plants. But logic, it seems, is not required for this fearful moment in progressive politics. Nor did Bernie offer a competing plan to stop inappropriate illegal immigration.
Here’s what I think. Triangulating Bernie and his Sazerac-mixing sidekick AOC are firewalls. Their job is to plug the Democrat’s dike and stop the base from bleeding out while the party tries to figure out some kind of message that will work. I’d wager my next birthday that they will soon be gone like the wind when progressives come up with anything better.
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On Friday, Politico ran an encouraging story headlined, “It’s not just impeachments. Republicans are eyeing other ways to rein in federal judges.”
They’re trying. According to unnamed sources, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is likely to bring a short bill to the floor for a vote over the next few weeks. Titled the “No Rogue Judges Act,” the bill would prevent federal judges from issuing nationwide injunctions with effects far beyond the parties who brought the lawsuits. In other words, it would stop injunctions from being transformed into vast class actions.
On Saturday, Speaker Johnson appeared to confirm the bill was headed for a vote.
There are pros and cons. During the pandemic, we enjoyed several rulings from the Fifth and Sixth circuits that broadly enjoined various kinds of Biden mandates. If Darrel Issa’s bill becomes law, conservatives would also lose that power. On the other hand, conservative judges are less likely to issue nationwide injunctions, so on balance it would prune Democrats’ options more so than conservatives.
And lawfare is, after all, the Democrats’ favorite tool. So reduced court authority reduces opportunities for lawfare, benefitting conservatives most.
The fight is only starting. Congress holds power to define court jurisdictions and set rules like Issa’s bills limits on injunctions. There is a lot they could do, since only the Supreme Court is explicitly defined in the Constitution’s third Article.
“The judicial Power of the United States shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.”
Congress controls the other courts. Congress can reshape them, reduce their jurisdictions, or even abolish them entirely if it wants (though it’d be political dynamite and practically unworkable). In other words, only SCOTUS is constitutionally immortal. The rest are legislative houseplants. Congress can water them, or not.
And they are thinking about the weed problem hard.
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Fox ran a very SADS story this weekend headlined, “Former GOP Rep. Mia Love dead at 49 after battle with cancer, family says.”
Former Representative Mia Love (R-Ut.), 49, died on Sunday after a three-year battle with aggressive brain cancer. She was diagnosed with glioblastoma in March, 2022, and given ten months to live. Defying doctors, Mia heroically held out until yesterday, having opted for clinical trials and immunotherapy. Then she became the first black Republican Congresswoman to die from a likely vaccine injury.
Mia opposed mandates but loved the jabs. During a December 2021 appearance on The View, Mia said, “I’m fully vaccinated. I believe that people should get vaccinated.” She did, however, support vaccine passports. Mia told View host Sunny Hostin, “If you choose not to get vaccinated, you cannot go into somebody else’s place of business. You can stay home.”
We pray for peace for Mia’s family.
By the way, now that the signal has been buried in the noise, the embargo on the words “died suddenly” has apparently been lifted from news articles. You can resume searching for the phrase if you like, but the results are depressingly predictable. The slow-motion jab disaster continues apace.
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WRAL-News ran a terrific story Friday headlined, “NC Supreme Court ruling opens path for parents to sue schools, health clinics over Covid-19 vaccines.” The partisan sub-headline added, “The ruling was 5-2 along party lines, with all the Republicans in the majority and all the Democrats dissenting.”
Tanner Smith, 14, played football at Western Guilford High. In 2021, the school rounded up the football team for a surprise vaccination. Tanner protested and said he didn’t want one. Clinic nurses tried calling his mother, who didn’t answer, but ignored Tanner’s advice to ask his stepfather, who was waiting in the parking lot. Then, Chief Judge Newby wrote, “Ignoring additional protests from Smith himself, the workers forcibly injected him with the first dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.”
The Smiths sued the covid clinic and the school district. The trial court and the appellate court threw out their case, citing the PREP Act’s broad immunity. But last week, the state’s Supreme Court ruled that, while Tanner’s tort claims, like battery, might be federally immunized, his claims under the state constitution were not immune. His case continues. (Western Guilford should settle; just saying.)
For full disclosure: I am currently suing the federal government over the PREP Act. We are currently waiting for a May hearing on the government’s motion to dismiss. I’ll keep you posted.
This North Carolina decision is promising but limited. Obviously, having been forcibly injected, and having state constitutional protections, Tanner is in a small class of victims. So I might not have reported the story, but for the initial background paragraph in the Supreme Court’s opinion. Read this and be encouraged:
In other words, five of seven North Carolina Supreme Court judges —the top jurists in the state— agreed that the pandemic featured “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.” We’ve come a long way. That is a legal verdict, not some blog post. This decision is permanently recorded in the state’s records and listed in its laws.
The partisan divide is also quite telling. Not one Democrat on the Supreme Court endorsed that statement, and how could they? It would be a damning admission, since Democrats themselves engineered “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.”
They will go down with the political ship before they admit they had any role in it.
💉 Let’s connect some dots. I think you’ll be surprised at what might really be behind the Democrats’ political woes. Consider all the recent bad-news headlines like this one, published in Politico on Friday:
This morning’s post began with the Bernie Sanders stopgap, which obscures the Democrats’ historic implosion. Last week, we saw Democrats’ overall approval rating crater to 29%— and with it their hopes of permanent majority or really, any kind of majority.
How did Democrats lose so much support so quickly? I would like to offer a radical proposal: what if a lot of people agree with the Republicans on the North Carolina Supreme Court? The media is desperately trying to paint progressive voter angst as anger at their own leaders for not fighting Trump hard enough. And it’s easy to find that kind of evidence in the progressive fever swamps of BlueSky where Trump Derangement Syndrome infection is endemic.
But what if the anger is due, at least in part, with the many betrayals of progressive ideals during the pandemic. Supposedly the party of the “working class,” the Democrats threw workers under the bus with “vaccinate or terminate” mandates. Supposedly the anti-Big Pharma party of “my body, my choice,” the Democrats forced people to take hastily approved injections they didn’t want, which is especially infuriating in the harsh hindsight that the stupid shots never worked and were basically all risk.
How, pray tell, do you hold a party together after those Shakespearean levels of betrayal?
Worse, as President Trump pushes the limits on civil liberties, as with his perfunctory deportations of violent gang members and adjacent illegals, how can Democrats possibly reclaim the mantle of populist champions? Their hypocrisy is too profound and too recent for anyone to really take them seriously.
The pop-up popularity of Bernie Sanders and hyphenated Representative Ocasio-Cortez demonstrate a new willingness among partisans clinging to the “Democrat” brand to bring a wrecking ball to established party orthodoxy. What dragged them to this remarkable point of furious enthusiasm for discarding leaders like Chuck Schumer (D-NY) like soiled tissue?
Both Bernie and AOC were good little doggies who towed the party line during covid, enthusiastically endorsing mandates of all and any description. And maybe that’s why their messages aren’t resonating outside progressive partisan echo chambers.
Never let them forget.
The media prefers, for obvious reasons, to chalk up Democrat discontent to not opposing the President. But maybe —whether voters consciously realize it or not— it has more to do with lockdowns, passports, masks, and experimental jabs. Instead of Democrat officials’ terminating unvaccinated workers, vaccinated Democrats are terminating them.
I believe the Democrats are reaping the bloody harvest of their pandemic excess. That is what I think is happening to them. I think the Democrats have post-vaccine syndrome. It’s a political autoimmune disorder causing Democrats to attack their own party. And I think it will ultimately be fatal.
Have a magnificent Monday! Swing back around here tomorrow morning for another riveting episode of essential news and C&C commentary.
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The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida.
