Democrats Didn’t Pass Their Toxic Spending Spree For Midterms But In Spite Of Them

Elle ReynoldsAugust 9, 2022

Why in the world are flailing Democrats, in the face of disheartening midterm prospects, trying to boost their popularity by spending us deeper into inflation and radically expanding one of America’s least popular federal agencies, the IRS? The answer is that they’re not trying to boost their popularity. They’re trying to transform America.

The outrageously named “Inflation Reduction Act” does nothing to reduce inflation and will likely exacerbate it by spending even more money. It kneecaps the energy industry, imposing additional charges on oil companies for emissions with a stated aim of cutting emissions 40 percent by 2030, while spending taxpayer dollars to subsize electric vehicles for the wealthy.

Among a wide swath of other spending, it also pours almost $80 billion into the IRS — more than what 47,000 Americans would make in their entire lifetimes, based on median earnings. Part of that spending spree would enable the IRS to hire as many as 87,000 new agents, enabling them to go after Americans even more efficiently. And contrary to the talking point that it will crack down on mega-corporations, the majority of the IRS’s audits appear to be targeted at Southern and flyover communities with a conspicuous shortage of audits in the Northeast and California.

So if the bill isn’t full of popular voter-attracting goodies, why pass it, especially now? The truth is, the package isn’t a last-ditch effort to lose fewer seats in the November competition, which all signs indicate will be a damning indictment of a failure-prone Biden administration and the president’s party. The Democrat grab bag isn’t for the impending midterms, it’s in spite of them.

Democrats are willing to sacrifice an election that’s already unlikely to be in their favor, because they have far longer-term goals. They are playing the long game in order to impose their vision of a radically different America on voters, and it’s fine by them if those voters cause short-term setbacks; history has proven the setbacks are temporary.

Democrats made the same calculated gamble when passing the similarly ill-named Affordable Care Act in 2010, before the GOP and Tea Party candidates swept in the midterms later that year. In the end, Republicans failed to use their wins to repeal Obamacare, and Democrats won the game in the long term. They are content to rely on the same strategy again, knowing Republicans are usually ineffective at rolling back Democrat policies.

Assuming a Republican takeover of Congress this November, will the GOP rally enough to repeal this abominable box of inflationary climate spending, suppression of American energy production (and the higher gas prices that inevitably follow), drug price fixing, and new tax cops? That would be great, but it’s hardly likely. Their effort to repeal Obamacare had the wind of the Tea Party at its back and still managed to fizzle. For a bill that Democrats rushed through under a brazenly false name with the corporate media running cover, the odds of squishy GOP congressmen effectively turning back the Democrats’ agenda are slim to none.

A Republican victory in November sounds nice, and will hopefully help slow efforts to pass any more radical Democrat wish-list bills for a while (unless Republicans jump the aisle and help, as they did with the anti-Second Amendment crackdown in June). But if the GOP doesn’t have better goals than warming congressional benches, it’s going to be useless in the long-term fight against the Democrat agenda.

That agenda includes taxpayer-funded abortion on demand for any reason until a baby is being born; the practical abolition of the Second Amendment; the elimination of the natural oil and gas industries with complete dependence on pricey and often ineffective “green” energy; taxpayer-financed operations to mutilate the genitals of confused minors; radical race and gender theories in public education; and federal enforcement of letting men in women’s restrooms, prisons, sports, and shelters, to name a few.

The way things are going, a few years of Republican majorities in Congress won’t stop the steamroller, and Democrats know it. They are arrogant enough to look voters in the eye and say, “We know you won’t like more inflation, more IRS audits, higher gas prices, and fewer freedoms, but we are powerful enough without your support and this is the agenda we want to pass anyway.” The only way to stop the steamroller is for the GOP to learn how to punch back — to tear down power-grab legislation like Democrats’ most recent bill, and to push the pendulum even further in the opposite direction.

When Republicans win a majority again, they shouldn’t just fire the new posse of IRS agents, they should slash the agency’s budget and bureaucratic power even further. They shouldn’t just prevent a universal abortion free-for-all, they should pass legislation recognizing the constitutional right to life for the unborn.

They shouldn’t just slow Democrat efforts to force taxpayers to pay sham doctors to chop off the healthy organs of confused children, they should ban those procedures as the child abuse that they are. They shouldn’t just walk back federal agencies’ attempts to force boys into girls’ bathrooms at school, they should pass legislation protecting girls’ spaces as just that. Opportunities for landing actually-significant blows on the Democrat agenda are near endless, but to take advantage of them requires a spine and a long-term vision.

Until the GOP realizes what game Democrats are playing and starts adjusting its defense and offense accordingly, comebacks like the one Republicans anticipate in November will do little to slow, much less stop, the steady transformation of the America we know into just another socialist kleptocracy. It’s not enough to warm the bench; if the GOP wants a fighting chance at long-term relevance, it has to start moving the ball down the field.

Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.