Rep. Moulton must have read wrong. See, Teddy Roosevelt said, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Somehow the Massachusetts Democrat thought the sage words were, “Speak loudly and be a big weenie.”
After the election last year, Moulton criticized his party for avoiding controversial issues like biological men competing in women’s sports. “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest…I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.” The reaction by his constituents confirmed why: His comment on the topic were widely criticized and there were resignation from his staff.
But Moulton continued to channel “Profiles in Courage.” “I stand firmly in my belief for the need for competitive women’s sports to put limits on the participation of those with the unfair physical advantages that come with being born male,” he said. “I probably will be primaried,” he told CNN. “And that’s great. That just proves my point: you can’t speak a sentence that’s out of line and not get backlash from the left. But that’s OK. This is a democracy.”
Impressive. Then, last month, Moulton quietly voted against the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which bans biological males from competing in girls’ school sports. Only two Democrats voted for the bill. He had been the most vocal Democrat in supporting its purpose, but when the time came to vote consistently with his fervent devotion to the safety of his daughters in their future athletic pursuits, he decided that he didn’t want to be primaried after all.
Coward. Liar. Hypocrite. Weasel. Hack.
Ethics Alarms 
I’ll dig into it when I have the chance, but I’ve found that as a consequence of having a system that almost seems to pride itself in putting irrelevant shit into what should be simple bills, that it’s fairly common for something to happen to this to happen not just because someone doesn’t want to be primaried, but because there was a poison pill inserted at some point.
Was the bill clean, straightforward, and did what the title of the bill said? If so: guy’s an ass. If not….
Oh, you don’t have to guess whether the bill was full of some other junk: I’m sure it was. And pure partisan votes like this one are always rationalized and excused later by pointing to some other feature of the bill, sometimes sincerely, more often not.
Pork barreling is one of those bizarre Americanisms that I think Americans have been frog-boiled into accepting, but probably aren’t great. I actually heard someone defend the practice as necessary because they thought that if you couldn’t bribe votes in the house with pork, nothing would ever pass.
I mean, first… That’s either not true, or a condemnation of the American system; clean bills get passed the world over on a daily basis.
Second… Fewer bills would get passed? Don’t threaten me with a good time.
Reagan and Clinton both made unsuccessful efforts to fight it. But it should be easy: all a POTUS has to do is say that he won’t sign any bill that takes him more than 20 minutes to read.
You know, Trump is just the president to say that, if only he would.
If memory serves the House GOP caucus got rid of a lot of this when they took control in 2011. It was a different title — carveouts? I cannot recall, but it’s where a congressman is able to put a line item into a spending bill to fund a pet project back in his district.
At any rate they did away with it but then the Democrats brought it back in 2019 or 2021. To their disgrace, Republicans not only took part in the practice then but didn’t get rid of it in 2023.
That’s my recollection, at least. Not exactly the same as pork barrel spending, but close.
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The other part of this is that this guy is already an apostate. He’s likely to get primaried even though he crawled back into line.
“The other part of this is that this guy is already an apostate. He’s likely to get primaried even though he crawled back into line.”
Yeah, the left has never really had “forgive and forget” in its vocabulary.Just ask J. K. Rowling . . . or Al Franken . . . or RFK Jr.
. . . or a certain former Democrat from NYC who ran for President as a Republican. What was that guy’s name again . . . ?
–Dwayne
“Earmarks” was the term I was looking for. We shut them down once, but have allowed them back in. Very sad.