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Home » If a Republican tweets in the forest, can anybody hear it?

If a Republican tweets in the forest, can anybody hear it?

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “JimNorCal” writes, about the Biden administration’s planned payments of $450 thousand per person to illegal immigrants who were subjected to the family separation policy:

Do you hear angry responses from the Repub Party? Me neither.

My question is: did you look?

I encounter this sort of assertion time and again about Republicans being silent on various issues, so I don’t mean to single out JimNorCal; it’s a common observation. And yet very often when I check I find that plenty of Republicans have in fact issued angry responses about the topic in question, whatever it may be.

The thing is, how does the news get out? Is the MSM covering those responses? Where would we read or hear about them? Don’t expect CNN or the NY Times to mention them, except now and then in the tried-and-true “Republicans pounce” fashion if they think they can make the responses sound cruel and/or outrageous.

And of course not all Republicans are responding to any one issue, and some don’t respond much at all. Some probably don’t care. Some do cover a lot of things, but they can’t talk about everything. They have to pick and choose because time and energy is limited, and the Biden administration (and the left in general) perpetrates so many horrors a day that it’s pretty much impossible to keep up. Playing whack-a-mole isn’t all that productive. And besides Republicans in Congress are somewhat limited to rhetoric. They don’t have the votes or the power to stop these things at the moment.

Whether they often stop them when they do have majorities is another question entirely, but in recent years even when they’ve controlled Congress they haven’t controlled it by much of a margin, and so the more conservative among them can be stopped by the “mavericks.”

Regarding the issue at hand, though – the $450 thousand dollars per person award to illegal immigrants suing because they underwent family separation during the Trump years – it only took me a moment to find Ted Cruz’s Twitter feed:

And Tom Cotton’s:

As well as John Cornyn and Chuck Grassley:

And Rick Scott and Dan Crenshaw:

Also Marsha Blackburn:

And Lindsey Graham:

I’ll stop there because I think I’ve made my point. I checked a few other senators (it would take me a day to check every Republican in Congress) who didn’t mention it, but for the most part those particular people don’t seem to be heavy twitter users anyway. For all I know, some of them may have something about it on their websites; I didn’t check that either.

But the larger picture – and perhaps this is what the commenter was really trying to get at – is that there’s rarely an effective response in terms of action, and that’s very very frustrating.

But what can Republicans in Congress do about this particular issue? They don’t have a Congressional majority, and this is the DOJ making the settlements, anyway, rather than Congress being involved. It doesn’t seem like a case where SCOTUS could step in, either.

Maybe you’d like them to yell LOUDER. That would be good, and possibly would affect public opinion, as well. But how would we hear them – except for the small numbers who follow them on Twitter (I certainly don’t)? Would the MSM cover their yells? Only if the press could frame their statements as “hear the mean angry Republicans who would do awful things to you and to all innocent and defenseless people if they had the chance.”

Politicians can’t force the media to cover them. That’s one of the reasons Trump’s tweets were sometimes effective; they were so anger-provoking for the MSM that they couldn’t resist covering them and that could actually work to Trump’s advantage because his point was spread throughout the land that way.

That’s probably the main reason they took him off Twitter and kept him off.

In summary, although the GOP has its flaws and then some, the media and social media gatekeepers are no small problem for Republicans. It’s not just the lies and the nasty coverage. Sometimes it’s the lack of coverage that’s just as important.

Comments

If a Republican tweets in the forest, can anybody hear it? — 34 Comments

  1. What they could do (and maybe, hopefully, this is in the works) is turn this story into a campaign ad; several campaign ads, actually. This is a visceral matter, which strikes deeply at many voters’ sense of fair play. It could have long legs, if Republicans do indeed pounce.

    Also, of the people you cited, only Cruz is a major, nationally well known figure (Graham I suppose too, to a much lesser extent). Is McConnell talking about it? Is McCarthy? Yes the MSM will spin and downplay regardless, but this is something the leadership really needs to hammer home.

  2. The Democrats Propaganda Ministry gives them cover as well as smothering decent of other politicians.
    Doubt $450,00 will ever be paid on 1 person, but starting negotiations top dollar is not the goal but $75,000 might be. But it will start another bureaucracy department with a overseeing boss clearing 6 digit salary and a whole office of goverment employees.
    As in the Pigford payouts Lawyers made most of the payouts.

  3. I hope somewhere there is a conservative legal foundation working out a way to sue to get an injunction against these outrageous payments, on behalf of taxpayers.

  4. “there’s rarely an effective response in terms of action, and that’s very very frustrating.”

    I think we’ve seen that when the shoe is on the other foot, Dems pull out all the stops to point of essentially shutting down Congress. Recall that 2 years in, PDJT was still trying to confirm some of his original appointments.

    Meanwhile, Repubs confirm AG Garland and the commie Omarova lady as Comptroller and a myriad of judges.
    There’s a nice clip of Sen Cruz calling out AG Garland as a liar and political hack. Big deal. Nothing will come of it.

    I’m glad you were able to find a couple press releases and tweets.

  5. I decided to check the coverage of this insanely destructive proposal at Pravda-on-the-Potomac, and I must confess to having been somewhat surprised, on scrolling through many of the comments, that the majority were hostile to this (clearly indefensible) idea. Normally, at WaPo, the thoroughly-brainwashed leftists are out in full force blaming Trump, Trump’s supporters, “Russian” bots, “white supremacists”, racist Republicans , lunatic conservatives, etc, but this seems to have been a bridge too far, and many were worried that such an idiotic plan might well lead to victories for the GOP next year.

  6. Yeah, I’m probably guilty of grousing unfairly about elected GOPers being quiet about some story when I didn’t bother to confirm so by checking Twitter (spoiler altert: I never check Twitter). It upsets me that Twitter has such an outsized effect on public discourse dispite perhaps only 10% if users generating 92% of the Tweets, and since about 73 million Americans have a Twitter account, that means something like (8/73/335 * 100) 3.6% of the population is driving so much of our discourse and strife.

  7. JimNorCal:

    It wasn’t hard to find them. I found them right away.

    But many people are so angry at and disillusioned with the GOP that they write the party off entirely. I’ve been fighting that for many years, because I think it plays into the hands of the left. My personal policy is to write off those who need writing off (support primary challenges to them) but be careful and realistic about it and don’t dismiss the whole lot of them because of the behavior of some.

  8. Ackler:

    You ask whether McConnell and McCarthy are talking about it.

    Yes and yes.

    McConnell:

    McCarthy:

    That only took about a minute to locate.

  9. Very much related to this is when a Democrat is elected or puts forth an agenda the media often reports it as a “mandate” or the agenda is “popular.”

    Yet when a Republican is elected or puts forth an agenda that is up for debate the media reports it as “the country is divided” or the agenda is “controversial.”

    What I cannot understand is this double standard is so obvious, so blatant, and so disingenuous; how can most people not see it?

  10. To get to many people, a reaction would have to appear on the front page of the local paper. That’s just not going to happen. The opinion page? More likely to see an applause piece there!

  11. What did we pay the victims of Japanese internment camps? $20,000 seventy years later? So these folks have suffered more than them?

  12. Where does the money come from? Doesn’t Congress have the power of the purse? If there’s $1 billion available in some kind of legal settlement slush fund, how in the world did the Congress let that happen? I can’t imagine many Democrats supporting this outrage (but, of course, I could be wrong). Dan Crenshaw’s comparison with death benefits for our servicemen and women should be published everywhere by the Republicans.

  13. neo stated, “this is the DOJ making the settlements, anyway, rather than Congress being involved.”

    Huh? Upon what basis would the Executive branch have the legal authority to make payments? Congress has passed no law. The judiciary has rendered no judgement.

    Wouldn’t Congress have to pass a law directing payments?

    In addition, unless Biden’s puppet masters are completely divorced from political realities, they have to know that it’s highly unlikely that this could pass through Congress. In fact, its likely to further alienate low-info moderate democrats.

    So what’s the purpose in proposing this? What tangible, immediate benefit does this proposal gain for the Biden administration?

    I agree with Ackler that this proposal will make for a devastating political campaign ad. The Biden administration, Congressional Democrats and every organ on the left have provided an abundance of political fodder for devastating ads in 2022 and 2024.

    And that is the field of opportunity for moving around the media’s censorship.

  14. Geoffrey Britain: “So what’s the purpose in proposing this? What tangible, immediate benefit does this proposal gain for the Biden administration?”

    Virtue signaling. Bad Orange Man was mean to these people. Of course, the rape and abuse victims of the current immigration regime aren’t the same, because that’s Good Old Joe.

  15. Neo:

    Well that’s certainly good to see. But they really do need to hammer the issue and not let up. I await the campaign ads.

  16. Geoffrey Britain;

    My understanding from what I’ve read is that rhese are lawsuits (often the ACLU representing the plaintiffs) against the federal government. The DOJ is the agency that defends them or settles them. These are proposed terms of settlements. Congress isn’t part of this, nor is SCOTUS, and I can’t think think of anything about it that is actually illegal

  17. I am not an enthusiast for the Republican party, but complaints about it ought to be tempered right now as we see Merrick Garland revealing his true colors and recall that he would be on the Supreme Court if establishment Republicans had not stopped him.

  19. The problem I see with the Repubs is that there’s no follow-through **even when they HAVE the power**.

    Trey Gowdy was spectacular at chewing out witnesses before the House Judiciary Committee, but that’s as far as it ever went. Lindsey Graham huffs and puffs, but he conducted none of the hearings he threatened to when he chaired Senate Judiciary — he could have waded in to expose the Trump/Russia bullshit, and that would certainly have been covered, even by our shyster-saturated media.

    And recently Graham and Murkowski voted to confirm some rabid leftist to an appeals-court seat. If they’d voted “No,” the nomination would have been defeated 50 – 49 (because some Dem was absent).

  20. I don’t know if I weary people by adding sidebar cites as often I do.

    I’m trying to check what I think is true — I don’t trust anyone, not even myself — before unleashing it on readers. Also, so readers may judge for themselves.

  21. neo,

    Ah, I see. The DOJ is going to settle the lawsuits out of court?

    Well, handing out $450,000 to each criminal claimant, along with all the other outrages is going to create massive political blowback.

    They have to realize this and since a significant loss in the next election is so likely as to now be a near certainty, and one they can ill afford, massive electoral fraud seems a near certainty as well.

    Yet if they once again play that card, they remove another layer of deniability and place another straw upon the camel’s back.

  24. This is not the only mountain of cash Biden has given away.
    https://notthebee.com/article/biden-wants-to-give-450000-to-each-illegal-immigrant-separated-from-their-family-at-the-border

    First, Biden gives millions of dollars in high-tech military swag to the Taliban, then he decides to give hundreds of thousands of dollars to illegal immigrants because the Trump administration decided it didn’t want to participate in human trafficking.
    …
    There were around 5,500 children who were separated by the Trump administration as part of a policy that aimed to separate criminals who were using the children by pretending to be their family members.

    The media described this policy like it was a Nazi concentration camp; meanwhile, while children are being left for dead and raped in the current migration crisis (1.7 million people and counting this year!), then locked in “cages” by the Biden admin, the media is silent.

    Let’s not be too hard on Biden, though: Those illegal immigrants are gonna need that $450,000 to survive the hyperinflation headed our way!

  25. Too good not to share. And close to becoming true.
    https://babylonbee.com/news/mounted-border-patrol-ordered-to-replace-whips-with-bags-of-money

    Still fanciful, but think about what a sane country would do with that proposed settlement money (other than rewarding law breaking even more than we do now).
    https://babylonbee.com/news/supply-chain-crisis-solved-as-each-migrant-coming-into-country-will-be-asked-to-help-carry-a-shipping-container

    This is why people (as opposed to professional pundits & politicians) are NOT HAPPY.
    https://babylonbee.com/news/american-who-got-1200-in-exchange-for-lost-livelihood-wishes-he-had-just-illegally-crossed-the-border-for-450000-instead

  26. Scott Johnson at PowerLine:
    https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/10/bordering-on-insanity-payout-edition.php
    “I am on outrage overload. I have no comment either. This story is beyond my poor power to add or detract. I can only say that I would prefer to defend these cases to the hilt and submit them to a jury if they pass legal muster than to pay dime one voluntarily.”

    The number of chart-toppers may increase.
    https://notthebee.com/article/fourcount-em-1-2-3-4of-the-itunes-top-10-songs-are-versions-of-the-anti-biden-lets-go-brandon-song

  27. Neo writes “ My understanding from what I’ve read is that these are lawsuits (often the ACLU representing the plaintiffs) against the federal government. The DOJ is the agency that defends them or settles them. These are proposed terms of settlements.”

    The ‘sue to settle’ strategy we saw when Acorn (housing rights advocacy group) sued the Clinton administration for fair housing act violations, for example. Which eventuates in the Great Recession in the next decade. And other Leftists sued the EPA to stock eco-whacko groups coffers. NGOs in nirvana? Nope. NEVER! But their radical agendas? Sure. Evermore marching to the radical far Left’s drummer.

    It’s been SOP of the Deep State to grow Left powers over Federal spending by sue and settle actions that go on without much media exposure. (And talent flows from NGOs into Federal bureaucracies benefiting both.) And besides, this is the boring side of law, dealing with regulatory branch of the Big State powers — but it grows and grows just this way.

    Thus, nothing will come of this outrage on the Right. The practice expanded on steroids with Obama, but such NGO funding goals gets delivered in-your-face style through omnibus spending bills that have fuelled Deep State ‘grow the government’ goals ever since then.

    Now do something more useful, Neo. Expose the capture of corporatocracy by far Left business ethics agenda called ESG, or the Environmental (ethics like climate change and sustainability), Social (-ist Justice), and Governance game. ESG laid the grounds for Left billionaire Silicon Valley to lead corporations into enforce our New Fascist State between last year and this.
    https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/08/01/introduction-to-esg/

    Notice in the ambitions in the commenters case: there are no metrics to gauge ecological or environmental sustainability (because, for one thing, technology changes which affects the possible, but it cannot be predicted). The commenter, though, seeks to gauge the effectiveness of different sustainability corporate policies.

    Disconnect? “Buhler? Ferris Buhler?” No one talks about this Leftist takeover of industry through our corrupt business schools on our declining campi.

  29. I suspect that federal civil rights legislation may provide a foothold for claimants; however why isn’t sovereign immunity the primary response? (Yes, I understand that the people proposing to settle don’t want to defend). Generally if the government harms you pursuant to “policy” you are out of luck.

  31. The puppeteers running this regime deeply resent, detest and are pathologically jealous of white, Western Culture with all its joys, prosperity, beauty, and success and are working assiduously for it’s demise – think Tanya Harding vis-a-vis Nancy Kerrigan or Salieri vs Mozart. One way to speed the destruction along is to open the borders to as many ‘third-worlders’ as possible because, by doing so, we will become more ‘third-world-like’ ourselves. What better way to encourage more people to seek “the American Dream” than to put the word out around the globe that the US will pay $450,000 to anyone who can make it across our vanishing border?

  32. To put it in perspective: that’s 20 YEARS of post taxes income for me, and I’ve a pretty senior position in software engineering.

  33. Are these the same kind of “separated” families that resulted from the Obama cages? With interest I’d say Joe ought to pay them even more!

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