On this date in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” published profiles of U.S. Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, the woman whose original campaign for office in 2014 was built around running ads where she shot up copies of the Affordable Care Act with a gun (which she offered as a 2nd Amendment alternative to the government not operating as we like three weeks prior to the election), and promised to go to Washington, D.C. to use her experience growing up on a farm castrating hogs to make veteran politicians “squeal”.
Since being elected, Sen. Ernst has continued to be a vacuous never-ending stream of moronic, pandering statements. A few examples include her State of the Union rebuttal where she talked about walking home from school wearing bread bags on her feet on wet or snowy days during “tough times” (which she grew up during the Reagan administration, so…), the time she said Hillary Clinton “wasn’t doing enough on women’s issues” (ignoring like, her entire quarter century record on them), and claiming President Obama ordered flags lowered to half mast after a mass shooting in Chatanooga because “he wanted to distract from the Iran deal”. She also voted against funding the Department of Homeland Security, as well as voted to defund Planned Parenthood in her first nine months in office. And the GOP is hell bent on making Joni Ernst one of their “rising stars” of the party.
Giving her the rebuttal of the 2015 State of the Union wasn’t enough for them, and they wanted to make sure she got a prime-time slot at the 2016 Republican National Convention to cement herself nationally as a figure in the Republican Party. There was just one problem… the 2016 RNC was, of course, being overseen by the wisdom of Donald J. Trump. As such, the long line of Trump-backed speakers coming out to fearmonger pushed Ernst’s remarks further and further back into the night, as well as The Donald’s own WWE-styled entrance on Night 1 of the convention just to introduce his own wife, Melania, so she could plagiarize Michelle Obama at length took precedence. By the time Joni Ernst got on stage to bad-mouth Hillary Clinton (which everyone else had already spent the whole night doing), over half the delegates and attendees had already left that night, probably closer to nine tenths (check the photo from correspondent Alan Rappeport). Those who remained had already been in their seats for over four hours, and barely seemed to even notice a U.S. Senator was pandering to them, and Ernst reported found speaking to an empty arena “excruciating”. We find that to be true of her voting record, where she has twice voted to defend the Second Amendment rights of suspected terrorists, and feels that anyone on the “no fly list” should still have a firearm. And even though she claims she’s “pro-life” to her core, Ernst voted against funding for the prevention of the spread of Zika Virus, which causes birth defects in the unborn.
In 2017 and 2018, Joni Ernst voted for the Senate GOP’s attempt to repeal Obamacare that crashed and burned on a 51-49 vote, voted to place Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh onto the Supreme Court, and voted to confirm every single member of Donald Trump’s “Cabinet of Horrors”. That’s part of the reason her constituents wanted to make the supposed pig farmer “squeal” herself when she has returned to Iowa for her own halls in July of 2017, where people who depend on affordable healthcare to survive have kept her scrambling, and the only real applause she got through the whole night was when she agreed with them that Donald Trump should release his tax returns.
Six months later, it didn’t get much better. In January of 2018, Ernst hosted another town hall, and her own constituents laughed in her face when she defended their criticism that Donald Trump’s talk of white supremacy wasn’t doing anything to help our standing with countries around the world, and Ernst was asked what countries Trump’s rhetoric helped, and she meekly responded, “Norway”. As in, Norway, a country that is 83% Norwegian, and predominantly white. The crowd of Iowans also audibly groaned when Sen. Ernst defended Trump from charges of being racist, saying he wasn’t racist “deep inside”.
That town hall didn’t have the only folks back home who are disenchanted with Joni Ernst, as her husband filed for divorce. (And the timing would be potentially damning if there’s anything in the court documents that would get released in the middle of her 2020 re-election campaign by way of a FOIA request.)
Joni Ernst has 11 months left left on her freshman term as a senator before her first defense of her seat… She has yet to castrate anything in Washington, D.C., that we know of, has yet to produce any legislation of note, and seems to be a running joke for the GOP. Her re-election campaign kicked off in June, and what was Ernst’s rallying cry? “THE RADICAL LEFT WANT SOCIALISM FROM COAST TO COAST!!!” Keep in mind, she’s stupid enough to try to deride government assistance at a time when Iowa farmers are desperate to get more of it because of Donald Trump’s stupid trade war with China and all the tariffs getting thrown around crippling her state’s farm industry. She’s also claiming that “Medicare for All means Healthcare for None”, because she hasn’t developed a better lie to attack it like better people at messaging did during the Tea Party Wave to lie about the Affordable Care Act. And her constituents are noticing, heckling her at town halls throughout the state, and mocking her openly when she does things like try to convince people that active shooter drills were something that used to take place in schools when she was a child (again, she grew up during the Carter and Reagan administrations, so she’s full of s*** about that).
Republicans are going to be fighting tooth and nail to hang onto the Senate in 2020, so we’re expecting Joni Ernst to go out flailing and clawing like a drunken wildcat rather than show any grace or dignity.