By Sarah Arnold | Townhall.com
AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
Many politicians on both sides of the aisle are in it for their political gain. The only difference is Republicans will sacrifice their gains if it means bettering the country, and Democrats won’t.
As Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) puts an end to his career in Washington, he told the Associated Press that D.C. wasn’t what it once was.
“If we don’t get back to it, this country is going to be severely damaged,” Leahy said, adding “we’re the wealthiest, most powerful nation on Earth. And we have over 300 million Americans. We have a responsibility to the Americans. We have a responsibility to the rest of the world.”
The 82-year-old claimed that politicians in Washington no longer care about the country, only about their “political ambitions.”
Leahy has spent the last 48 years in the Senate, and looking back he said that regardless of which political party someone associated themselves with, senators always found a way to get things done.
“I think then, most of [the senators] knew there were basic things the Senate should do, basic things the country needed, and we should find a way to come together,” Leahy said.
Leahy went on to say that when he first began his career in D.C., being on the news or trending on Twitter didn’t exist. Now, he says, politicians care far too much about their social status than fighting for what’s best for the U.S.
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RELATED ARTICLE
Democrats Rolled a New Election Law Into the $1.7 Trillion Omnibus
By Matt Vespa | Townhall.com
AP Photo/Susan Walsh
There’s a lot to unpack in the $1.7 trillion omnibus that proved to be the Republican Party’s last gift to us to close out the year: complete surrender to liberal action items. The legislation is over 4,000 pages, ensuring that no one read this pork-stuffed liberal novel. It does nothing to ameliorate the crisis on the southern border, one of the country's most pressing domestic issues, besides the economic recession and high inflation crippling America’s working families. It gave billions to the Internal Revenue Service to finance its targeted harassment of Americans’ Venmo activity. The Republican Party gave their seal of approval. And now, there’s a new election law that is par for the course for a political party still triggered by January 6 (via NBC News):
The legislation also includes a rewrite of an 1887 federal election law to close loopholes that then-President Donald Trump and his team sought to exploit on Jan. 6, 2021, to make it harder for presidential candidates to steal elections. It would also grant extra funds to the Justice Department for Jan. 6 prosecutions.
Schumer said the election measures in the bill would “preserve our democracy for generations to come.”
Trump said it was "probably better" to reject the election changes.
"I don’t care whether they change The Electoral Count Act or not, probably better to leave it the way it is so that it can be adjusted in case of Fraud," he wrote on his social media platform, arguing that the desire in Congress to clarify the law validates his belief that the vice president had the power to overturn the 2020 result.
Proponents of the changes say that the 1887 law is poorly written and that it was never intended to give the vice president such power — and that the new legislation would make that abundantly clear.
“It’s going to stop the kind of stuff we saw on Jan. 6, where a sitting president tried to take the election and become dictator of this country,” Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, a moderate Democrat, said Wednesday on MSNBC’s "Morning Joe." “It’s an important piece of legislation that was worked on in a bipartisan way.”
How the media covered this portion of the spending legislation was even more of an atrocity, declaring the election law tweak necessary to deter coup attempts. That’s not hyperbole—it’s what NBC News called it: “Preventing future coup attempts.”
