[The Federalist] As Republicans consider who ought to be tasked with responding to President Biden’s State of the Union address on March 1, they have the luxury of an obvious, unobjectionable choice whose message speaks to the moment, and to their priorities in 2022: Virginia’s Lieutenant Governor, Winsome Sears.The San Francisco school board recalls are just the latest sign that American voters are fed up with the state of things in almost every arena, but particularly when it comes to school closures, mask and vaccine mandates, and the racial politicization of education.
They are tired of a White House and Democratic leadership in Washington which has spent the past year squabbling with its own flanks, left and center, and pretending despite all evidence that it is intolerant intransigent insurgency-minded Republicans who are the problem — not inflation.
The White House’s massive miscalculations over the past year are obvious. Instead of taking the win with Operation Warp Speed’s vaccines and using their wide availability as a path to get life, schools, and government policy back to normal as soon as possible, they doubled down on performative emergencies as a justification for insane policy packages no one understood. They doubled down on the Sunday show musings of Anthony Fauci, the arbitrary guidance of Rochelle Walensky, and the whiplash recommendations of their supposed experts at an alphabet soup of agencies. They doubled down on bureaucratic mandates and pressure campaigns that ran into the harsh reality of the Constitution.