Some House mental faculties so diminished they can no longer do job, others vote drunk, high: lawmakers

 Up to a dozen members of Congress reportedly have mental faculties so diminished they can no longer do their jobs — with some even showing up drunk or stoned to cast votes.

“There’s no question that somewhere between six and a dozen of my colleagues are at a point where they’re … I think they don’t have the faculties to do their job,” Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn) told Politico, which spoke to 25 members of the House and Senate who spilled the tea on their unnamed colleagues.

A Republican colleague concurred, with an important addendum.

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The house is awash in alcohol and members in cognitive decline, members say.lazyllama – stock.adobe.com

“I have a difficult time sometimes telling between the deterioration of members and a handful who are just not very smart,” the unnamed lawmaker said.  

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After President Biden’s 2024 presidential campaign spectacular collapse due to his age-related cognitive issues, the issue of elected officials hanging on past their expiration date has come sharply into focus — with neither chamber of Congress being spared.

Former California Sen. Dianne Feinstein held office despite being so diminished she was forced to cede power of attorney to her daughter. Texas Rep. Kay Granger — the powerful former chair of the House Appropriations Committee — was found in an assisted living facility last year after being AWOL for six months.

“The United States Congress is the world’s most prestigious senior center,” Rep. Ritchie Torres, 36, (D-NY) quipped to The Post.

Some lawmakers claimed late night votes in the House are rarely cast entirely sober.

“Every time we do an 11 p.m. vote, a minority of the chamber has a zero blood alcohol content. Now, that’s different than voting drunk. I don’t think I’ve ever seen somebody demonstrably drunk on the floor,” Himes noted.

Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) claimed to have seen one GOPer who “show[ed] up drunk” several times — and that “there were one or two Dems I thought might be high on something, but not drunk.”

Added Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY): “I would say DC is more like ‘Veep.’ We’ve had a couple of ‘Veep’ moments in my office.”

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Some lawmakers claimed late night votes in the House are rarely cast entirely sober.motortion – stock.adobe.com
Other members cried poverty about their $174,000 salary — something which has not been adjusted for inflation in 15 years.

“I have people who land in the airport here and call me and ask, can I send my car for them. I mean, my first term up here I didn’t even own a car,” said South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn — one of the most powerful Democrats in the chamber.

Added Himes: “Everybody thinks that we fly around on Air Force One and dine at the French embassy every night. But the reality is, I’m eating burritos and McDonald’s more often than I’m dining in any embassies.”

https://nypost.com/2025/03/08/us-news/some-house-members-have-mental-faculties-so-diminished-they-can-no-longer-do-their-jobs-and-others-voting-drunk-high-lawmakers/

The Joe Biden ‘Now They Tell Us’ Phenomenon

 Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. I want to talk today about this sudden phenomenon of “Now they tell us.”

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, everyone, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, they all knew about Joe Biden’s dementia. Suddenly we’re given all of these revealing quotes that he was completely physically and mentally unfit to carry out the oath of office.

But we all knew that. People had been writing about it. And yet, when you wrote about it, you were called a “cheap faker.” You were ageist.

And now they’re just telling us, “Nah, it was all a cover-up. It was all a conspiracy. You were right all along, you people. He was demented and challenged.”

Francis Collins at the National Institutes of Health, he’s now coming out—and he has for a long time, but especially recently—in saying, “Maybe that lockdown wasn’t such a good idea. That was the lockdown that destroyed, almost, the middle class.”

“You attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never might quite recover from … ”

“Collateral damage.”

“So there—yeah, collateral damage.”

It led to missed cancer screenings, spousal abuse, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, suicides, all because we shut down, in an unprecedented fashion, our entire society, not just the economy, but the culture, the social life, the political life. And now we’re told by the architects of that failed policy that “we’re kind of sorry.”

Then there’s Joe Biden himself. He’s now openly saying that he doesn’t like what Merrick Garland did vis-a-vis Donald Trump. But he doesn’t mean that “I’m shocked that I weaponized the Department of Justice.” What he’s saying is that he wished that Merrick Garland had gone after Trump more vigorously and earlier. In other words, that lawfare wasn’t enough.

Why didn’t he say that six months ago? Why didn’t he say that during the campaign? But he didn’t.

Then we have this reporter, maybe some of you remember him, probably not, David Enrich from The New York Times. He co-authored a number of hit pieces on Brett Kavanaugh way back during the Kavanaugh hearings.

Now he’s coming out, in a letter to Mark Judge, who was one of the targets of his hit pieces: “I kind of feel bad, sort of, maybe. Maybe we went a little bit overboard. Maybe we shouldn’t have dug up things that may or may not have been true about Judge Kavanaugh when he was 17, 18. Maybe that was a bit much.”

And then we’re getting a whole nother group of what we call data dumps about the FBI and January 6th. So, not long ago, we were told, “Well, yes, there were informants, but actual agents, maybe very few. Just informants. And some of them probably wanted to go there anyway. But yes, there were informants.”

Remember Matthew Rosenberg for The New York Times had told us that. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who had covered January 6th, he said it was all cooked up—the sensationalism. That was an ambush interview by James O’Keefe. But nevertheless, it was an admission that there had—the hysteria had got out of control.

And now we’re learning that the FBI admits there were informants. And more importantly, they just released videos of the supposedly nonexistent, not really, kind of, maybe bomber who put these explosive devices in front of the DNC and the RNC, in which we were told—we weren’t told anything. We weren’t given videos. But the implication and the leaks to the media was that this was some hyper-Trump partisan.

All of these things demand the question, why now?

Why all of a sudden are we no longer crazy that Joe Biden was not fit as a fiddle, that the quarantine was a mess, that Brett Kavanaugh was not a rapist or sexual assaulter, that there’s more to January 6th than we’re told? And I could go on and on about these 11th-hour revelations.

It’s either, A, they’re afraid there’s going to be an accounting, very quickly, from the Trump administration, and they know that they had done things that were not just [unethical] but perhaps illegal.

No. 2, it also could be that in time, and they are opportunists, most of these people that I talk about—they see the national mood changing, that we’re at peak-woke and the reputation of the FBI or the NIH or journalism in general is at an all-time nadir.

Or maybe it’s something even more dramatic, like, if I were Donald Trump and his team, and we had lied and done all of these things, and I was now in power, I know what I would do to people like myself.

So, it’s a projection that they have culpable—a feeling of culpability and exposure. And now they’re trying to get everything out before there’s an accounting. Whatever the reasoning, it’s quite amusing and, in a tragic way, funny.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2025/03/07/the-joe-biden-now-they-tell-us-phenomenon/

How House Democrats became zombies

 by Newt Gingrich

As I wrote earlier this week, after attending President Donald J. Trump’s address to the Joint Session of Congress, it occurred to me that the House Democrats have become like zombies.

Their members sat mute and motionless no matter what the President said or who he honored – including a young cancer survivor, a newly accepted West Point cadet, and an American who had been held hostage in Russia. Not one House Democrat exhibited any trace of human compassion or interest. It was a bit eerie.

As I thought more about this, a lot of other things began to make sense.

The House Democrats have evolved from being a relatively rough and tumble, argumentative, and rebellious bunch in the 1960s and 1970s into a tame, passive, robotic group today.

Of course, historically, the Democratic Party has had a deep tradition of machine politics going back to the founding of Tammany Hall in New York City in 1786. Virtually every major city run by Democrats today operates this way. Over the long-term, the Democratic system simply tends to breed conformity. But this zombie-ism is a new, more extreme phenomenon.

You can start to track it with Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Recall when Pelosi held up the nearl 1,000-page Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and said, “we have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it.” At the time, I thought it was a foolish slip of the tongue. In hindsight, the Pelosi Speakership often involved Democratic members voting blindly as instructed by their elected leadership.

As Speaker in the first two years of Joe Biden’s presidency, Pelosi took full advantage of this blind loyalty to pass a slew of massive bills with no elected officials really knowing the details.

Democrat after Democrat voted for deeply unpopular policies which barred parents from know what their children were doing and learning in school, allowed men to play in women’s sports, opposed tax cuts, left the southern border open, etc. For a long time, I could not figure out how House Democrats could so brazenly ignore the will of the American people. Now I get it. They were turning into zombies.

Of course, Pelosi didn’t do it alone. The teachers’ and public employee unions kept people in line by threatening to fund primary opponents. The left-wing billionaires and activist groups also policed House Democrats members.

The propaganda media also gladly reminded Democrats of the party-movement line. From “The View,” to MSNBC, to the New York Times, and the Washington Post, the signals went out. This is who we are. This is what we believe. Those who broke rank became ostracized and isolated. Just ask Sen. Joe Manchin, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., or Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

Finally, there was sheer social pressure from other Democrats. Walking to vote and getting on an elevator with five or six hard left-wing members could have a significant influence on whether someone voted against Democratic leadership. At a practical level, losing committee assignments and watching more obedient members get the better committees is a real lever of power. I encountered this in the 1980s when several southern Democrats voted with President Ronald Reagan. They suddenly found their committee assignments and proposed legislation in jeopardy.

The ultimate example of zombie behavior in the Democratic Party was the replacement of President Biden by Vice President Kamala Harris. President Biden had won every primary. He had a virtually unanimous delegation which would have dominated the Democratic National Convention. Vice President Harris had received zero votes. Yet within a few hours, the zombies took down Biden and elevated Harris.

In a party which had spent four years lecturing about democracy, this instant switch would only have been possible in a party of zombies. They did as they were told. Applauded when they were told. And lied to themselves when they were told.

It will be interesting to see how House Democrats deal with the challenges of a dynamic, creative, and aggressive Republican Party. I expect President Trump will cheerfully run circles around the House Democrat zombies just as he did Tuesday night.

https://gingrich360.com/2025/03/07/how-the-house-democrats-became-zombies/

Report: Democratic Donor Platform ActBlue in Chaos as Workers Flee

 The Democratic National Committee’s donor platform, ActBlue, is in trouble. Republican lawmakers have targeted the organization as a potential money-laundering operation while it faces internal chaos after at least seven senior officials departed, a report claims.

The New York Times reports a lawyer at the firm accused ActBlue executives of a retaliation campaign against staff which is contributing to the turmoil.

It’s unclear what prompted the departures, which began on Feb. 21, according to the report but unions have been acting on their own assumptions while critics allege wealthy funders have been using ActBlue as a slush fund to circumvent contribution limits and funnel money to Democratic candidates.

Two organizations representing ActBlue workers sent a letter to the company’s board of directors citing the “alarming pattern” of the exits, despairing they were “eroding our confidence in the stability of the organization,” the Times reported.

Customer service and partnerships directors that had been with ActBlue for more than a decade are among the departures. Others reportedly include an associate general counsel, the highest-ranking legal counsel; an assistant research director; human resources director; and an engineer who had been with ActBlue for 16 years, the Times set out.

“Like many organizations, as we undergo some transition heading into this new election cycle, we are focused on ensuring we have a strong team in place,” ActBlue spokeswoman Megan Hughes told the outlet.

Amid the departures, according to the Times, the last remaining lawyer in the general counsel’s office posted an internal message saying his access to email and other platforms had been cut off. The lawyer is now on leave from the organization.

The staff exits follow an investigation launched last September by Republicans on the House Oversight Committee regarding “potential fraud” linked to donations made to candidates’ campaigns, as Breitbart News reported.

In a letter addressed to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Republicans such as Rep. James Comer (R-KY), Rep. Nick Langworthy (R-NY), Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH),  and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) wrote that the committee was investigating reports of “potentially fraudulent and illicit financial activity” that occurred in relation to “contributions to campaigns of candidates for federal offices mediated by online fundraising platforms like ActBlue.”

The lawmakers added the reports had raised concerns that there was “fraud and evasion of campaign finance laws,” through the exploitation of “online contribution platforms.”

“The Committee on Oversight and Accountability is investigating reports of potentially fraudulent and illicit financial activity related to contributions to campaigns of candidates for federal offices mediated by online fundraising platforms like ActBlue,” the lawmakers wrote.

“The Committee writes to request the U.S. Department of the Treasury (Treasury) make available to the Committee certain Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) relevant to the Committee’s investigation.”

As Breitbart News has previously reported, at the beginning of August, Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares raised concerns to ActBlue over “suspicious” donations that had been made in “volumes” that seemed to be “facially implausible.”

Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray and Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey were also reported to have announced investigations into ActBlue.

In December 2023, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton also began an investigation into ActBlue to find out if its “operations are compliant with all applicable laws.”

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2025/03/07/report-democratic-donor-platform-actblue-in-chaos-as-workers-flee/

Crimefighting that works

 In the late 1980s and early 1990s, things were about as bad as they could get in New York City. Roughly 2,000 residents were dying in homicides every year, far more than double the per capita rate of the United States as a whole. Public spaces, from the busy streets of downtown Manhattan to the dingy subway system, felt fundamentally out of control.

Back from the Brink: Inside the NYPD and New York City’s Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop; By Peter Moskos; Oxford University Press; 312 pp., $29.95

But then things improved at a rate no one could have thought possible. Homicides fell two-thirds in the Big Apple between 1993 and 1998, far faster than they fell elsewhere in the country. And while New York has never exactly been clean, the growing sense of public order was palpable to all who lived there, with some even complaining of a “Disneyfied” Times Square and the loss of New York City’s all-important seedy character.

Subsequent improvements have been more gradual, with some ground lost on occasion. But today, the striking reality is that America’s biggest city consistently has a homicide rate lower than that of the country as a whole.

What happened? In very large part, the New York City Police Department happened. Over this time frame, the NYPD implemented an entirely new strategy, combining a conviction that police could reduce crime if they tried, an appreciation of the fact that seemingly minor “broken windows” such as public drug use can fester a sense of disorder, a willingness to experiment with new ideas, and a simple but technology-fueled system of tracking where crimes happened and sending police to address the problem.

Back from the Brink, from the sociologist and former Baltimore police officer Peter Moskos, tells this story from the inside. The book is an oral history, in which Moskos briefly introduces each chapter and then lets his sources, ranging from former NYPD commissioners to everyday officers and community leaders, take it from there via lengthy interview excerpts.

This approach to storytelling has its trade-offs. But it nicely captures the experience of saving a city from ruin and allows each individual’s voice to truly come through — especially if one reads most of the book in a gruff New York cop accent.

There is, of course, a backstory to how New York found itself in such a dire situation by 1990, and that is where Back to the Brink begins. Walter Signorelli, who became an officer in 1967, tells Moskos that even then, crime was so high that he was taken out of the police academy after two months: They “put us walking around on foot post” alone in the South Bronx, wearing telltale police academy uniforms. “They left you out there without any control and supervision, very little training. You didn’t have a radio. If you needed help you were supposed to bang your nightstick on the curb.”

In 1975 came New York’s infamous bankruptcy and police layoffs that lasted two years. Charles Campisi, a patrolman at the time who later became a bureau chief, remembers fights between laid-off officers and sergeants who were annoyed about filling out the associated paperwork. He tells Moskos he still has his own layoff notice, and some officers hung theirs in their lockers: “It’s the late ’70s, major crimes are soaring, and the cops are disengaged.”

The next decade was little better for the city but showed signs of what was to come. Crime stayed high despite experiments such as the “Community Patrol Officer Program,” in which officers were sent out to connect with business owners and other members of the community and which Moskos’s sources remember with a mix of fondness and disdain. The ’80s also saw a major effort to rid the subway of graffiti. Jack Maple, later a deputy commissioner, made a name for himself using “decoys,” officers disguised as easy victims, to catch robbers, and with the Transit Police began pioneering the crime-mapping techniques that would later drive the bigger successes of the 1990s. 

It’s delicious to conservatives that it took a Republican mayor to fix one of America’s bluest cities, and there is more than a little truth to the claim. But the years of David Dinkins’s mayoralty, running from 1990 through 1993, planted some of the seeds of Rudy Giuliani’s success. These included an initiative to hire more officers that began in 1990 but provided its biggest graduating class in 1994, and great strides made in ongoing efforts to improve places like Times Square, Port Authority, and Bryant Park. They also included Bill Bratton taking charge of the Transit Police, where he and Maple ramped up enforcement against fare evasion — checking for warrants along the way and finding many fare-beaters wanted for more serious offenses. Crime, especially robberies and pickpocketing, fell underground.

But it was, in fact, under Giuliani that Bratton returned from a brief stint in Boston to become commissioner, these strategies went citywide, and serious crime plummeted everywhere. Bratton and others, including the charmingly over-the-top Maple, who died in 2001 but appears here through interviews another writer recorded in the late ’90s, explain how they changed pretty much everything.

They swept aside much of the department’s top brass, swapped out the old “Maytag repairman” uniforms, changed hours so that more officers were deployed at the times when crime actually happened, and addressed quality-of-life issues such as drug dealing and illegal fireworks. Most famously of all, they collected comprehensive, up-to-date crime statistics across the city in a system they dubbed “Compstat,” used it to map patterns, and relentlessly interrogated precinct leaders at regular meetings about those patterns and how they would be addressed. These efforts paid dividends almost immediately, and crime fell.

Ultimately, the relationship between Giuliani and Bratton grew tense, with the latter departing for Los Angeles, where he replicated his success in bringing down crime. (Ego is a heckuva thing: Bratton being on the cover of Time seems to have played a role in their beef.) But these key early years proved that professional, motivated, data-driven urban policing can bring down crime and make public spaces livable, and Bratton’s successors would continue his strategies. Cities across the country, and the world, would adopt them as well.

Back from the Brink is rich not only in facts but also in character thanks to Moskos’s decision to let the officers tell their own stories. The book is a front-row seat to several decades of New York crime and policing history, featuring sources who were on the scene at the 1977 blackout, the 1984 Palm Sunday massacre, and the 1991 Crown Heights riot. There’s even an officer who later worked with members of Frank Serpico’s backup team and insists they would not have set him up. There are folks who remember the days when 911 first became available, when bulletproof vests were optional, or when officers communicated through oversized Motorola walkie-talkies.

The book is undeniably one-sided, in that its sources are overwhelmingly law enforcement. Yet even in this telling, police are not always heroes. Managing a large department entails not only motivating the unmotivated but also keeping a tight lid on corruption and abuse. As the years pass by in Moskos’s narrative, the scandals pile up too: The Knapp Commission’s investigation into rampant payoffs in the 1970s, officers in Queens torturing a suspect with a stun gun in the 1980s, the “Dirty Thirty” and similar outrages of the early 1990s involving extortion and drugs. Not to mention plenty of smaller anecdotes about, for instance, officers timing arrests at the ends of their shifts or otherwise scheming to get extra overtime.

The message here is that policing can and should be a force for immense good — under the right leadership and oversight. The New York of the mid-1990s showed departments around the world a way to get that right.

Robert VerBruggen is a Manhattan Institute fellow.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/premium/3335684/an-oral-history-of-crimefighting-that-works/

US Vetoes G-7 Shadow Fleet Task Force Plan, Signals More Change

 

The US has rejected a Canadian proposal to establish a task force that would tackle Russia’s so-called shadow fleet of oil tankers, as the Trump administration re-evaluates its positions across multilateral organizations, according to people familiar with the matter.

Canada, which holds this year’s revolving G-7 presidency, will host a summit of foreign ministers in Charlevoix, Québec, next week. In negotiations to formulate a joint statement on maritime issues, the US is pushing to strengthen language around China while watering down wording on Russia, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive matters that aren’t public.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-08/us-vetoes-g-7-shadow-fleet-task-force-plan-signals-more-change