Well, the Democrats spent about $40M to try and win a seat in a purplish district and failed. Pajama Boy not only underperformed Hillary in the district; he got fewer votes than the 2016 Democrat candidate in 2016.

So, maybe they need to up the ante and, in 2018, spend $50M on each of the 25 districts they need to retake the House. A cool $1.25 Billion. (About what Hillary spent in 2016, BTW.)

One potential fly in the ointment… the Democrat Party is broke and had a terrible fundraising month in May.

Many Democrats really believe that recruiting clones of Liz Warren and Kamala Harris and engaging in more street violence will help them flip red districts in the Midwest to blue. It won’t.

Nothing preps you for next election more than concluding your team is too virtuous to win & voters are too evil or dumb to see the truth. – Jonah Goldberg

A few Democrats recognize that normal Americans care about the economy, (also, border security, and protecting civil society from terrorism {the Trump agenda}). Not a phony, “Russia Russia Russia” scandal ginned up by Hillary Clinton campaign operatives after losing an election, or phony, virtue-signaling issues like Transgender locker rooms for teenagers. But all of the money and power in the Democrat Party is held by wealthy people in Washington, New York, San Francisco, and Chicago.

(BTW: It also looks like Trump was right about illegal voters. There may have been five million or more of them in the 2016 election.)

Honestly, the best shot the Democrats have at retaking the House and Senate in 2018 is for Republicans to continue to sabotage the Trump agenda. The Republican Establishment may despise PDT, but Republican voters want border security, want tax and regulatory reform to help grow the economy, want a revitalized manufacturing sector, and want a rational policy response to the growing threat of Islamic Supremacist terror. If Republicans in Congress don’t deliver on this agenda, then they will bodily function away their majority.  The only question is whether they hate Trump more than they love their phony-baloney jobs.

The flow of new regulations (Government micromanagement) under Donald Trump is running at a tiny fraction of the fearsome clip of Barack Obama.

President Trump is winning on one key campaign promise, cutting regulations and virtually eliminating the release of new ones.

In fact, he has cut the output of costly regulations so deeply that a group that charts the federal government’s output of rules has called the shift “historic.”

American Action Forum told Secrets that Trump has cut the output of regulations to just 8 percent of the averages under former President Obama and other recent administrations.

What’s more, the cost of the new regulations has dropped from an average of $26 billion to $33 million, or just 0.12 of the past average for the first five months of the year.

Nice start, but regulatory reform is desperately needed if the economy is to grow at its full potential. Regulatory reform is unsexy, and doesn’t make for good re-election ads, but the almost 100,000 pages of Federal Regulations and our absurd 70,000 page tax code force our industries to compete with the world with cinder blocks strapped to their feet.

And here’s something else Trump is doing right:

The Justice Department announced Wednesday it will no longer allow prosecutors to strike settlement agreements with big companies directing them to make payouts to outside groups, ending an Obama-era practice that Republicans decried as a “slush fund” that padded the accounts of liberal interest groups.

Under Obama, coerced settlements were used to force businesses to fund left-wing groups and created the professional protest industry to guarantee that there will be media-friendly protests any time any left-wing policy is in danger of being overturned.

Washington “Democracy Dies in Darkness*” Post: Bannon: Trump administration is in unending battle for ‘deconstruction of the administrative state’

Atop Trump’s agenda, Bannon said, was the “deconstruction of the administrative state” — meaning a system of taxes, regulations and trade pacts that the president and his advisers believe stymie economic growth and infringe upon one’s sovereignty.

This goes a long way toward explaining the Left’s absolute derangement with Steve Bannon. The all-powerful, unelected bureaucracy is the Left’s primary implement of social control.

* Yes, that’s their new motto, and not the name of Metallica’s next album.

Democrats have vowed to filibuster Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee if it is anyone other than Lockstep Leftist Merrick Garland, who would have cemented the left-wing majority of Democrat dreams. (Hat Tip RSG). They are also dragging their feet on Trump’s cabinet nominations. This is the political equivalent of a two-year-old throwing herself on the floor at WalMart and screaming until she’s red in the face because Mom said she couldn’t have a Barbie doll.

In playing these childish political games, Democrats in the US House and Senate are behaving much like Wisconsin Democrats did under Governor Scott Walker. Remember when a bunch of them left the state to deny the senate the necessary quorum to pass a budget? Remember their failed attempt to recall Scott Walker?  Remember how they tried to run a Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice off the bench and replace him with a Democrat hack? And, of course, they compared Walker to Hitler.

I can’t help but wonder if the childish antics and tantrums of Wisconsin Democrats are one of the reasons Wisconsin went red this time around, and why Ron Johnson handily re-won his senate seat against leftist darling Russ Feingold? Not only that, solid Republican majorities have been elected to the Wisconsin State Legislature.

One of the reasons Donald Trump is president may be because of the decision made by Democrats in the first term of George W. Bush’s presidency to go scorched Earth. George W. Bush was a pretty moderate Republican, who prided himself on “reaching across the aisle” (Republican codespeak for “giving Democrats whatever they want.”) He let Ted Kennedy author the No Child Left Behind law. He created a new Medicare Prescription Drug entitlement. He pushed for amnesty for millions of undocumented Democrat voters, and, on his watch, was more likely to prosecute Border Patrol Agents than illegal immigrants. On conservative initiatives like supplementing social security with private investment accounts, or opening Alaskan wastelands to oil exploration, he folded faster than Superman on laundry day.

Did Democrats cut him any credit for this? No, they compared him to Hitler and fantasized about assassinating him.

Likewise, Mitt Romney, was a very moderate Republican; moderate enough to be elected governor of Massachusetts and sign the first draft of Obamacare into law. He was also pro-gun control and a Global Warming True Believer.  Did it matter? Nope, he was still Hitler.  And they said he wanted to put women into binders and outlaw tampons.

Democrats created this no-win scenario where Republicans would never advance any conservative ideas, and would get called Hitler no matter how much they appeased the left. If it any wonder that Republicans voters finally said, “Screw it, we’re gonna give them Trump.” And now that Democrat Media organs are making the Trump-Hitler comparison … the only people who are impressed are the same people who said that Bush was Hitler and Romney was Hitler. We get it. Every Republican is Hitler. Whatever.

Now that Democrats are embracing childish temper tantrums as their party’s signature move, the question is whether the rest of the country is going to go along with it? Or whether enough sensible people will tire of their antics and shift to the right, as happened in Wisconsin.

Donald Trump’s budget team is said to be considering major, significant cuts to the bloated, gigantic Federal Leviathan built up by Bush and Obama.

Overall, the blueprint being used by Trump’s team would reduce federal spending by $10.5 trillion over 10 years.

At the Department of Justice, the blueprint calls for eliminating the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, Violence Against Women Grants and the Legal Services Corporation and for reducing funding for its Civil Rights and its Environment and Natural Resources divisions.

At the Department of Energy, it would roll back funding for nuclear physics and advanced scientific computing research to 2008 levels, eliminate the Office of Electricity, eliminate the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and scrap the Office of Fossil Energy, which focuses on technologies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Under the State Department’s jurisdiction, funding for the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the Paris Climate Change Agreement and the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are candidates for elimination.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be privatized, while the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities would be eliminated entirely.

I’m gonna see a doctor if my response to this article lasts more than four hours.

Please don’t get me wrong, I don’t wish GHWB any ill, like all decent Americans, I wish him a speedy and thorough recovery and many happy years left on Earth. However, the symbolism of Bush 41 being possibly on his death bed as Trump takes office is so strong I’m surprised Peggy Noonan hasn’t written four columns about it.

The Bush Brand of Republicanism has dominated the GOP ever since 1989, when Bush 41 took office and almost immediately began repudiating everything Ronald Reagan had accomplished. “Bushism” could be characterized as using ‘conservative’ as a brand for electioneering, and occasionally paying lip-service to social conservatism and fiscal responsibility. In practice, it meant continuing to expand the Federal Government, deficit spending, and expensive-but-indecisive foreign wars. The Bush Style of Republican politics was a tacit acceptance that liberal Democrats and the media were the natural owners and operators of Washington DC, and Republicans should consider themselves temporary, unwelcome guests and defer to their hosts as much as possible.

Bush 41 gave us the largest tax increase in history up to that point, foreign interventions in Panama and Kuwait, the Americans with Disabilities Act (well-intended, but a massive regulatory burden) and David Souter on the Supreme Court.

Bush 43 gave up a minor, temporary tax cut (that left tax rates higher than his father had raised them), monstrously expensive but ultimately indecisive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a massive influx of illegal immigrants, massive increases in domestic spending, No Child Left Behind, McCain-Feingold, Sarbanes-Oxley, the TSA, the Incandescent Lightbulb ban, a doubling of the National Debt, the Prescription Drug Entitlement, and John Roberts on the Supreme Court.

In the Obama years, Bushism has meant that Republican majorities in the House and Senate verbally attack the progressive policies of the Obama administration, occasionally pass meaningless symbolic votes against them…. but at the end of the day fully fund every initiative even ones like ‘Exectuve Amnesty’ that they claim to oppose.

We don’t know that President Trump will bring, but he has already made it clear, he’s not going to just play nice with the Democrat Media Complex that seeks only to destroy him. He has appointed General James Mattis as Secretary of Defense and put Jeff Sessions in as Attorney General. He has nominated an advocate for school-choice as Secretary of Education, and a skeptic of Global Warming Hysteria as head of the EPA. He is rumored to be considering repealing as many as 100 of Obama’s Executive Orders upon taking office, and ordering his agency heads to pursue 20% budget cuts. And he really does intend to get serious about stopping illegal immigration.

It is impossible to imagine Jeb Bush doing any of this.