NBC’s Kristen Welker questioned Chuck U. Schumer about misleading Americans about Joe Biden’s mental fitness. He doubled down on Biden’s alleged fitness and claimed he’s been an outstanding president. He mentioned his so-called achievements, which Biden’s handlers put in place. When asked if Biden could have served another four years, Chuck U said he was […] The post Chuck Schumer Still Claims Joe Biden Was Fit appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said on Sunday that he wants the House to pass one hefty budget reconciliation bill to realize President-elect Donald Trump‘s policy agenda during the early months of his second term, dealing with a broad range of issues such as border security, tax cut extensions, the U.S. economy, and energy. In an interview on “Sunday Morning Futures,” Fox News anchor Maria Bartiromo noted that new Senate Budget Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has been pushing for splitting the legislation into two reconciliation bills and asked Johnson what Trump prefers. “Yes, he and I have talked about this quite a bit, as you might imagine, over the last few months, determining the pros and cons of the two different strategies,” Johnson said. “I respect Lindsey Graham and all my friends who kind of preferred a two-step strategy. The idea would be: get something done on the border and maybe defense spending right out of the blocks very quickly in what we would call a skinny reconciliation bill, and then do the rest of it in a larger chunk later.” Johnson, who huddled with colleagues over the weekend at Fort McNair to discuss the plan, said he thought “at the end of the day, President Trump is going to prefer, as he likes to say, ‘one big, beautiful bill.’ And there’s a lot of merit to that, because we can put it all together, one big up-or-down vote, which can save the country, quite literally, because there are so many elements to it. And it’ll give us a little bit more time to negotiate that and get it right.” RELATED: With Snow Blast Imminent, Speaker Johnson Says ‘We Cannot Delay’ Certification Of Trump’s Victory The speaker insisted the plan for reconciliation does not mean “we won’t come right out of the gates full-fledged right out of the beginning of the Congress.” The House will be “addressing the border” over the next couple weeks with fixes that are “so commonsense” that some Democrats may support them, Johnsons noted, adding that those bills could be ready for Trump to sign when he takes office on January 20. As for the reconciliation bill itself, the legislation will “have a lot of pieces,” Johnson said. “We made a lot of campaign promises. President Trump did as well, and reconciliation is the way to get it done. Why? Because you avoid a 60-vote threshold in the Senate.” Johnson then alluded to a two-step process in which putting together a budget resolution would precede the House and Senate actually considering the reconciliation legislation. “Reconciling the budget, which we will pass in early February, is how we will get all of our committees involved, committees of jurisdiction all these big issues. What are they? Well, obviously, we have to secure the border. We have got to make sure that our Border Patrol agents and our immigration enforcement agencies have the right directives from the White House, but also the right resources to do their job and secure that border once and for all,” he said. “We have got to take care of the dangerous illegal criminals who have come over, and all that’s part of it as well. And we have got to shift immediately to the economy. Maria, you know, you talk about every day, we have got to revive the U.S. economy, and we can. We know how to do it,” Johnson continued. “Part of that is preventing the largest tax increase in U.S. history, which would happen automatically at the end of next year if we don’t get our ducks in a row. So we’re going to make sure that happens. We’re going to incentivize American companies to manufacture in the U.S. again. And we’re going to make sure that the regulatory burden and the red tape that has smothered our free market is reduced and eliminated.” Johnson said “we’re going to be dismantling the deep state all along the way. We’re going to restore American energy dominance, so many different pieces to this, Maria. They all have to work together. And, of course, the president has asked us and really needs us to address the debt limit crisis before that hits in June. So, a lot of moving pieces, a lot of things to negotiate, a lot of opinions on all that, so we will be working long, long hours with whiteboards, making sure every Republican is on board, because, remember, I will be dealing with the smallest margin in U.S. history for much of the first 100 days. But we’re going to get it done.” Bartiromo asked Johnson if he is expecting to raise or eliminate the debt ceiling as part of the reconciliation legislation. “I think we’re going to have to do it in that bill. And the reason for that, Maria, is that we won’t have to negotiate with [Senate Minority Leader] Chuck Schumer and the Democrats on that,” the speaker replied. “If you do it in reconciliation, you can do it just with the Republican Party. So we will have very thoughtful discussion and debate about where that limit should go. But here’s the important thing everybody needs to remember. We’re the team that wants to cut spending, and we will. And we will do it dramatically, all the wasteful spending in government. DOGE will be doing its effort in coordination with all this. But you have to raise the debt limit on paper, so that we don’t frighten the bond markets and the world’s economy. You know how that works. It’s about the stability of our economy. But we don’t intend to spend to that limit, as President Trump will clarify all the time. We’re going to raise the ceiling, but we are going to be cutting all along the way, so we can do both of those things simultaneously.” Bartiromo also pressed Johnson on “what’s a realistic timeline” for getting the legislative package advanced through Congress and on Trump’s desk. “Would you have that on the president’s desk by May?” she asked. “Certainly by May, yes,” Johnson said. “In fact, we’re targeting a vote in the House maybe in the first week of April. Now, everything’s got to move in the right sequence. And along the way, I think we’re going to keep those trains moving in the right direction and on time. And if that happens, we will get it out of the House in early April, maybe as soon as April 3, and then move it over to the Senate. That would put that bill on the president’s desk for signature by the end of April. That would be fantastic. And, in a worst-case scenario: Memorial Day.”

Rep. Micheal McCaul (R-TX), Chairman Emeritus of the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Homeland Security Committee, outlined the threats that he wants President-elect Donald Trump to focus on immediately after getting sworn into office. McCaul made the remarks during a Sunday interview on ABC News’ “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos while discussing 42-year-old ISIS terrorist Shamsud-Din Jabbar’s attack on New Orleans’ French Quarter last week. McCaul said that he was specifically looking forward to learning more about his month-long trip to Egypt prior to the attack since investigators have found that he produced a rare explosive compound for bombs that he made. “What was he doing in Egypt for a month?” he asked. “It reminds me so much, George, of the Boston bomber, who traveled to Dagestan, came back, and then built this pressure cooker bomb that led to the deaths of so many people in that marathon.” McCaul said that Trump’s incoming national security team needed to focus on vehicle attacks in light of the attack and the vehicle attack in Germany late last month. “The other thing, I’m very worried about is, with the fall of Afghanistan and – and the debacle, and with what happened there, we are seeing a resurgence of ISIS and ISIS-K in the Khorasan region between Afghanistan and Pakistan that concerns me greatly,” he said. “Now we know that eight ISIS individuals have entered the United States through that.” He said that the administration also needed to focus on online radicalization since more terrorists are becoming radicalized in Western countries and there are not always warning signs prior to their attacks. WATCH:

'One big up or down vote which can save the country'

In The Washington Post’s self-righteous telling, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” It says so every day, right there below the paper’s masthead. But democracy also dies in historical revisionism, of the sort found Dec. 29 in the Post’s front-page lead story, directly below the masthead and across five columns, titled plaintively: “Joe Biden’s lonely battle to sell his vision of American democracy.” Tyler Pager’s fourth installment in a four-part Post series dubbed “How Biden Leads” reads like a cross between a postmortem defense of Joe Biden’s failed (my adjective, not his) presidency and a sycophantic hagiography. There are so many “what might have beens” in Pager’s 2,349-word magnum opus, it’s hard to know where to begin in dissecting and dismantling all of the historical revisionism. The article begins anecdotally with Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., who was instrumental in getting Biden nominated in 2020, recounting a meeting with the president early last year as Biden prepared to run for reelection. A lachrymose Clyburn lamented that Biden’s supposed campaigning on “substance” was no longer a good fit in an era—a scant four years later—where style now supposedly trumps (pun intended) substance. (Just as an aside, it was as if Clyburn had conveniently memory-holed Barack Obama’s performative “hope and change” candidacies, which were nothing if not style over substance.) “After Donald Trump’s ascent, Biden believed that he just needed to show Americans that traditional democracy still worked—by listening to experts, working with Republicans, passing popular policies—and voters would rally around him,” Pager wrote, claiming with scant evidence that Biden “had succeeded in Phase One of his plan.” When you begin with such a dubious—if not demonstrably false—premise, however, much of what follows is likely to be wrong as well. “[P]hase Two never happened,” Pager wrote. “The truth of Biden’s presidency is that he failed in what was, by his own account, his most important mission: making Trump’s presidency seem like an aberration.” Biden and Pager might regard Trump’s presidency as “an aberration,” but an American electorate that gave Trump 11.2 million more votes in 2020 than in 2016 clearly didn’t see it that way. Moreover, voters doubled down in 2024, giving Trump nearly 3.2 million additional votes on top of that. (For the record: Just under 63 million in 2016; 74.2 million in 2020; and 77.3 million in 2024.) Biden’s governing “through traditional processes and institutions,” Princeton University presidential historian Julian Zelizer is quoted as lamenting, “ … didn’t do anything to end the very intense polarization that exists in this country.” To the contrary, the Biden administration’s unabashedly far-left policies—open borders allowing the country to be flooded with unvetted illegal immigrants and having taxpayers support them, trillions of dollars in deficit spending that spawned 45-year-high inflation and interest rates, and unswerving fealty to a pro-abortion, pro-transgender, and pro-DEI agenda—only served to exacerbate that polarization. The only thing surprising about the “intense polarization” is that Zelizer (and by extension, Biden and Pager) were surprised by it. In Zelizer’s case, however, it could be because of the clueless crowd that he runs with. “Some Biden allies point to a recent survey of historians that ranked Biden the 14th-best president in American history, while putting Trump last,” Pager notes. But those historians have about as much credibility as the “felonious 51” intelligence officials who knowingly lied at the height of the 2020 presidential election when they asserted that the infamous Hunter Biden laptop had all the “hallmarks of Russian disinformation.” Those historians notwithstanding, after Biden’s four years in the White House, Jimmy Carter—who died at age 100 on the same day the Post article appeared in print—can rest in peace knowing that his presidency is no longer the worst of my lifetime. Pager wrote that Biden argued “that he did not get enough credit for his accomplishments, especially on the economy.” That raises the question: What part of the aforementioned 45-year-high inflation driving up food and fuel prices—to say nothing of soaring housing prices that have made homeownership increasingly unaffordable for more Americans—does the lame-duck president not understand? In the same vein, Pager credited Biden with “avoid[ing] a recession that many economists considered inevitable,” when he surely knows that Biden avoided a recession, but in name only, because liberal economists brushed aside the long-standing definition of recession as being two or more consecutive quarters of declining gross domestic product. That’s a whopper for which Pager’s Post “fact-checker” colleague, Glenn Kessler, should award both of them three Pinocchios. “Substantively, few analysts deny Biden’s accomplishments,” Pager further swoons, citing as one of those accomplishments “mobiliz[ing] the government to vaccinate Americans against COVID-19, bringing the country out of a devastating pandemic.” He might want to get second opinions on that “substantive accomplishment,” however, from the thousands of service members Biden’s Pentagon drummed out of the military for refusing to take those largely experimental vaccines or from the millions of elementary and secondary school students whose educations were irreparably harmed by unduly long school closures pushed on Biden by left-wing teachers unions, or from the thousands of mom-and-pop enterprises driven out of business by unnecessary restrictions on their operations. Pager also credits Biden as having “rebuilt the trans-Atlantic alliance,” with the implication being that Trump had shattered it. But the latter is true only if you think that insisting that NATO’s 30 European members “pay their fair share” (to use one of Biden’s and the Left’s pet phrases) for their own defense—or Ukraine’s—is unreasonable. And any discussion of Biden’s foreign policies would be incomplete without mentioning the catastrophic August 2021 pullout from Afghanistan. But leaving tens of billions of dollars in military hardware behind for the Taliban gets no mention in Pager’s detailing of “how Biden leads.” And the fallback explanation for the failure of Biden’s “lonely battle to sell his vision of American democracy” is the Democrats’ reflexive excuse whenever they lose an election: “We didn’t get our message out.”“Previous articles in this series … showed that Biden, even at the peak of his power, struggled mightily to communicate his decisions and vision.” Au contraire: The American people were all too well aware of Biden’s “decisions and vision” when they went to the polls on Nov. 5. Voters correctly surmised that they would continue unabated if Vice President Kamala Harris were to succeed Biden and cast their ballots accordingly. Pager devotes four lengthy paragraphs to how Biden and “some Democrats” in hindsight have faulted his attorney general, Merrick Garland, for adopting what they considered a go-slow approach to prosecuting Trump. “Had the Justice Department moved faster to prosecute Trump for allegedly seeking to overturn the 2020 election and mishandling classified documents,” those Democrats say, the former president might have faced a politically damaging trial before the election,” Pager wrote. Could it be that Garland recognized that those trumped-up (again, pun intended) charges were a baseless, nakedly political “weaponization” of the justice system and that he wasn’t comfortable pursuing a corrupt gambit just to win an election for the Democrats? It must have pained many in the newsroom of The Washington Post when it had to report that then-President Donald Trump had been acquitted by the Senate on two trumped-up, baseless articles of impeachment on Feb. 6, 2020. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images) Even with all that said, there was much more to take issue with in Pager’s historical revisionist hagiography of Biden and his soon-to-end shambolic presidency, but why further belabor the point? Suffice it say that Pager should offer to be the ghost writer for Biden’s postpresidency memoir. But libraries would have to shelve it under “fiction.” Originally published by The Washington Times The post At Washington Post, Democracy Dies in Historical Revisionism With Whitewash of Failed Biden Presidency appeared first on The Daily Signal.

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