Written By: Joe Gould for Defense News
WASHINGTON — Rep. Elaine Luria is one of the U.S. Navy’s staunchest proponents — and one of its most ruthless critics.
Luria first drew attention in 2018 as one of seven Democrats with national security backgrounds who flipped red House seats to blue. But the Virginian at times finds herself aligned with Republicans, as she champions defense spending hikes, even flatly saying earlier this year President Joe Biden’s defense budget “sucks.”
Now, the 46-year-old former Navy commander serving as the House Armed Services Committee’s vice chairwoman faces her toughest political battle yet as she works to hold onto her seat this fall.
To Democrats, Luria is a pivotal player in their quest to maintain a majority in the House — even as she finds herself at odds with fellow members of her party. To shipbuilders and sea power supporters, she’s an ally; to the Navy, she’s both a supporter and a skeptic.
Last month, she led a bipartisan coalition to boost defense spending, and she often uses her military experience to grill officials on both the size and readiness of the Navy’s fleet, and whether those factors are sufficient enough to win a war against China.
It’s a role some Navy supporters say is much needed, as the service has borne the fallout from budget fights since 9/11 that favored the military branches closer to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Retired Navy Capt. Lory Manning, now the government relations director of the Service Women’s Action Network, said Luria is helping the Navy “make up for 20 years of being underfunded or under-resourced.”
“We need people like her who really know what they’re talking about with Navy ships because there’s not that many Navy officers in Congress, and they need to know they can’t bullshit,” Manning said.
It’s a focus Luria’s betting will resonate in Virginia’s 2nd District, home to a high concentration of shipyard workers, service members, veterans and their families. The district is adjacent to the Hampton Roads area, whose local economy is tied to Naval Station Norfolk, home of the most U.S. Navy personnel, and to Norfolk Naval Shipyard, which services nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines on the East Coast.
“I spend the majority of my time talking about defense and veterans issues, and it affects everybody in my community,” Luria, who also serves on the House Veterans’ Affairs and Homeland Security committees, told Defense News during a June 24 interview in her office.
“The way I look at it is if we don’t get this right with defense, especially with China’s increased aggression against Taiwan, investing in the right Navy and air forces, none of the other stuff matters.”
More than two decades in the Navy
Luria is well known in defense circles for using her 20 years of Navy experience to scrutinize the sea service.
A Birmingham, Alabama, native, she entered the Navy at 17 after attending a U.S. Naval Academy summer science and engineering program during high school. She graduated from the academy in 1997 and was among the first women to serve in the Navy’s nuclear power program and to spend her career on combat ships before retiring in 2017.
In uniform, Luria capped a globe-spanning career as executive officer of the guided-missile cruiser Anzio and then as commander of Assault Craft Unit 2, which supplies amphibious forces on the East Coast. The Virginia-based command supplied ships for Hurricane Matthew relief in Haiti and the multinational exercise Cold Response in Norway, among other missions.
Luria and her husband, also a retired naval commander, opened and later sold a shop called the Mermaid Factory, where customers painted sculptures of mermaids, the symbol of Norfolk. By owning a business, Luria said, she became attuned to local, state and federal policy, and “was looking at ways to continue to serve” when she launched her successful campaign against incumbent Scott Taylor, a former Navy SEAL.
Luria is one of five self-described “badass” women among the 2019 class of national security-focused freshman Democrats. They were considered a new kind of candidate, the kind of moderate that might be able to win in a more polarized environment.
Another in that group, New Jersey Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill, a former Navy helicopter pilot, told Defense News this year’s reelection fights will be more difficult against an energized GOP.
“Elaine is a badass,” Sherill said. “She is on message. We might be talking about Ukraine or some concern we might have about our NATO allies, or the overuse of special operators, and Elaine Luria, without fail, no matter the context, will tell you why it’s important we don’t have enough ships and why we have to fight harder for that.”
While Luria is a generally reliable Democratic vote, she’s bucked the Biden administration to take stances on defense and shipbuilding primarily championed by Republicans.
The administration last year laid plans to stop spending money on weapons ill suited to a notional fight with Russia or China and to instead reinvest in forward-leaning technologies. But Congress reworked those plans as part of a $25 billion boost to defense spending. In response, the White House scolded lawmakers over budget bloat.
“The Administration opposes the direction to add funding for platforms and systems that cannot be affordably modernized given the need to eliminate wasteful spending and prioritize survivable, and resilient forces that credibly deter advanced threats,” the White House said in a policy statement in November.
For the past two defense budgets, Luria has rejected the administration’s plans and joined groups of Republicans and centrist Democrats to pass separate proposals, adding billions of dollars in funding.
In 2021, Luria was among centrist Democrats who supported a Republican amendment to increase Biden’s flat budget, which in turn helped Congress add two destroyers and rescue two ships planned for decommissioning.
This year, she co-sponsored Maine Democratic Rep. Jared Golden’s amendment to the House Armed Services Committee’s defense policy bill to add $37 billion for five more ships, among other hardware.
The boost included roughly $7.4 billion to cover inflation. It also added $3.6 billion for an additional destroyer, an additional frigate, an additional T-AO oiler and two expeditionary medical ships, as well as $2 billion for eight additional F/A-18 jets and other Navy and Marine Corps aircraft. It would save five of the nine littoral combat ships the Navy wants to retire early because they’re not suited to high-end fights.
HASC Chairman Adam Smith, D-Wash., and a critic of ever-rising defense budgets, denounced the $37 billion increase his panel passed 42-17. But Smith said he’s not rankled to have opposition from a fellow Democrat on what’s arguably the committee’s defining issue.
Luria, among 14 veterans on the committee from both sides of the aisle, is “incredibly effective,” Smith said.
In a sign of HASC’s unique bipartisanship, Smith and Rep. Mike Rogers, the committee’s top Republican, had a hand in crafting the amendment before it was proposed.
Smith said “Elaine was a crucial part of that process, of getting to the right amounts.”
Tough questions
Luria is one of the House Armed Services Committee’s most biting inquirers, especially when it comes to Navy matters. Less than a year into office, she grilled service officials on complex issues, often with coolly withering or rapid-fire questions, rarely glancing at her notes.
At a naval readiness hearing in 2019, Luria peppered the three-star chief of Naval Sea Systems Command with questions about maintenance delays for carriers.
Though Navy plans called for the carrier George H.W. Bush to sit in drydock for 16 months of a 36-month cycle, Luria wanted to know why it would instead take 28 months, forcing another carrier to extend its deployment.
NAVSEA’s commander said the Bush faced unique repair issues and that Norfolk was overburdened by other work. Luria told him she’d talked to the shipyard commander personally; the work didn’t seem unique to her.
“Are you going to say it was successful if we complete it in 28 months, or is it already a failure because it’s 28 instead of 16, which it should have been?” Luria asked pointedly.
The larger issue to her was that seven out of 11 Navy carriers were not deployable, including the problem-plagued carrier Gerald R. Ford. She roasted that ship as “a $13 billion nuclear-powered berthing barge.”
Luria has also regularly argued Navy officials do not advocate enough for their service and budget. She has criticized the Navy for backtracking on plans to build a 355-ship fleet.
For their part, service officials have said fleet size is not all that matters. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday and Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro have, for example, tried to convince Congress to let the service decommission its old and worn-out cruiser fleet, arguing the ships are irrelevant to future fights, unsafe and a drag on the Navy’s budget.
“They’re eating us alive in terms of our ability to get maintenance back on track, which is where we need to be,” Gilday said at an industry event in March. “We are paying tens of millions of dollars beyond what we expected to because of growth work and new work on ships that are beyond their service life.”
To be clear, Luria hasn’t called for a specific number of ships; she agrees with the sort of aim Michèle Flournoy — former undersecretary of defense for policy — has espoused, that the U.S should be able to “credibly threaten to sink all of China’s military vessels, submarines, and merchant ships in the South China Sea within 72 hours.”
“With such a defined goal, we could design a fleet not based on size, but based on capability,” Luria said in 2020. “Deterrence must be credible and is only effective when an adversary believes, through our daily actions, that the cost of their armed aggression will be met with such overwhelming force (damage) that the loss would be too extreme for the benefit.”
Hawkish on China
Republicans in Washington have sought to paint Democrats as weak on China, but it’s hard to draw a line between those Republicans and Luria, who has called on the Biden administration to end U.S. ambiguity about whether it would defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack.
When Navy officials appeared on Capitol Hill last year to defend plans to decommission 15 ships, Luria was among lawmakers who pointed to assessments from two successive Indo-Pacific Command chiefs that China wants to be able to seize Taiwan by 2027. Beijing considers the island a breakaway province and has vowed to incorporate it back into the mainland, by force if necessary.
The U.S. Navy’s focus on the future, Luria and other lawmakers said, would leave it too small to face that fast approaching threat.
“We’re looking at this Battle Force 2045, a plan that’s far off, a 355-ship goal that we’re never going to get to when we decommission more ships every year than we actually build. … What are we going to do in 2025 to counter this threat?” Luria asked. “We’re creating a gap, and I’m afraid that the Chinese will find a way to exploit that gap.”
When this year’s budget proposal aimed to retire 24 ships, Luria made headlines in April for calling it out in a Twitter thread that invoked Taiwan.
“The Navy owes a public apology to American taxpayers for wasting tens of billions of dollars on ships they now say serve no purpose,” she said, adding the Navy has “NO PLAN” to replace lost firepower quickly enough to make a difference against China. “Lastly, the Navy has no strategy. Stop saying you do, because if you did you would be able to explain how this Fleet size will allow us to defend Taiwan.”
Luria followed up with a lengthy analysis published by the Center for International Maritime Security that decried the “catastrophic loss” of firepower she said would result from that budget.
According to Luria’s number crunching, those plans would translate into a loss of MK 41 Vertical Launching System cells, which fire a variety of missiles. She forecast a loss of 756 cells by 2024, 1,668 cells by 2027 and 1,980 by 2035.
To convince China it can’t outgun the U.S. and its allies in the Pacific region, Luria offered several options, including keeping and extending the lives of 12 cruisers, refitting expeditionary fast transport ships with a 64-cell capacity, and building eight additional ships.
That approach has won her plaudits from some Republicans.
Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, a former Marine intelligence officer on the House Armed Services Committee, is a frequent collaborator. Also a China and sea power hawk, Gallagher was Luria’s co-sponsor on an amendment to establish a congressional commission to review the Navy’s force structure plans.
“She’s really knowledgeable and wants to build a bigger Navy,” said Gallagher, crediting her as the committee’s most vocal member about the Navy’s shrinking firepower. “I feel like we’ve done a billion amendments together.”
Luria’s budget inspiration stems from the Reagan administration. Then-Navy Secretary John Lehman’s 600-ship plan was meant to signal strength to the Soviet Union. As Luria sees it, the Democrat-run White House no longer grasps the urgency of a bigger naval budget, and the Navy’s not helping its own case.
“The administration was not prioritizing this with that sense of urgency and view, so I just continue to be loud about it,” Luria said. “I know that it’s frustrating to people in the administration that here you have a Democrat just continuously criticizing the administration on defense-related things.”
The previous Republican administration said “the right words,” she added, when then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper unveiled plans to boost the Navy’s fleet to 500 manned and unmanned ships by 2045, and a fleet of 355 traditional battle force ships by 2035.
Still, in October 2020, it came too late, she said.
“It was a commitment to an investment,” Luria said. “It needs to come from the top … and I just don’t feel like it’s been high enough of a priority.”
Though Biden has signed a flurry of executive orders that seek to revive America’s manufacturing and industrial base, the Navy’s budget submission is out of step and doesn’t offer any certainty of consistent work for shipbuilders, according to Luria.
“If we really want to make a commitment to grow the industrial base, we have to send a steady demand signal about what we are going to build,” she said.
Swing district
Luria wants a chance to craft that signal. But it will require winning another election.
The contest for Virginia’s 2nd District is a key part of the GOP’s drive to recapture the House, and it will be among the most closely watched in the country. Redistricting in 2021 means it tilts at six points in Republicans’ favor, according to FiveThirtyEight.
Luria maintains her record in Congress now positions her better than in past races. She pointed to her efforts to expand care to veterans exposed to toxic chemicals, win federal funding to improve rural 911 coverage, deepen Norfolk’s harbor and, of course, boost defense spending.
Republicans think they can beat Luria with State Sen. Jen Kiggans, a nurse practitioner who served as a Navy helicopter pilot. Kiggans, who prevailed in the GOP primary June 21 with the backing of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, used her victory speech to link Luria to Biden.
“Every one of Joe Biden’s disastrous policies are on the ballot this November, and in the 2nd District, these policies go by the name of Elaine Luria,” said Kiggans, 51. “From $5-a-gallon gasoline to runaway inflation, and from an open border to Afghanistan and the Ukraine, Elaine Luria has been Joe Biden’s chief enabler.”
It’s unclear whether Luria’s work as a member of the House committee investigating the Capitol insurrection will be a liability in her Republican-leaning district. A majority of voters across Virginia, 68%, say Biden’s election was legitimate, but 26% disagree, according to polling last year by Christopher Newport University, based in Newport News.
An Associated Press poll released last month found that 48% of Americans think former President Donald Trump should be charged with a crime for his role in the events of Jan. 6, 2021. However, 86% of Democrats support criminal charges, while 68% of Republicans oppose them.
Luria said her service on the investigative panel marks a “clear contrast” with Kiggans, who was not definitive when recently asked by reporters whether Biden won in 2020.
“I’ll say this,” Kiggans told Virginia’s WTKR News, “Joe Biden lives in the White House, and I wish that he didn’t.”
Speaking with Defense News — just days before the committee heard testimony Trump rebuffed his own security detail’s warnings about armed protesters and made attempts to join them — Luria said the panel’s findings are more important than her reelection.
“I feel that more and more the further we go along in this investigation,” she said.
To be sure, Luria said she definitely does want to be reelected. Among other plans, she’s working on a proposal to reform the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986 in a way that she says would take the handcuffs off Navy budgeting.
“If I come back, you know, I’ve got a six- or eight-year plan,” she said. “There’s a lot of work to be done, and I think I’ve laid the groundwork.”
She
Will win re-election
Na na na na, Na na na na, hey hey hey GOOD BYE!
In your dreams. Spending, spending, spending money that has barely been printed, pretending to be a moderate while consistently voting left–we’ve sort of seen through this farce. She has NEVER commented about the double-digit inflation that is creating economic chaos throughout the country; no remarks about the unprecedented movement of illegals across the southern border; no expressions of dismay about ongoing rampant urban crime. I could go on.
Last month, Virginia’s own Elaine Luria led a bipartisan coalition to boost defense spending, and she often uses her military experience to grill officials on both the size and readiness of the Navy’s fleet, and whether those factors are sufficient enough to win a war against China?
Elaine Luria thinks that the United States can win a war against China, which is 7,408 miles from Norfolk, Virginia, and 6,992 miles from San Diego, California?
Is she daft?
How on earth is the United States going to win a war with China?
A big naval battle like the Battle of the Coral Sea?
Or Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar?
Is that how she is seeing it all going down?
One big naval battle and the Navy finally wins one for the Gipper?
Get ******* real, here, people, this talk from Elaine Luria about beating China in a naval battle is CRAZY TALK from a lunatic.
How does she propose to protect the logistics train required to maintain those warships in the contest, or will it be over in an afternoon?
Has she ever bothered to read anything about the Korean War after the Chinese crossed the Yalu?
Does she even know there was a Korean War?
That war wasn’t over in an afternoon, and the Chinese were fighting quite effectively in mountains in the winter when the temperatures were dropping to forty below zero, as one can read about in the Marine Corps histories of their participation in that war, including up by the Frozen Chosin, and there was doodley-squat the Navy could do about it.
So these are the people Elaine Luria is going to beat with her Navy?
She’s a whack-job if she thinks that is the case.
Look at the role of the Navy in EVERY WAR we have ever had, including WWII, with landings at Anzio and Palermo and Sicily and D-Day, and then VEET NAM, and then Iraq.
They had to act DEFENSIVELY in ALL of those contests, staying offshore, to protect their ships, while the land battles to win the war were raging.
And being quite young, she must not remember Chairman Mao Zedong of China famously declaring, “I’m not afraid of nuclear war, China has a population of 600 million; even if half of them are killed, there are still 300 million people left.”
Today, the population of China is 1.402 billion.
So how many of those people does Elaine Luria’s Navy have to kill to make the Chinese throw in the towel and cry uncle?
I’m a combat veteran of combat near the Cambodian border in VEET NAM in 1969, where it was essentially face-to-face against a people willing to die for their country so long as they took some of us with them, and where was the Navy then?
Out at sea somewhere, is that answer, miles and miles and miles away.
To see what a jingoistic whack-job this Elaine Luria really is, let’s go to an article titled “How to Reason With a Nuclear Rogue – To stop North Korean nukes, the United States should learn from its own history with China,” something Elaine Luria clearly has not done, by Jon B. Wolfsthal on July 12, 2017, where we have some sane and rational and realistic talk, as opposed to the crazy talk of Elaine Luria, to wit:
A country bent on threatening the United States with annihilation develops nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them from Asia to the U.S. homeland, putting America and its allies, including Japan and South Korea, at grave risk.
It is clear that only grave consequences will come from ignoring this danger any longer, but taking military action in the vain attempt to eliminate the program threatens to provoke unspeakable destruction.
No, this is not an assessment of North Korea in 2017, but of China in 1964, the year China first tested a nuclear weapon.
Then, it was called Red China, and was widely considered part of a communist wave bent on global domination.
Then, as now, voices called for strength and resolve and pushed for military action to surgically remove the nuclear capability our enemy had developed.
Failure to act, it was argued, would create a near-certain risk of nuclear destruction.
At a minimum, the United States would be under constant threat of nuclear blackmail, undermining the security of our allies in East Asia so greatly that they themselves would surely have to go nuclear.
Of course, deterrence did work, the countries avoided war, and America and its allies learned to manage a complex deterrent relationship with China, to our mutual advantage.
end quotes
Our mutual advantage meaning we never had a STOOPID WAR like Elaine Luria is pushing for, like a ******* idiot.
So, if you really are very stupid, and want to be represented by someone even more stupid, your choice is clear – VOTE LURIA!
Well said. I was with the First Air Cav. in late 67-68, first in An Khe and then at Camp Evans south of the DMZ. Lots of Army troops and Marines, but the Navy was always “offshore”. It was NEVER a presence. Ms. Luria uses her incessant spending efforts, particularly in connection with the military, as an indication of her “middle-of-the-road” stance. In reality, she’s a complete leftist, adhering to every stance of the current Administration. Her fake “patriotism” is wearing thin.
Hey voters: Have you seen her campaign ads? This ad includes a very imaginative and heavily edited local tv news clip about the Jan 6 “rioting” insurgents very terrifying attack on our capitol.
And this following is a bunch of UN-AMERICAN horse**** as well:
It’s unclear whether Luria’s work as a member of the House committee investigating the Capitol insurrection will be a liability in her Republican-leaning district.
A majority of voters across Virginia, 68%, say Biden’s election was legitimate, but 26% disagree, according to polling last year by Christopher Newport University, based in Newport News.
end quotes
And good for them!
However, the Federal Register for 6 January 2021
( http://thelivyjrfiles.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=251 ) makes it incandescently clear that Joe Biden’s election was not legitimate, at all!
But to understand that, it is necessary to be able to not only read a lot of words, but to assimilate them to comprehend their meaning, and there is where Elaine Luria and her fellow WITCH HUNTERS are safe, because they are spewing their bull**** to a nation full of functional illiterates who don’t know anymore than they are told to think.
And then we have this:
An Associated Press poll released last month found that 48% of Americans think former President Donald Trump should be charged with a crime for his role in the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
However, 86% of Democrats support criminal charges, while 68% of Republicans oppose them.
end quotes
So there is “democracy in action” Elaine Luria style – a real lot of Democrats not surprisingly want Donald Trump brought up on criminal charges, and since a lot of Democrats really want that, and are for that, it is up to Elaine Luria to trump up some charges against Trump to satisfy the passions and emotions of the Democrat mob Elaine Luria is playing to here, as if justice in America should be meted out as if this were a dance contest on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand where the winners were chosen based on what faction in the audience could scream their little heads off the loudest.
And then we come to this:
Speaking with Defense News — just days before the committee heard testimony Trump rebuffed his own security detail’s warnings about armed protesters and made attempts to join them — Luria said the panel’s findings are more important than her reelection.
“I feel that more and more the further we go along in this investigation,” she said.
end quotes
Except it is NOT an “investigation” she is involved in – it is a STALINESQUE SHOW TRIAL, plain and simple.
Every dirty and slimy lawyer’s trick in the book is being employed by Elaine Luria and her fellow WITCH HUNTERS to pour slime down on the head of Donald Trump to remove him as a threat to the re-election of Joe Biden and the Democrat party in the up-coming midterm elections.
Luria is big on the oath she said she took to defend the Constitution, while at the same time she is actively engaged in STRIPPING Donald Trump of those very Constitutional rights to due process of law and the right to confront one’s accusers, in this case, Cassidy Hutchinson. she took an oath to protect.
So she is an oath-breaker!
Her oath means nothing to her, compared to being loyal to Nancy Pelosi and the Democrat Party and the howling mob who want Trump’s head on a platter!
So if you hate America, honesty, integrity, RULE OF LAW, and Constitutional Protections, then vote for Elaine Luria, because she is the candidate for you!
She can’t bribe my vote. Can’t slime the house anymore, the hour’s getting late.
And that is exactly what she is resorting to here – good old electoral bribery, making it about how much bacon she is going to be bringing to her home state.
But if she is building up a Navy that can beat China in a war, won’t that Navy be stationed in the Pacific Ocean, several thousand miles from Virginia?
So who will be the real beneficiary of all this money the congresswoman wants to spend on the Navy?
San Diego?
Hawaii?
Or Virginia?
ASSOCIATED PRESS
“Jan. 6 panel probes Trump’s 187 minutes as Capitol attacked”
By LISA MASCARO, MARY CLARE JALONICK and FARNOUSH AMIRI, Associated Press
21 JULY 2022
WASHINGTON (AP) — The House Jan. 6 committee will hold its final hearing of the summer the way the series began — vividly making the case that Donald Trump’s lies about a stolen election fueled the grisly U.S. Capitol attack, which he did nothing to stop but instead “gleefully” watched on television at the White House.
The panel intends to show how the defeated president’s attempt to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory has left the United States facing enduring questions about the resiliency of its democracy.
Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Va., a former Naval officer who will lead the session with Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., who flew combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, said she expects the testimony from the White House aides will “just be really compelling.”
“These are people who believed in the work they were doing, but didn’t believe in the stolen election,” Luria said.
And remember when:
Congresswoman Luria said. “As part of my duty to defend our oath to the Constitution, I continue to support the ongoing investigation of the President’s decision to withhold critical aid from our partner, Ukraine, in exchange for information to detract from a political opponent.”
“The President’s own words threatened our national security, undermined the integrity of our elections, and constituted an abuse of power.”
“This investigation will bring out the truth, something every American deserves.”
And Virginia’s own Elaine Luria just got a huge boost yesterday with respect to her election campaign with her being the star of a MADE-FOR-TV ABSURDIST DRAMA called the JANUARY SIXTH COMMITTEE PRESENTS on PRIMETIME TV with maybe 100 to 200 million viewers all over the world tuning in to see a real Naval hero in action, once again as part of her duty to defend her oath to the Constitution, which appearance on PRIMETIME TV garnered her not only national, but international attention as well, which should have the votes for her pouring in from every corner of the globe as we can clearly see from an Associated Press article titled “Jan. 6 takeaways: White House in chaos, unmovable Trump” by Mary Clare Jalonick on 21 July 2022, to wit:
WASHINGTON (AP) — The House Jan. 6 committee closed out its set of summer hearings with its most detailed focus yet on the investigation’s main target: former President Donald Trump.
end quotes
Given this is a STALINST SHOW TRIAL we are talking about here, where the “target,” Donald Trump, feared and hated by Democrats all over the world, is being tired in absentia with no due process of law afforded, despite any oath Elaine Luria claims to uphold and defend the Constitution, which the Democrats shoved in the toilet on 6 January 2021 when they appointed the loser Joe Biden as their president, to the detriment of the rest of us and the world, something Joe Stalin himself would be immensely proud of, seeing Democrats like Elaine Luria carrying on his legacy of repression, it is indeed fitting that Trump is being called “the target” here, for target of Democrat ire he clearly is and has been since 2016, when he beat out Hussein Obama’s chosen successor to carry on his legacy, which takes us back to Elaine Luria as a MAJOR PRIMETIME TV STAR, to wit:
The panel emphasized where Trump was as the violence unfolded — in a White House dining room, sitting at the head of the table, watching the violent breach of the Capitol on Fox News.
He retreated to the dining room at 1:25 p.m., according to Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Va., one of two members who led the hearing.
end quotes
And WOW, people, how about that for some real good lines in the script the Democrat screen writers in Hollywood cooked up for her to regurgitate on NATIONAL PRIMETIME TV!
And speaking about some really GONZO lines coming from the Hollywood screen writers, how about these:
Trump “could not be moved,” Thompson said, “to rise from his dining room table and walk the few steps down the White House hallway into the press briefing room where cameras were anxiously and desperately waiting to carry his message to the armed and violent mob savagely beating and killing law enforcement officers.”
enjd quotes
Uh, okay, Bennie, whatever you say, except there were no law enforcement officers being killed on 6 January 2021, but what difference does that make, since the goal here is to hang Trump, not publish either truth or facts, which brings us back to Elaine Luria and her moment in the spotlight here, as she cinches her re-election come November, to wit:
“He put a target on his own vice president’s back,” said Luria.
And how about that for some real tough talk from one of the Navy’s finest?
Next thing we know, the Democrats will be running her for president, and we will see her on the wide screen in theaters all across America being played by Angelina Jolie, and just think, people, it all started right here in Cape Charles, Virginia!
And the irony here for Ms. Luria, whose judgment is clearly called into question here as she tries to destroy and bury Trump who the Democrats and Ms. Luria, a Pelosi pet poodle, hate with a burning passion, using tactics straight out of the playbook of Joe Stalin or Chairman Mao, is that her champion Joe Biden is even more unpopular than Trump, and a clear majority of the American people, INCLUDING Ms. Luria’s Democrats, don’t want Biden to run again, as we see as follows:
NBC NEWS
“Biden’s approval ratings hit all-time lows in CNBC poll”
Mark Murray
14 JULY 2022
A new CNBC poll, conducted by the same polling firms that helm the NBC News poll, finds President Joe Biden’s overall approval rating sinking to 36% among all adults, while his approval rating for handling the economy has fallen to 30% — both all-time lows for the president in CNBC polling.
What’s more, Biden’s ratings are lower than the worst scores ever for Donald Trump (37% job rating, 41% economic handling) or Barack Obama (41% job rating, 37% economic handling) during the entire course of their presidencies, according to both the CNBC and NBC surveys.
*****
FOX NEWS
“Biden lashes out at reporter asking about dismal approval among Dems: ‘Read the polls, Jack’”
Nikolas Lanum
13 JULY 2022
President Biden became agitated and approached a reporter Tuesday after he was asked his response to a recent poll showing a majority of Democrats do not want him to seek reelection in 2024.
“Mr. President, what’s your message to Democrats who don’t want you to run again?” the reporter asked at the White House congressional picnic.
Biden, walking adjacent to the reporter, then paused in his tracks, telling the reporter that “they want me to run,” and for him to “read the polls.”
The interaction comes as the media has highlighted numerous polls that show Biden in hot water with American voters, including voters of his own party.
The numbers that Biden and the reporter spoke on came from a New York Times/Sienna College poll conducted between July 5 and 7.
In this particular situation, the reporter was in fact correct in his assessment that a majority, or around two-thirds, of Democrats do not want Biden to seek the presidency again in two years’ time.
The poll revealed that a staggering 64% of Democratic voters agree that somewhat else should take the mantle in 2024.
The poll also highlighted a number of other notable insights into the national mood regarding Biden and his administration.
The polling shows particular frustration among younger voters, showing 94% of Democrats under the age of 30 would prefer a different nominee.
The poll also found that just 13% of Americans believe the country is on the right track.
*****
BLOOMBERG
“Most Americans in Poll Don’t Want Biden or Trump to Run in 2024”
Mark Niquette
20 JULY 2022
(Bloomberg) — President Joe Biden’s job-approval rating fell to the lowest mark of his presidency, and a healthy majority of Americans don’t want to see either him or former President Donald Trump run again in 2024, a Quinnipiac University poll found.
*****
CNBC
“President Biden’s job approval rating hits new low in public poll”
Dan Mangan
20 JULY 2022
More Americans now think President Joe Biden is doing a bad job than at any prior point in his presidency, according to a major public opinion poll.
Just 31% of American adults said they approve of the way Biden is handling his job, while 60% disapproved of it, the Quinnipiac University poll found.
Just 31% of American adults said they approve of the way Biden is handling his job, while 60% disapproved of it, the Quinnipiac University poll found.
Biden’s approval ratings among registered voters also hit a record low in the Quinnipiac poll, as just 33% percent of voters said they liked the job he was doing, and 59% disapproved.
The findings came a day after a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that the Democrat’s public approval rating had fallen to 36%, matching his record low in that survey.
In Quinnipiac’s survey, Biden got the lowest job ratings for his handling of the economy, as just 28% of respondents approved of his work in that area.
Biden’s approval ratings were also underwater when respondents were asked about his handling of gun violence, foreign policy and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Quinnipiac poll had even worse news for Biden when it came to his intention to seek a second term in 2024.
A whopping 71% percent of respondents said they would not like to see Biden run for president that year, and just 24% percent said they wanted a second Biden term in the White House.
A majority of Democrats, 54%, said they would not like him to seek reelection in two years, the survey found.
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THE WASHINGTON POST
“Biden’s continued — and marked — decline with Democrats”
Aaron Blake
21 JULY 2022
It has become abundantly clear in recent days that Democrats would like to turn the page on President Biden in 2024.
A New York Times-Siena College poll showed they preferred “someone else” to Biden as their nominee by a historically unusual 64-to-26 percent margin.
And a new Quinnipiac University poll confirms it: Just 40 percent of Democrats want Biden to run at all; a majority don’t.
Fully 94 percent of Democrats under 30 years old preferred “someone else” in the Times poll.
But part of it is also a very real degree of Democratic disillusionment with both Biden’s performance and the state of affairs on his watch.
They don’t hate Biden, but they don’t love him, either, and they don’t see the results they had hoped for.
And that’s borne out if you dig a little deeper into recent polls.
We wrote last month about Biden’s distinct lack of a base.
In four separate polls at the time, the number who “strongly approved” of Biden was between 1 in 8 Americans and 1 in 6 Americans.
About three times as many Americans strongly disapproved of him.
The only time that’s happened in recent political history was the waning days of George W. Bush’s tenure, when he was even more unpopular than Biden is today.
New polls from Quinnipiac and CNN bear this out — and show just how much Biden has declined with this base.
The CNN poll shows Biden’s recent further decline in popularity — he’s at 38 percent overall in the poll — is solely attributable to Democrats.
They slid from 86 percent approving to 73 percent over the past two months, while independents and Republicans remained largely static.
The decline is more evident if you focus, as we did before, on strong approval.
In the CNN poll, just 28 percent of Democrats strongly approve of Biden.
That’s down from a high of 67 percent in April 2021.
In the Quinnipiac poll, slightly more strongly approve — 38 percent — but that’s down from 77 percent a month into Biden’s presidency and down from 58 percent in November.
Biden’s base numbers on the economy have also slid markedly.
Fully 85 percent of Democrats approved of his handling of that issue in November in the Quinnipiac poll; that’s now 66 percent.
In the CNN poll, his economic approval among Democrats has steadily slid down to 60 percent.
The CNN poll also features some other striking findings:
In April 2021, 90 percent of Democrats said Biden had the “right priorities” as president, versus 9 percent who said he had not “paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems.”
That latter number has now risen to 42 percent.
Fully 4 in 10 Democrats say Biden isn’t even focused on the right things.
62 percent of Democrats say things in this country are going at least “pretty badly” — up from 37 percent in December.
Just 32 percent of Democrats view economic conditions as at least “somewhat good” — down from 62 percent in December.
56 percent of Democrats think we’re currently in a recession (which we might be).
Indeed, the people most inclined to give Biden the benefit of the doubt and to see the good in his presidency are struggling to do so.
And it should thus be no surprise they’re entertaining alternatives for when he’s up for reelection.
Speaking of building a stronger Navy, one has to wonder what Congresswoman Luria would have to say about this British naval boondoggle which is the “command ship” of Joe Biden’s “stronger than ever because of Joe” NATO navy, to wit:
Business Insider
“UK’s newest and largest aircraft carrier broke down on the 2nd day of a mission to the US”
By George Glover
29 August 2022
The UK’s newest and biggest aircraft carrier broke down on the second day of what was meant to be a months-long deployment to the US.
The carrier, which has held the role of command ship for NATO since January 2022, was on the second day of its latest deployment.
This isn’t the first time that the 65,000-ton vessel has suffered technical issues since it entered service in 2019.
At the end of 2020, it was stranded in Portsmouth after a flooded engine room led to electrical damage.
The carrier, which has a crew of 1,600, spent fewer than 90 days at sea during its first two years of service after suffering multiple leaks, according to The Guardian.
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Somehow, that is so typical of what one has come to expect in this time of Joe Biden!