T here is a battle across the Anglosphere on the right side of the political spectrum. We see it in Britain between a ‘we mean business on immigration’ insurgent Reform party riding high in the polls and the established Tory party that did nothing (and repeatedly broke manifesto promises) on that and a host of other issues for fourteen years. We see it in Australia between a lifeless, unelectable Liberal party dominated by Labor-lite types and various conservative splinter parties, most notably One Nation. We see it in a different guise, even in the US.

I speak, of course, of the struggle between what critics label ‘populist conservatives’ on one side and established, High Tory, ‘moderate’ righties on the other side. The latter tend not to fight on culture issues, at all. They are Keynesians on economics. They were all-in on thuggish, civil liberties-destroying Covid lockdowns. They are at least half-committed climate alarmists and net zero advocates. They loved (though now pretend to be a tad sceptical about) mass third-world inward migration. The so-called populists (a term of abuse or a proxy for ‘electorally popular’) want big, big cuts to immigration and even deportations. They want non-Keynesian economic policies. And they want to fight the culture wars, not cravenly surrender, because they believe that everything else, politically, is downstream of culture.

This same battle is playing out between President Trump, a populist, and a hefty chunk of Congressional Republicans who aren’t. After eleven months, and using almost only executive orders, Trump presides over an annualised 4.3 per cent growth rate, record-high stock market tallies, 2.7 per cent inflation, a completely secure border (and hence a massive drop in drug overdose deaths), hundreds of billions of dollars of tariff income (which elite economists promised would send inflation sky-high, but hasn’t), a lowered deficit, a 20-per-cent drop in murders (largely from sending in the National Guard to a few Democrat-controlled cities), real wage gains for the poorest Americans, petrol prices at the pump that in some states are well under half the price they were under President Biden, and energy and electricity prices many Australians would chew off their left arms to have. I leave wholly aside Trump’s foreign policy wins such as bombing the Iranian mullahs’ nuclear ambitions, removing the Venezuelan strongman, bringing some stability to the Middle East, pushing the self-indulgent Europeans to spend much more on defence while threatening their anti-free speech ambitions, all while pulling out of Paris and net zero, effectively ending that lunacy except in Britain, Canada and, most conspicuously, Australia.

Meanwhile, what have Congressional Republicans delivered, given that in the 2024 election, Trump not only won all the swing states, the Electoral College and the popular vote, but on his coattails, the Republicans won a 53-47 majority in the Senate and, unusually for Republicans, a majority in the House of Representatives. (Not to mention, and overwhelmingly due to Trump, there is a solid conservative majority of justices on the Supreme Court.)

So, what have Republican majorities in Congress done to lock in Trump’s agenda through legislation? Wait for it. They have set a record for the lowest legislative output in the modern era, passing a handful of bills, whereas Democrats with these majorities have passed hundreds. But more than a few Republicans in Congress are Rinos who despise much of Trump’s agenda, including his closed-border and deport-all-illegals policies. For instance, Trump wants to completely revamp the grossly expensive and weirdly inefficient Obamacare legislation (which Democrats passed without a single Republican vote), but the Republicans can’t get it done – illustrating a truth of contemporary Anglosphere politics, that what the left legislates, the right almost never unwinds. Just think of the idiotic statutory bills of rights or the destruction of the British constitution by Tony Blair. What about legislating Elon Musk’s Doge cuts? Nope. Or Trump’s national voter ID laws, because it is patently obvious that some Democrat states are handing out Social Security cards and letting non-citizens use them to vote? Nope. Congressional Republicans haven’t legislatively locked in any of the above as Trump’s first-year legacy, leaving it completely vulnerable to the next Democratic president.

The claim of Republican leaders in the Senate (who are more problematic than in the House, which faces voters every two years) is that they are not prepared to take on the filibuster. What’s the filibuster? It’s not part of the US Constitution, which already has incredible checks and balances built in, including the democratic world’s most powerful upper house, one of the most powerful top courts, vetoes, real federalism, and so on. It evolved by accident, over time, but today requires 60 of 100 US senators to vote for cloture to override it. Worse, the filibuster, for most of American history, required senators to actually stand and speak, and keep speaking. Now it’s just a formalised device, but Senate Republicans won’t even change that. There is talk of ‘the nuclear option’, a simple-majority vote to get rid of the filibuster (as the Democrats did regarding non-Supreme Court judicial nominations, later extended by Republicans to cover the top court too). We’re not talking about a New Zealand-style parliamentary sovereignty set-up. There are myriad checks and balances in the Constitution. The filibuster is not in it and is grossly anti-democratic. It is used by Democrats far more than it used to be. Everyone knows that in the same position, the Democrats would nuke the filibuster if that were the only way to pass legislation to lock in election promises.

Who knows what this new year will bring? I’d certainly do what was needed to bring in national voter ID laws (in a world where we need ID to buy alcohol, board planes, and lefties made vaccine ID mandatory to keep jobs) and protect Trump’s immigration wins. Of course, as with half the Liberal Party’s shadow cabinet, many Rino Republicans worry about what the legacy media will say. Ha! In a recent US study, only 3.4 per cent of journalists identified as Republicans. Another found more than two dozen Yale University departments lacked a single Republican professor. Only losers worry about what the elites think. We know what they think. We know they’re wrong. Start doing something, you useless Rinos.