Five Quick Things: John Thune Is Blowing It

All in all, this hasn’t been a bad week for America, and so this edition of the 5QT ought to be taken in the positive spirit in which it’s intended.

As in, your author is positive that things ought to be better, because we have a hell of a good opportunity to make them that way.

Starting with that wimp who runs the GOP caucus in the Senate.

1. John Thune Fools Nobody

The Senate’s majority leader — who seems like he’d rather be the minority leader, just like his mentor Mitch McConnell spent the better part of 20 years trying to make himself, often with success — had a big announcement on Thursday about the SAVE America Act…

???? BREAKING: Senate Leader John Thune confirms HE’S FORCING A VOTE on the SAVE America Act, he will put Democrats ON THE RECORD opposing the 85-15 issue

This MUST pass! Voter ID, citizenship — common sense ????????

“We will put the Democrats on the record! […] We’ll get it on the… pic.twitter.com/bvtULHAV45

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) February 25, 2026

That sure sounds like a big deal, right? Thune is moving forward on the SAVE America Act, the GOP is serious about safeguarding our elections from the undocumented and undead, and all is right with the world. Why, he might just force a talking filibuster that will break the Democrats in the Senate once and for all. (RELATED: The SAVE Act: Why Are Senate Republicans Dithering?)

Right?

Not really, no.

My buddy Connie Hair, who was chief of staff to Rep. Louie Gohmert for more than a decade and knows congressional procedure about as well as anybody, writes in Human Events that this is failure theater. Spurious. Y’know, bullshit.

The voters already know where the Democrats in Congress stand. We don’t need another symbolic cloture vote to put them “on the record.”

What the people of America want to know is where the Republican majority stands. Are they with us or against us? Do they want to allow the millions of non-citizens Biden let into this country an opportunity to cast ballots to cancel out ours?

We noted when Sen. Thune said in the interview that having a real talking filibuster would require the Republican majority Senate to show up to work. He said, “We’d have to have 50 [votes] to defeat every amendment, and that’s not where we are right now.”

Not where you are right now?

Let me translate that statement from Capitol Hill Glossary into English: “I am a weak leader, and my conference is weak, old and lazy. We won’t show up. We will not deliver what voters want because we are not willing to do the work. It would be hard. It would take time to defend the sanctity of American citizenship. It’s not worth the struggle. We have much easier, more important priorities.”

What’s Connie talking about? She’s talking about the fact that Thune doesn’t need cloture for the SAVE America Act, and he damn well knows it…

Cloture (60 vote threshold) is not required for this special message bill sitting at the Senate desk awaiting call-up.

The Senate’s Standing Rules have been dissected ad nauseam since the House took S.1383, a bill already passed by the Senate, gutted its text, replaced it entirely with the SAVE America Act, and returned it as a privileged message. That procedural posture matters.

There is no need to “nuke” the filibuster lowering the cloture threshold from 60 votes to 51 to call up the bill. Under the Senate’s existing rules, the message can be called up for debate. After the two-speech rule is exhausted or there is no one left wishing to speak, the bill is voted up or down by simple majority.

If Sen. Thune files for cloture anyway to resurrect a 60-vote hurdle, he is conceding that the Senate doesn’t intend to consider this bill. It’s a facade to cloak killing the bill while claiming they held the promised vote. Look what those dirty Democrats did!

In a previous post, Connie had extolled the virtue of the talking filibuster. One aspect of that is if a talking filibuster is a live item, it’ll serve as an effective age limit. These half-dead octogenarians who are so addicted to power over their fellow man that they won’t go away even after they’ve clearly lost their marbles will start to become active hindrances to their parties, not to mention embarrassments (I was going to say “walking embarrassments,” but in the case of McConnell and Dianne Feinstein before him, semi-ambulent is probably the best they could do) to themselves and their constituents, won’t be able to last on the floor of the Senate if they have to participate in a real filibuster. (RELATED: Save the SAVE Act: Sunset the Filibuster)

The Democrats have a lot of fossils in their caucus. But so does the GOP. And that’s a damn shame, because it’s that obsolete 20th-century mentality that pretends that the other side is a bunch of Sam Nunns and Joe Liebermans instead of the raging communists that they are, which is responsible for so much failure by the Republicans in the Senate. Aging them out more quickly will get us more fighters.

But more fighters would mean a demand for a tougher leader. Which John Thune is increasingly showing himself as incapable of being.

This garbage, and things like it, are why the American people don’t deserve for Republicans to lose control of the Senate to a gaggle of demonically-possessed, anti-American communists — but the Republicans in the Senate sure might.

Stop gaslighting us, Thune. Do your damned job and force that bill through to Trump’s desk.

2. This Is What I’m Talking About

You want to age out these decrepit, passive old weaklings because the younger Republicans came up in politics understanding who the Left is and feel less inhibited about taking them on.

Markwayne Mullin, senator from Oklahoma, isn’t perfect. He’ll make mistakes from time to time. But Mullins is pretty fearless, and when he’s on his game, he’s one of the few people in Washington who will actually notice the emperor is buck naked.

And sometimes he’ll just strip the pompous old bastard down to his birthday suit. Like, for example, when Bernie Sanders, who, more than anybody else in the Senate, was responsible for writing Obamacare, thought he’d interrupt Mullins when he was making some perfectly valid points about what a failure that legislative time bomb has proven to be during a hearing over the nomination of Dr. Casey Means to be Surgeon General.

Maybe it’s overkill for me to say this, but if I don’t, I’m sure the commenters will unload on me about it — Obamacare was intended to fail. That’s what it was built for. It was intended to collapse the healthcare system into a smoking heap and therefore pave the way for socialized medicine in the country.

Everybody who’s paid attention to this disaster since it was passed in 2010 knows that. They might, for whatever reason, prefer not to advertise this fact, but they all know it. Which makes it so especially obnoxious that Sanders, a communist who has wanted to force us into a medical system by and for the people who gave you Prohibition and NPR, would be prattling on about it.

And Mullin isn’t having it for one damn second…

3. The Biden Tyranny Gets a Little More Exposed

I didn’t want this 5QT to come and go without at least a mention of this, so I’ll give a shout-out to Shawn Fleetwood at The Federalist for a good rundown of what Joe Biden’s FBI did during the 2024 election…

Following in the footsteps of his former boss, President Joe Biden’s FBI surveilled a member of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign leading up to the 2024 election, according to a new bombshell report.

The damning revelation was disclosed by FBI Director Kash Patel in a Wednesday Reuters article. The outlet reported how the Biden FBI “subpoenaed records of phone calls” made by Patel and now-White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles in 2022 and 2023, years in which they were both private citizens.

According to Patel, the actions came as part of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigations into Trump’s conduct regarding the 2020 election and handling of classified documents, the latter of which culminated in an unprecedented raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.

“It is outrageous and deeply alarming that the previous FBI leadership secretly subpoenaed my own phone records — along with those of now-White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles — using flimsy pretexts and burying the entire process in prohibited case files designed to evade all oversight,” Patel said in a statement.

Ten FBI officials have been fired as a result of the discovery, several agency employees reportedly told Reuters.

Firing isn’t good enough for these people, you know.

Somewhat related to this was one of the Obama-Biden regime’s chief FBI thugs tut-tutting Patel for whooping it up with the U.S. men’s hockey team after their gold medal in Italy…

Former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe on Monday slammed FBI Director Kash Patel for celebrating with the U.S. men’s hockey team after their gold medal game victory at the Winter Olympics.

“Horrible, horrible message to the FBI rank and file,” McCabe told host Jake Tapper on CNN’s “The Lead.” McCabe has been a CNN contributor since 2019.

“I’m sure that this video is coursing through that population today,” he added. “And a horrible message to the country when the FBI is in the middle of such incredibly important investigations.”

Patel was caught on camera Sunday in Team USA’s locker room after it defeated Canada 2-1 in overtime. At one point, he drinks a beer before singing along to “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” by the late Toby Keith.

The Hill’s social media sharing of that story called McCabe a “former FBI official,” as though the country doesn’t know exactly who he is and the stunts he pulled.

I’m generally going to give Patel a wider berth than a lot of other conservatives might, because I think he’s fighting a lost cause. I don’t think the FBI as an institution can be saved — not by Patel, and not by anybody else. I think there are too many people like McCabe and those 10 goons who just got fired dug in at the Bureau. But tearing down the FBI isn’t the job Patel was given, so he slogs on.

And if he wants to take time off to have a beer in celebration of something good happening, give the man some space. Where Andrew McCabe ought to be residing, there is no beer — unless somebody can home-brew it in a toilet.

4. “Trump Is a Pedophile!” Says the Party Now Running Open Pedophiles For Office

Boy, they sure do have some high standards in the Democrat Party.

Oh, you don’t agree? Maybe you’re right, because this is happening…

In another nation leading shattering of that glass ceiling, Gavin Newsom’s California hopes to elect the first registered sex offender to a city council. pic.twitter.com/VPE9pCqPqk

— Kevin Dalton (@TheKevinDalton) February 25, 2026

They’re also running a convicted child molester for mayor in Providence, Rhode Island. It’s not luck if you can do it twice, you know.

What’s funny about this is the Left has spent this whole week running around with their hair on fire over this “bombshell” news item that a crazy lady accused Trump of beating and raping her when she was underage, but that accusation had spent some time in the court system and fell apart pretty much completely.

What none of the people resurrecting it seem to want to address is that they had the Epstein files in their possession for a very, very long time, and yet when Trump ran for president in 2016, they hired a drunken former British spy to cook up some cockamamie story about hookers and piss as their “bombshell” to smear him with.

And they’re running a couple of pedos — at least a couple that we know of — in this cycle after electing one in 2020. And then letting hundreds of thousands of illegal alien kids get fed into unspeakable horror mills by the worst people imaginable, the entire time Joe Biden was president.

No, you don’t have a problem with child molestation.

By the way, the Democrats put an illegal alien in charge of the Los Angeles school system, and he robbed the place blind. I could have made that a thing in its own right; instead, I’ll just leave that here.

5. Well, This Sure Is a Shame, Huh?

The release of the Epstein files has been interesting. On this side of the pond, it’s somewhat conspicuous that nobody has been hit with any real consequences for it. As an example, Hillary Clinton testified in front of Congress on Thursday, and she swore she never heard of the man. Yeah, OK — guess Ghislaine Maxwell sneaked into Chelsea’s wedding, right Hilldawg?

Larry Summers and Martin Nowak are leaving Harvard in disgrace over their Epstein friendships, but who doesn’t leave Harvard in disgrace these days?

And Bill Gates has sent his minions out to swear he never did anything illegal as part of his long-running friendship with Epstein, though that’s sort of a weak seller…

Gates’ surprising mea culpa Tuesday was a questionable attempt to cleanse his image over his friendship with Epstein, which ex-wife Melinda French Gates largely blames for destroying their marriage.

“I did have affairs, one with a Russian bridge player … and one with a Russian nuclear physicist,” the billionaire told staff at a town hall for his Gates Foundation, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Gates admitted the affairs while maintaining that he did nothing “illicit” with his now-dead pedophile pal.

However, rumors of the fling with the bridge player, Mila Antonova, first emerged over her own ties to Epstein — ones featured heavily in damning exchanges in the Epstein files.

Antonova was also an acquaintance of notorious Kremlin spy Anna Chapman, with a photo capturing them strolling near Wall Street before Chapman, the daughter of a former KGB officer, was booted out of the country.

Gates was 53 when he was first pictured with Antonova, who was in her 20s, at a national bridge event in Washington, DC…

However, one of Gates’ main advisers and confidants, Boris Nikolic, introduced her to Epstein in 2013 — when he’d already convicted of child-sex offenses — as she sought help getting money to start an online business to teach people how to play bridge.

Epstein also paid Antonova so she could attend a programming camp as part of helping her pursue a career in software development, she told the Wall Street Journal in 2023, when she had initially refused to confirm the affair with Gates.

What’s with Bill Gates and all these Russians? And his “confidant” is pimping broke bridge players with ties to Russian spies to him?

Nothing is going to happen to Bill Gates. We all know that.

Which means our standards are lower than the… World Economic Forum? What?

JUST IN – President and CEO of the World Economic Forum, Borge Brende resigns after the forum launched an independent investigation into his relationship with Epstein — Reuters pic.twitter.com/lUqaL6YHUi

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) February 26, 2026

Then again, this guy Brende, he of the half-assed Billy Idol sneer in his photos, went to dinner with Epstein three times IN 2018 AND 2019, which is outright brazen. It isn’t a surprise the weffers got spooked.

Why the Dems want to keep talking about Epstein when it’s all their friends getting popped for what’s in those files is a mystery for the ages.

READ MORE from Scott McKay:

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Five Quick Things: The Death of Good Faith

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