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October 21, 2023

Byron Donalds throws his hat into the ring for Speaker

By Andrea Widburg

The House speakership has not been a happy thing for Republicans lately. While Nancy Pelosi was a raging leftist who successfully corralled her party and rammed through the leftist agenda (love her or hate her, she was effective), the same cannot be said for recent Republican speakers. John Boehner and Paul Ryan were RINOs. Kevin McCarthy was much more conservative, and for that he deserves credit, but he reneged on promises, especially about January 6. Since his ouster, though, it’s been one humiliation after another. Now, however, with Byron Donalds having thrown his hat in the ring, there’s hope.

Whether you think Matt Gaetz was bold to punish yet another Republican who failed to work for his base or an idiot to upset the status quo of a decent Speaker is a topic for another day. What we have today is a leaderless Republican party in the House and, given our slender majority, that’s a problem. (There’s a larger problem, of course, which is that we have a leaderless Republican party in toto. Donald Trump should be that leader, but the schism between NeverTrumpers and conservatives is too big for him to fill that role.)

Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan have both gone down in flames, victims of the Vichy Republicans in Congress—and by that, I mean the people who are usually called RINOs. I prefer “Vichy Republicans” because this isn’t your daddy’s Democrat party anymore. As the past few years, and especially the past week, have made clear, the Democrat party has morphed into a stone-cold socialist party that is determined to take over America. Democrats are conquerors, and those who side with them are no longer weak or greedy, they’re complicit.

Image: Byron Donalds. YouTube screen grab.

Now, though, we may have someone who just rode to the rescue: Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla).

Donalds is an interesting man. He grew up in Crown Heights and was raised by a single mother. In 1997, a year after graduation from high school, Donalds was arrested for marijuana distribution, although the charges were dropped when he was put into a diversion program. He also pleaded no contest to charges of trying to defraud a bank. Although his record was sealed and expunged, it lives on in cyberspace.

Thus, Donalds seemed to be set on the path so common to young black men raised by single mothers: Drugs and crime. However, Donalds made different choices. He attended Florida A&M University and eventually graduated from Florida State University.

Once out of college, Donalds did well in the financial world, moving from being a credit analyst to a commercial credit manager to an assistant vice president in a bank to a portfolio manager to a financial advisor for Wells Fargo. I believe in remorse, repentance, and redemption, and Donalds clearly followed that path.

By this time, Donalds was a conservative. He got involved in the Tea Party movement and, from there, got into politics. He was eventually elected to the Florida House of Representatives in 2016.

In 2020, Donalds was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. His self-description during his campaign is great: “Trump supporting, gun owning, liberty loving, pro-life, politically incorrect Black man.” In addition, he supports economic freedom, nuclear power, less government in healthcare, and no Green New Deal. He’s outspoken in his belief that the 2020 election was gamed. Donalds has also shown himself to be adept at handling the media, in large part because he believes in the principles on which he was elected.

There’s absolutely no doubt that Byron’s support for Trump and disdain for the 2020 election results are anathema to the Vichy Republicans. On the other hand, they’d be absolute dodos to turn down the chance to elect the first black man to be Speaker of the House of Representatives—especially a black man whom the Republican base likes:

And of course, it will make Democrat heads explode to have Republicans revisit their 19th century history—when they voted for the first Black congressmen—by voting for the first black Speaker of the House.

For Democrats, a vote for Donalds should be a no-brainer. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen too often, too many Republican politicians have no brains.

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