Rep. Ron Kind (D-WI), a self-professed “moderate” Democrat in a district that backed former President Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020, has announced he will not seek re-election in 2022. Kind likely sees the writing on the wall. Having squeaked through in a tight 2020 race, he could not have been relishing running again next year under the banner of a party that is sowing chaos at the border, hyper-politicizing everything from infrastructure to health and education, and pursuing an Apologize First foreign policy.
“I’ve run out of gas,” Kind told reporters on Aug. 10. “I had to face a serious job review every two years for 26 years.” Apparently, he wasn’t looking forward to another one. Given the abrasive tack Democrats have taken since Joe Biden entered the White House in January, who can blame him?
RINOs Giveth, and The Squad Taketh Away?
Nineteen Senate Republicans gifted a stumbling Biden administration a victory by agreeing to support a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill loaded with progressive poison pills for American taxpayers. But that is not enough for House Democrats. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has stressed the $1.2 trillion bill must be wedded to an even more gargantuan $3.5 trillion package that satisfies the spending dreams of the most woke members of the blue caucus.
“I am not freelancing. This is the consensus,” Pelosi reportedly informed House Democrats during an Aug. 11 call. “The votes in the House and Senate depend on us having both bills.”
Thus, instead of first passing the $1.2 trillion legislation and allowing vulnerable Democrats like Kind to tell voters they are helping to reach across the aisle and get things done on Capitol Hill, Pelosi is instead rigidly shackling them to the most divisive forces in the party. Enter the “Squad,” stage left.
“My progressive colleagues and I, we’ve been calling for bold investments that meet the moment, so an unprecedented investment at an unprecedented time at an inflection point for our country. And that means making bold, robust investments both in human and physical infrastructure,” Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) told taxpayer-funded leftist media organ NPR on Aug. 10.
“Well, care is infrastructure, climate justice is infrastructure, housing is infrastructure. So this is what I want to see as we negotiate these packages.”
It’s as ugly a look as Democrats could possibly present. Politicizing potholes and bridge repair and using the machinery of regime politics to push it over the finish line seems almost designed to alienate the local residents back home that the Ron Kinds of the party will desperately need next year.
Bricks on Their Backs
Ron Kind
Kind resides in a district that wants a change from the political status quo. Boasting about his ability to “work with” existing power structures that his constituents see as manifestly corrupt and out of touch with the day-to-day concerns of regular Americans is a train wreck just waiting to happen.
Add to this horrible messaging the Biden administration’s constant hectoring of citizens to mask up and vaccinate as it allows illegal aliens to swarm across the nation’s southern border in the midst of what it never stops calling a deadly health pandemic. And then throw in Biden’s internationalist-oriented Secretary of State Anthony Blinken in July inviting the United Nations to send over a foreign “racial truth” commissar to investigate systemic racism in America.
Imagine being Ron Kind and having all this loaded onto your wagon and then being told, “Now go back home and let your people know we’re looking out for them.”
“Kind was only one of seven House Democrats in the country who won districts that were carried by Trump [in 2020], making his seat vital to both parties in the 2022 mid-term,” The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel notes. With the loudest of progressive rabble-rousers urging her on, Nancy Pelosi has just made it much more difficult to keep that seat blue.
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