As the opposition to critical race theory (CRT) grows, the state of Washington just enacted legislation requiring all public school teachers to be trained in the ideology. Jason Rantz wrote for The Federalist:

The race-obsessed framework isn’t relegated to schools in Seattle, where you’d expect a victim-centered ideology like critical race theory to flourish. Thanks to the state’s Democrat-controlled legislature, a trio of bills just signed into law mandates critical race theory training for all public school teachers. Another even requires training for medical students, teaching them it’s as essential to be social justice activists as it is to treat patients.

Former FEC Chair Brad Smith published an op-ed today in the National Review today entitled: “The First Amendment Is Lucky to Have Mitch McConnell.” That is both a great headline and an accurate salute to the Republican Senate Leader at a time when Democrats have declared war on the First Amendment through the Corrupt Politicians Act (H.R.1/S.1). That said, a key part of Senator McConnell’s leadership on the First Amendment is not partisan:

Surprisingly few elected officials are willing to come to the defense of campaigns and other organized efforts to effect change. Americans celebrate their freedoms to speak and organize into groups, but once an organization achieves success, support for its rights tends to give way to concerns about “influence.” It’s rare to find politicians who support equally the freedom to speak of the NRA and the Brady Campaign, the League of Conservation Voters and the Chamber of Commerce, or pro-life groups and Planned Parenthood.

For over a quarter century, Mitch McConnell has stood as the Senate’s most consistent, articulate, and dogged defender of the First Amendment rights these organizations rely on. Way back in 1994, he engineered the defeat of a bill to fund campaigns with Americans’ tax dollars, a policy that remains at the top of the progressive agenda today and that reappears in S. 1. He has frustrated bad ideas from the right, too, such as in 2006, when he was one of only three Senate Republicans to oppose an amendment to the U.S. Constitution permitting the criminalization of flag-burning. That amendment fell just one vote short.

Vanita Gupta has been confirmed to be Associate Attorney General by a mostly party-line vote. She remains one of the most controversial nominations made by the Biden Administration so far. Presidents are entitled to nominate qualified individuals to fill political positions, but as Republican Leader Mitch McConnell explained on the Senate floor earlier today, Gupta falls outside of the mainstream:

Earlier today, Democrat members of Congress announced the introduction of legislation that would expand the number of members on the U.S. Supreme Court from 9 to 13 justices. Liberals claimed that Republicans were alarmist when they suggested this would happen with Democrat control of Congress and the White House, but here we are. Just last week, President Joe Biden announced the formation of the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States which many see as a vehicle for making the idea of packing the Supreme Court mainstream. 

The backlash by woke corporate interests in response to Georgia's new election law got even worse over the weekend, and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has something to say about it: “We are witnessing a coordinated campaign by powerful and wealthy people to mislead and bully the American people," he said in a statement released on Monday morning.

Our private sector must stop taking cues from the Outrage-Industrial Complex. Americans do not need or want big business to amplify disinformation or react to every manufactured controversy with frantic left-wing signaling. My full statement: https://t.co/3Ck3qW4Mbe

— Leader McConnell (@LeaderMcConnell) April 5, 2021

Earlier today, the Senate Rules Committee held a hearing on the Corrupt Politicians Act. As Senator Cruz pointed out, Democrats have made keeping themselves in power their #1 priority for this Congress despite the myriad of important issues facing the country.

Democrats’ #1 priority is not:

❌ Defeating the #COVID pandemic

❌ Getting people back to work

❌ Helping kids return to the classrooms

It’s keeping themselves in power. pic.twitter.com/oEytF7D1q2

— Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) March 24, 2021

Senator Schumer is scared of a primary challenge from far left Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He is willing to go to any extreme to appease the radical fringes of the Democratic Party including blowing up the Senate to do so. A good example of this is talk of eliminating the legislative filibuster. Not only have Democrat Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin said they will not vote to repeal the legislative filibuster, but even liberal stalwarts such as Dianne Feinstein have hesitated to do it (she is now showing signs that she might cave to pressure after flip flopping on the issue literally overnight). As Republican Leader McConnell stated last week:

 “He is yielding to the pressure of the hard left to turn the Senate into a speedway, as opposed to a place where things are paused and thought over,” McConnell said during an interview with Fox News’s Harris Faulkner. . . .

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden signaled that he may be throwing his support behind the progressive movement to dismantle the filibuster in its current form. But even Democrats know that getting rid of the legislative filibuster would be a bad idea. . . As Politico reports: 

Two Democratic senators, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, are hard opponents of changes to the 60-vote threshold. But that duo's firm resistance is obscuring the size of another, bigger faction in the Democratic caucus — call them softer opponents of ending the filibuster.

Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell has always defended maintaining the legislative filibuster while Republicans were in both the majority and the minority. This is a bipartisan issue which even former-Senators Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have also supported. It should be noted the legislative filibuster is very different from the filibuster used on nominations which was mostly eliminated by then Senate Majority Leader Harry Ried in 2013.  (Senator McConnell ended it for Supreme Court nominees in 2017 when Democrats filibustered Justice Neil Gorsuch's nomination.)  

However, Sen. Chuck Schumer is flirting to remove this critical democratic process. McConnell is fighting to preserve the legislative filibuster which lets a senator extend debate and requires controversial bills to muster 60 votes to proceed to a final up-or-down vote.

For the first time since 2017, all of the seats on the Federal Election Commission are filled. Allen Dickerson, Sean Cooksey, and Shana Broussard were confirmed by the Senate earlier today. Dickerson and Cooksey are Republicans, while Broussard is a Democrat. Some may find it odd for a Republican President to appoint a Democrat, but no more than 3 of the 6 commissioners can be from the same political party. The votes for the Republican nominees were largely along party lines.