We return to a persistent subject with the lead subject of today’s Five Quick Things — that being the utterly insufficient and generally useless quality of a majority of the Republicans in the U.S. Senate. I’ve said here and there, and I especially said it in the runup to, and promotion of, my 2022 book, The Revivalist Manifesto, that I no longer consider myself a conservative. I’m with the Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson, who six weeks or so ago wrote a piece noting that the old “three-legged stool” of conservatism has devolved into a three-legged stool of abject failure. Self-styled conservatives, like the editors at National Review or the David Frenches and Quin Hillyers of the world, are the people who have consistently devolved the status quo by failing to ever go on offense or even to mount a vigorous defense of principle while the Left has aggressively broken down America’s cultural, economic, and political norms over the past 80 years or so. And now, after having run off the vast majority of their former supporters as the public has recognized how toothless the “conservative” leadership is, these tend to be the people pot-shotting not just at Donald Trump but, far more importantly, Trump’s supporters. I’ll confess that back in 2016 I was not a Trump guy. I was a Ted Cruz guy. But I was a Cruz guy for the same reasons the Trump people were for Trump. Cruz was the new kid in the Senate who insisted on pushing the GOP’s chips into the middle on a government shutdown to force the Obama administration to back off its left-wing aggressions, which looked a lot to me like the kind of brash, iconoclastic leadership we needed atop the Republican Party if we were going to get the proper level of backlash against the eight years of rapid decline in constitutional governance Barack Obama represented. Trump promised that, too. I wasn’t sold that Trump was truly committed to the project. But he did deliver, and so I’m with him even if I still from time to time see things I’d prefer not to out of his camp. The one thing the Cruz people and the Trump people, who have pretty much unified since the spring of 2016, agree on is that the Republican establishment, the “conservatives” who took Ronald Reagan’s legacy and dragged it through 30 years of Bush family mud until “conservatism” essentially meant starting stupid wars while surrendering on fiscal policy, the culture and corporate-fascist economics, simply cannot be the standard bearers of a future for the Right in America. My formulation, which I outlined in The Revivalist Manifesto and will expand upon in my next book The Revivalist Agenda, which I’m planning on having out for public consumption before this fall’s election, is to stop using conservatism as the word to describe the philosophy of an America First/MAGA movement that aims to drain the Washington Swamp and return our culture, politics, and economics to something productive and sustainable. The folks I’m describing, and I’m including myself in their number, obviously, are Revivalists. It’s not as evident as it ought to be in the House, because there simply aren’t enough votes for it in a paltry 219-vote GOP majority. Even still, most of the House Republicans are more Revivalist than conservative at this point. There was evidence of that Thursday in the meeting Trump had on Capitol Hill. But we’re still very, very short of the number of Revivalists we’re going to need in the Senate. 1. They Should All Be Lining Up Behind Vance, Lee, and the Others How is this not the open position of the entire Senate GOP Caucus? Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) and Senate Republicans on Thursday announced a hold policy on numerous President Joe Biden nominees in response to the 46th president’s “radical lawfare” against former President Donald Trump and other political opponents. Vance led an effort alongside Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT), Bill Hagerty (R-TN), Roger Marshall (R-KS), Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), and Eric Schmitt (R-MO) to block swift confirmation of roughly four dozen of Biden’s nominees throughout various positions of the government. This includes judicial nominees, a nominee for deputy undersecretary for the Treasury Department, and a general counsel nominee for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). Under the blockade, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) would have to waste significant time to confirm the nominees. Only five senators signed on to that effort. So far, at least of this writing, the other 44 haven’t said a word. My guess is that’s more logistical than ideological or political, and Vance and the others may have simply run out there with an announcement and others would have (and likely will) signed on. But Vance shouldn’t be the guy leading this. Mitch McConnell is the leader of the Senate GOP caucus. He should be doing it. But Morphine Mitch couldn’t be bothered. Maybe he’s busy sundowning. He hasn’t earned the benefit of the doubt, though. McConnell has done everything he possibly can to sabotage the Revivalist cause, and even now, having declared his impending retirement as the caucus leader at the end of the current term (instead of just doing it now so the new leader can get a head start on charting a new course for the caucus and, more importantly, play a leading role in the GOP’s efforts to retake the Senate), he’s standing in the way. A couple of weeks ago, the Daily Caller had a story on the Republican senators who still haven’t endorsed Trump: Despite Trump’s positive polling and historic fundraising numbers since a New York City jury found Trump guilty on all 34 counts against him, there are still several Republicans who will not say whether or not they will be supporting Trump in November. The Caller reached out to every Senate Republican who has yet to endorse Trump, to ask why and if they would be soon. Here Are The Senate Republicans Who Have Not Endorsed Trump:  Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski Utah Sen. Mitt Romney Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul Maine Sen. Susan Collins Indiana Sen. Todd Young Romney, Young, Collins and Murkowski have all said they would not be voting for Trump in 2024. Rand Paul might get a pass since he tends to be pretty good on Revivalist policy items. The rest? Suspect. McConnell’s endorsement was tepid and forced. He’s done nothing to help the cause. We are so far past the point where new leadership is needed that it’s acutely painful. If you’ve read those stories in legacy corporate media outlets about how endangered Senate Democrats are hanging on to leads in polling against their Republican opponents in red states like Ohio and Montana and you’ve been scratching your head as to how that could possibly happen, it’s not complicated. Mitch McConnell is the least popular politician in Washington, and the average voter associates his performance with the concept of a Republican majority in the Senate. And the average voter is not wrong to do that. McConnell is the personification of the problem, to be sure, but he isn’t the whole problem. Most of the problem is the caucus itself. 2. The Southern Poverty Defamation Center Is Dumping Employees As Charles Barkley would say, this is just turrible: The far-left smear factory the Southern Poverty Law Center reportedly terminated a quarter of its staff Wednesday, weakening and perhaps eliminating two of its departments amid a restructure that heavily hit its union members. The SPLC “gutted its staff by a quarter,” the organization’s union posted on X. (Yes, this nonprofit organization has its own labor union. If staff get tired of protesting Alliance Defending Freedom, they can protest management, instead.) The SPLC told more than 60 union members, including five union stewards and the union’s chair, that they would be losing their jobs. “We are devastated for our union and our colleagues,” the union posted. This might be my favorite tweet of all time: Today, @splcenter – an organization with nearly a billion dollars in reserves, given an F rating by CharityWatch for “hoarding” donations – gutted its staff by a quarter. — SPLC Union (@SPLCUnion) June 12, 2024 Is anybody sympathetic to these people? I hope not. The dark lining to this brilliant white cloud is that the leftist agitators being let go by the greedheads at the SPLC won’t go and get real jobs. Last week I had a story at The Hayride about the Left’s reaction to the new city of St. George, a previously unincorporated suburban area here in the Baton Rouge area that recently became a new city after a decade-long fight: apparently, for citizens of a non-declining area to form a city is “white fortressing,” according to a pair of “researchers” for the Soros-funded Urban Institute, writing at Bloomberg. One of the two “researchers” is a Mexican female named Luisa Godinez-Puig (I’m not calling her a Mexican because she’s Hispanic; she’s a Mexican import whose law degree comes from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México). And before Godinez-Puig landed at her current job, she was on the staff of Ibram X. Kendi’s idiotic Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University as a doctoral fellow. Kendi had to jettison a whole bunch of people lately because the money is running out. Whether Godinez-Puig was one of them or not, she nonetheless migrated to the Urban Institute and went right on calling regular Americans racists from a new sinecure at a different left-wing pseudo-academic political shop. So all this really means for the unionized race baiters being evacuated from the SPLC is a new line on their resumes. Still, any suffering is good suffering where they’re concerned. 3. At Least He Didn’t Drop a Deuce This Time We don’t need to apply too much commentary to this: Joe Biden wanders off and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni had to go wrangle him back in.. pic.twitter.com/CAzunBqDkZ — Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) June 13, 2024 Can you imagine being Giorgia Meloni and having the “smart set” trash you as a right-wing loon, and then this potato-brained old man shows up to represent the United States, and the same “smart set” mob gives him the benefit of the doubt? That has to be irritating. One can’t help but think, though, that these persistent incidents — which are getting continuously more frequent and glaring by the day — won’t make for some growing problems for the Democrats. Stock up on popcorn and pudding. Or, as noted yesterday, beaver nuggets from Buc-ee’s, which might just be the official snack of Normie American schadenfreude in 2024. 4. Jake Sullivan Is to Blame for the Loss of the Petrodollar When the fallout from this really starts to hit, Sullivan, a longtime peddler of the Trump-Russia hoax and the architect of that disgusting mass lie told by some 50 intelligence community spooks about Hunter Biden’s laptop being Russian disinformation, is the one who should wear it. Sullivan was made national security adviser for having pulled off that Big Lie in front of the American people. Well, here’s how well that’s working out: The financial markets are bracing for disruption now that Saudi Arabia decided not to renew its 50-year petrodollar partnership with the United States, MSN reported. This opens the door for Saudi Arabia to sell oil and other goods — instead of exclusively in the U.S. dollar — in multiple other currencies, including the Chinese renminbi, and in euros, yen, and digital currencies such as bitcoin. Saudi Arabia’s shift to other currencies is expected to hasten the global movement away from the dollar. The contract, originally signed on June 8, 1974, expired on June 9, 2024, although the petrodollar system was established in 1972, when the U.S. decoupled its currency from gold. The 1974 security agreement that the U.S. and Saudi Arabia signed heralded close cooperation between the two countries by establishing two joint commissions, one on economic cooperation and the second on Saudi Arabia’s military needs. The United States’ goal was to motivate the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to ramp up its oil production and foster cooperation not only with that country but other Arab nations as well. We’re teetering on the brink of losing the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency. When we do, we’re going to hit the federal government’s real debt limit — meaning that the financial markets will stop buying our government’s debentures. Sullivan was made the point man to get the Saudis to renew that deal, but the regime he’s a key part of made that impossible through stupid policy and worse diplomacy. What consequences should fall on him? The British used to shoot an admiral or two for gross incompetence, pour encourager les autres. I guess Sullivan can be glad he’s not British and this isn’t the 18th century. 5. The Best Ad of All Time This actually went up on local TV in North Carolina 15 years ago. I hadn’t seen it until a few days ago, but I couldn’t stop laughing. And it infused me with a deep love for my fellow man regardless of race. Surely it’ll have the same effect on you: The post Five Quick Things: Why Aren’t the Rest With J.D. Vance? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.