CNS Intern Senator-Pestering Season, Spring Semester Edition

It’s a new semester, which means that CNSNews.com has a new intern, Emily Robertson of right-wing Liberty University. And as is mandated of every CNS intern, Robertson has been tasked with going to Capitol Hill and pestering members of Congress with loaded and biased questions designed by CNS editors to trap liberal politicians and give conservative ones an opportunity to virtue-signal to the right-wing CNS audience.

Robertson’s first question this semester was: “The U.S. trade deficit with China in 2021 was more than $300 billion for the tenth year in a row. Can the United States have free trade with a communist country?”Her targets:

• Mitt Romney (R)
• Ted Cruz (R)
• Rand Paul (R)
• Rick Scott (R)
• Cynthia Lummis (R)
• Elizabeth Warren (D)
• Mike Braun (R)
• Dan Sullivan (R)
• Josh Hawley (R)
• John Cornyn (R)
• Thom Tillis (R)
• Tommy Tuberville (R)
• James Lankford (R)
• John Kennedy (R)
• Joni Ernst (R)
• Joe Manchin (D)
• Bill Cassidy (R)

Note that nearly all of Robertson’s targets are Republicans. That’s a lot of virtue-signaling.

Her next question was taken from a Feb. 14 grievance article by editor Terry Jeffrey complaining that federal data showed too many babies (in his view) being born to mothers who are unmarried and poor: “According to the CDC, 42% of the babies born in America in 2020 were born on Medicaid. Is that a good thing?” That came with a follow-up: “40.5% of the babies were born to unmarried mothers. Do you think that’s related to the high number born on Medicaid?” Here’s the heavily Republican guest list, with many repeats from the first round:

• Roy Blunt (R)
• Tommy Tuberville (R)
• Rand Paul (R)
• Steve Daines (R)
• Todd Young (R)
• Marco Rubio (R)
• Mike Braun (R)
• Joni Ernst (R)
• Cynthia Lummis (R)
• John Cornyn (R)
• Mitt Romney (R)
• Richard Shelby (R)
• Josh Hawley (R)
• Roger Marshall (R)
• Rick Scott (R)
• Mike Crapo (R)
• Mike Rounds (R)
• Gary Peters (D)
• Elizabeth Warren (D)
• Chuck Grassley (R)
• Tim Kaine (D)

Inexplicably, Robertson identified Peters as “pro-choice” in her headline and made a point of stating that he “supports abortion.”  By contrast, the anti-abortion views of the Republicans she quoted lamenting the birth of babies to poor and unmarried mothers was not mentioned.