February 19, 2023 --

First an example of bad Realpolitik:

Speaker McCarthy is fooling himself if he thinks he can find "common ground" with President Biden on the national debt.

For Democrats, "common ground" with Republicans is just a euphemism for diktat. Here, based on past political practice, is what will happen until Mr, McCarthy caves in to Biden's (or his handlers') demands. Biden, with media megaphones in support, will claim that because of Republican obstinacy, government must shutdown. Hysterical predictions of default, depression, and disaster will fill the front pages and nightly newscasts. BLAME will be poured on Republican heads, with dire warnings that the Republicans will lose the presidency and both houses of Congress in 2024 -- if the country can last that long. Reason will be tossed to the winds.

To our great future regret, in less than a week, Biden will announce that sanity prevailed, his administration has saved the country, all is economically well.And that will prove as false as the leftist propaganda that the Russians elected Mr. Trump, in 2016. Why? The fact of a country that is more than $30 trillion in debt is the definition of economic insanity.

What should Speaker McCarthy do? He should next meet the president with the text of Federalist No. 58 in his pocket and, as Biden declares his readiness to take to the budgetary mattress against the Republicans, the speaker should read this passage from Federalist No. 58 to Biden and declare that Republicans will shout these words from the rooftops to educate the American people that budgetary irresponsibility is the basis of economic disaster, but that confidence in the wisdom of the Founding Fathers -- and Madison in particular, will ensure economic well-being for all:

The House of Representatives cannot only refuse, but they alone can propose, the supplies requisite for the support of government. They, in a word, hold the purse that powerful instrument by which we behold, in the history of the British Constitution, an infant and humble representation of the people gradually enlarging the sphere of its activity and importance, and finally reducing, as far as it seems to have wished, all the overgrown prerogatives of the other branches of the government.

This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.

In brief, wise economic Realpolitik will have Speaker McCarthy and the House GOP majority employ the "power over the purse" not to enact "fool's gold economics' but to "carry[ ] into effect every just and salutary measure."

Now an example of good Realpolitik:

The expulsion of Rep. Ilhan Omar from the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the exclusion of Representatives Schiff and Swalwell from the House Intelligence Committee mean that never again will rabid Democrat zealots keep (placid and harmless) Republicans off House committees, standing or select. Consider, please, the Independent Counsel precedent. Democrats created the Independent Counsel -- unaccountable to constitutional authority -- to get Richard M. Nixon out of the Oval Office. They never considered, however, what goes around, comes around. And after the Republicans got the gumption to name an Independent Counsel to pursue and harry President Bill Clinton, the Independent Counsel law was allowed to terminate, never to be seen again.

When the Democrats voted to removed GOP Representatives Taylor-Greene and Gosar from their standing committees, the Democrats were feeling their oats, as was Nancy Pelosi when she barred Representatives Banks and Jordan from her Jan. 6 committee which, by her invidious conduct, thereby became a kangaroo court. Now that Omar, Schiff and Swalwell have suffered reciprocal (there is no other applicable word) treatment at the hands of the Republican House majority that the full-of-themselves Democrats never imagined, one can say with complete confidence, the tawdry partisan practice of pulling political foes from House committee is at an end.