On this date in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022, “Fanatical Republican Extremist 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 Chattanooga 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 was 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 the Trump administration, 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 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 returned to Iowa for her own town 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 in 2018, her husband filed for divorce.
Joni Ernst had 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 claimed 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 Reagan administration, so she’s full of s*** about that).
She’s also a goddamned hypocrite when it comes to the Supreme Court, as she sat and watched Mitch McConnell hold up a seat on the court in the year before the 2016 election that should have gone to Judge Merrick Garland, but now that it’s 2020, and there’s only months before this one, she’s ready and waiting for Ruth Bader Ginsburg to keel over so she and the GOP can hot-shot the next alleged rapist like Brett Kavanaugh into place to do kegstands at the SCOTUS.
She sees no double standard on that.
A lot has happened since our last update on Joni Ernst, and the biggest narrative that she’s botched politically while running for re-election in 2020 was how she’s responded to the Covid-19 pandemic. She’s tried to simultaneously criticize President Obama’s handling of an Ebola outbreak that she campaigned on six years ago where only two people died, while claiming Donald Trump’s handling of Covid-19, where 150,000 people died in four months was “stepping forward”. As the Covid-19 pandemic worsened in the fall of 2020, Sen. Ernst began promoting a completely originally conspiracy theory… that Covid-19 numbers aren’t as bad as the media is reporting, and greedy doctors are only reporting more positive tests so they can bilk more money out of health insurance companies. Does that sound bats*** crazy and incredibly hard to prove? Because it is.
Here’s what her voting record has looked like the past 18 months or so:
- January 31st, 2020: Joni Ernst votes against witnesses being allowed in the first impeachment trial of Donald Trump, effectively making it a “trial”.
- February 5th, 2020: Sen. Ernst votes against the first impeachment of Donald Trump, in spite of the mountain of evidence showing that he solicited foreign assistance in the 2020 elections.
- February 25th, 2020: Ernst votes for the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, an insane piece of anti-choice legislation that would ask abortion providers to try to admit aborted fetuses to a hospital if they were “alive” after the procedure, which is medically impossible given the age that abortions can be performed at.
- February 13th, 2021: Joni Ernst votes to acquit Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial, feeling that he deserves no punishment for inciting an attack on the Capitol and jeopardizing the lives of the legislative branch of our government.
- March 6th, 2021: Sen. Ernst votes against the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, because he can’t be bothered to care if people need financial assistance during a pandemic.
- September 3rd, 2021: Ernst claimed that “not once” has President Biden thanked overseas veterans in the past 20 years, a ludicrous statement about a man who has REPEATEDLY thanked them, and literally will pass out hot dogs to them himself to show his gratitude. When reality doesn’t fit her partisan narrative, expect Ernst to try and rewrite it.
- September 10th, 2021: The day before the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Joni Ernst goes on Fox News to claim Joe Biden was only attempting to create vaccine mandates to “distract from 9/11”. Critics were baffled as to what in the hell the point she was trying to make was.
- December 14th, 2021: Ernst votes against raising the debt ceiling, jeopardizing the United States’ credit rating.
- February 28th, 2022: Sen. Ernst votes against the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would have established a right to physicians to perform abortions to save their patients’ lives.
- March 30th, 2022: Ernst votes against putting the extremely qualified nominee, Judge Kentanji Brown-Jackson, onto the Supreme Court.
- May 26th, 2022: Sen. Ernst votes against the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2022, because at this point, domestic terror is a policy plank of authoritarian Republicans.
- July 27th, 2022: Joni Ernst votes against the PACT Act, blocking additional funding towards veterans exposed to “burn pits” while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a vote conducted out of spite that Democrats passed the Act the prior day. Several Republicans are seen shaking hands and fist bumping to celebrate screwing over the vets, while releasing a series of photos of the Senate GOP Caucus filling USO boxes and claiming they “support the military”.
- August 29th, 2022: Ernst comes to the defense of Donald Trump, as he’s in extreme legal jeopardy for violating the Presidential Records Act and the Espionage Act, but she chalks it up to a conspiracy theory that it’s just a ploy by the Biden administration to distract from falling gas prices. Which… why they would want to distract from what’s a GOOD thing… (Ernst is a moron.)
Joni Ernst is not up for re-election until 2026, and until then, she will remain the Senate’s seminal prop comic. Her main plan seems to become the GOP’s new “kingmaker”, who knows she’s too much of an idiot to ever be elected president, but will curry favor and root herself into the party hierarchy by making herself a key figure in the Iowa primary as a Senator endorsing a favorite… she’s doing this now for 2024, and expect her to try and do it if she’s re-elected for every four years until she’s dead.