What will DC Republicans do now?

The House and Senate return to work Monday in a very different town from the one they left before the long Memorial Day weekend. Over the congressional recess, Democrats reached the Rubicon, convicting the Republican presidential nominee on multiple trumped-up felonies with the help of a Constitution-bending partisan judge and district attorney.

While Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) tweeted his passive expectation that it will all sort itself out in the appeals process, others are setting about the smart work of resisting. In a Friday letter, a group of senators promised to block, stop, and derail nearly all Democrat legislation and confirmations for the remainder of the year.

“We will not,” the letter reads:

1) allow any increase to non-security related funding for this administration, or any appropriations bill which funds partisan lawfare; 2) vote to confirm this administration's political or judicial appointees; and 3) allow expedited consideration and passage of Democrat legislation or authorities that are not directly relevant to the safety of the American people.

The initial letter was signed by Republican Senators Mike Lee (Utah), J.D. Vance (Ohio), Tommy Tuberville (Ala.), Eric Schmitt (Mo.), Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.), Rick Scott (Fla.), Roger Marshall (Kan.), and Marco Rubio (Fla.). By Friday evening, Republicans Josh Hawley (Mo.) and Ron Johnson (Wis.) had added their signatures.

The move is a welcome shift for a Congress that has largely continued about business as usual, buying the FBI a shiny new headquarters despite its spying on former President Donald Trump, reauthorizing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act despite its use to ensnare Trump, and continuing to fund a Department of Justice long weaponized against conservatives big and small.

“After cheerleading the unprecedented politicization of our judicial system in a desperate attempt to save Joe Biden, congressional Democrats cannot come back to work on Monday expecting any bipartisan cooperation on their agenda,” Lee told Blaze News. “Actions have consequences.”

“Republicans," Vance told Blaze News, “simply cannot sit back and allow the weaponization of our justice system against our presidential nominee. We need to show the Democrats that there will be severe consequences for this grotesque abuse of power. If they think the normal spirit of bipartisanship can be maintained while their party leadership orchestrates a plan to throw Donald Trump in prison, they’ve got another thing coming.”

It’s a good start. When your constituents ask what you did when your party’s nominee was convicted in a kangaroo court, the answer can’t be, "Did you see the TV hit I did?” and “I held a hearing on it” simply won’t suffice.

Still, much will depend on how much hell the GOP is willing to raise. If the 10 senators commit to blocking all consents (for routine things as basic as setting up tomorrow’s schedule or allowing debate), they can shut down the U.S. Senate. Though there is good enough reason they should go that far, the pressure would be immense, and it’s unlikely they will.

More likely, they’ll block all political and judicial nominations by consent, forcing a vote (like Tuberville did, before he was betrayed by weak Republican colleagues).

To do anything beyond this, they’ll need the support of another 31 colleagues. With 41 united senators, you can stop appropriations. Then you’re talking business. While the original group of 10 should grow this week, it will take pressure to push other Republicans into supporting it. If Trump starts talking about it, the situation might change.

It’s no secret that Trump isn’t popular on Capitol Hill. When he was banned from Twitter in 2020, only a single Republican senator reached out to the company to protest. Most of the rest think of him as a blundering wrecking ball, inconvenient to the kind of uniparty spending D.C. prefers (colored by peripheral but meaningless TV fights).

That doesn’t mean they’ll say anything publicly against him. Republican voters back Trump to the hilt, so most know to keep their mouths shut. The Republican National Committee more than doubled its previous one-day fundraising haul, raising $52.8 million in the 24 hours after the conviction despite the fundraising portal crashing multiple times. All Trump’s lack of popularity in D.C. means is that few are eager to jump to the ramparts when he’s under attack.

State Republicans need not let D.C. have all the fun. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is just one of many hard-left prosecutors funded by George Soros and Co. What about those DAs in Republican-controlled states? Investigations and impeachments are in order. Time to clean house.

As with the culture wars, there can be no calling for a truce on this one. Democrats have crossed the northern border and are marching south. Republican politicians who continue to rubber-stamp so much as a postage stamp design are simply collaborating.

Glenn Beck: Don’t cower to the bullies who convicted Trump

CNN contributor Elie Honig in New York magazine:Prosecutors got Trump — but they contorted the law

Blaze News:Trump's 'banana republic' conviction won't be Democrats' last — unless there is 'retaliation in kind': UC Berkeley law prof

Blaze News:How red states should respond to Trump’s conviction

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IN OTHER NEWS

Fauci dragged back to DC to answer for cover-ups

For a guy who loves going on TV more than anything, the doctor has been scarce of late. But on Monday, retired American Overlord Dr. Anthony Fauci will be back on camera, this time in front of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

May was a bad month for the former Democrat hero. Congress uncovered that he and his friends had routinely and intentionally dodged oversight by using his private email and personal communications and even misspelling names to hide from record searches in official emails.

In one series of released communications, Fauci adviser Dr. David Morens talked openly about a series of methods for dodging public oversight of their COVID communications. “PS,” he wrote in an email to COVID China collaborator and serial gaslighter Dr. Peter Daszak, “i forgot to say there is no worry about FOIAs. I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work or at his house. He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”

In another, Morens wrote: “I learned from our NIH FOIA lady here how to make emails disappear after I am FOIA but before the search starts so I think we’re all safe. Plus I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to Gmail."

In a particularly ironic email, Morens added: “We are all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them we’d delete them.”

Monday will be the first chance for lawmakers to question him since closed-door testimony on the origins of COVID-19 in January. It will be his first public testimony since retiring as the highest-paid person in the federal government, with the highest government pension in American history.

The hearing comes just in time for catching up on the extent of the 2020 cover-up with BlazeTV’s new docuseries. For months, BlazeTV host Matt Kibbe and his team at Free the People investigated the lies and cover-ups of 2020, building an incredible multi-part docuseries. “The Coverup,” episode one, is live now. Watch it here.

Blaze Media Original: 'The Coverup' exposes Fauci and his whole cabal

The fire rises: Unherd: ‘I was offered assisted dying over cancer treatment’

Canada’s assisted suicide system was sold as a mercy package for the terminally ill. In the years since it began, it has extended its reach to the depressed, the homeless, and even those patients desperate for a cure. Allison Ducluzeau was one of the latter. She survived through perseverance, but her story is a warning to all those in the United States starting down the same path. Ian Birrell reports:

Two years ago, over the Thanksgiving holiday, Allison Ducluzeau started to feel pain in her stomach. At first, she assumed she had eaten too much turkey, but the pain persisted. A couple of weeks later, she saw her family doctor who requested CT scans, although none were sorted. Soon after, as the agony worsened, her partner insisted she went to the emergency unit at their local hospital on Vancouver Island. Finally, doctors confirmed the couple’s worst fears: she was almost certainly suffering from advanced abdominal cancer.

Allison, then 56, later learned that she had stage 4 peritoneal carcinomatosis, an aggressive condition. By the time she saw a specialist early last year, he warned that she might only live a few months longer: chemotherapy tended to be ineffective for her cancer, buying a bit more time at best, and she was inoperable. Instead, she was told to go home, sort out her papers, and decide if she wanted medical assistance in dying...