Astonishing.
Absolutely astonishing. Is it any wonder the base of the GOP is flocking to the campaigns of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz .?
So much for Speaker Paul Ryan .. Make that Speaker Paul Boehner.
The Ryan-led House GOP has utterly betrayed the Republican base that elected them. In the recently passed budget deal for which, according to the Washington Post, “House Republicans provided most of the needed votes,” the GOP leadership saw to it — after swearing up and down that they would use their congressional posts to defund Obamacare, stop the Obama executive amnesty, and defund Planned Parenthood — broke every last promise. Once elected, the GOP Congress turned on their own supporters — deliberately, willfully, eagerly — and broke every last promise. All of them.
Said the Speaker: “We played the cards that were dealt the best we can.” Ryan also cited the halt to an export ban on crude oil as a victory for the GOP. One can only ask in astonishment: “You were dealt a hand? Who was dealing the hand? Are not Republicans running the House?” With all due respect to the Speaker, he is making it sound like he and his GOP colleagues are Martians who just landed in a new world and are stuck with the mess they discovered. Not to put too fine a point on this but — hello? — Ryan and the GOP were in charge in the first place! They elected John Boehner Speaker of the House. They dealt the cards. And suddenly now they are mystified at the cards they dealt themselves? Oh please.
This wasn’t good enough for Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions .. A furious Sessions took to the Senate floor to say the following:
“There is a reason that GOP voters are in open rebellion. They have come to believe that their party’s elites are not only uninterested in defending their interests but — as with this legislation, and fast-tracking the President’s international trade pact — openly hostile to them. This legislation represents a further disenfranchisement of the American voter.”
Over here at Breitbart, the indomitable Steve Bannon with Julia Hahn has documented in chapter and verse the details of the sellout. Among them:
The omnibus would put the U.S. on a path to approve admission for hundreds of thousands of migrants from a broad range of countries with jihadists movements over the next 12 months, on top of all the other autopilot annual immigration.
Bannon and Hahn go on with the list of betrayals. Funding on other issues includes money for the resettlement of illegal aliens, a quadrupling of H2B foreign worker visas, tax credits for illegal aliens and, well, more. You get the picture.
In the words of Rep. Dave Brat . of Virginia — he the man who defeated House GOP Majority Leader Eric Cantor? “We’re breaking our pledge on the budget caps to the American people, we’ve lost fiscal discipline, and we’re throwing it all on the next generation.”And so Brat opposed the bill, right? Wrong. Barely in office and one of the leading lights of the House Freedom Caucus has jumped over the side. Why? Because Ryan is “just cleaning the barn” and: “Not only is he (Ryan) saying the right things, he is lining it up to do the right things… and then leadership can’t hijack the budget at the end of the year and throw the kitchen sink, which we just did.”
All of which means this, as Senator Ted Cruz said in Politico so well back in October:
“At every stage there’s a promise: ‘Next time we’ll stand and fight but not this time,’” Cruz said Tuesday. “That is leadership’s position. That we can accomplish nothing other than the priorities of the Democrats such as growing government and expanding the debt.”
So now even the House Freedom Caucus has joined in the “next time we’ll get ’em” routine.
Rush Limbaugh, as ever zeroing in on the heart of the problem, yesterday took to the airwaves to say, in part this:
When you surrender the power of the purse and that’s the primary power the House of Representatives has. Not a penny of money can be spent in this country by this government without the House of Representatives authorizing it. Obama can spend all he wants, but if the House doesn’t give him the mechanism, he can’t spend any of it. But the Republicans squandered that. They gave up the power of the purse. The reason they did that is because for some inexplicable reason, they are literally paranoid and scared to death of even being accused of doing something that would shut down the government.
… It fully funds Planned Parenthood. That, to me, is unforgivable, with everything now known about what goes on behind closed doors at Planned Parenthood, and that the federal government, led by a Republican Party, sees fit to pay for it. It is beyond comprehension, and it is a total squandering of moral authority to fully fund the butchery at Planned Parenthood….
… This was out-and-out, in-our-face lying, from the campaigns to individual statements made about the philosophical approach Republicans had to all this spending. There is no Republican Party! You know, we don’t even need a Republican Party if they’re gonna do this. You know, just elect Democrats, disband the Republican Party, and let the Democrats run it, because that’s what’s happening anyway. And these same Republican leaders doing this can’t, for the life of them, figure out why Donald Trump has all the support that he has? They really can’t figure this out?
Repeated stabs in the back like this — which have been going on for years — combined with Obama’s policy destruction of this country, is what has given rise to Donald Trump. If Donald Trump didn’t exist and if the Republican Party actually does want to win someday, they’d have to invent him.
What more is there to be said here? This betrayal of the GOP base is precisely what we have discussed many times in this space. That would be the Margaret Thatcher description of the “socialist ratchet.” Which, again one more time, was explained this way by Thatcher as she made the same complaint of the leadership of the British Conservative Party that the Republican base in America is making of today’s GOP leadership. Thatcher described the problem thusly, after explaining the devotion of the British Labour Party to socialism:
The Tory Party was more ambivalent. At the level of principle, rhetorically and in Opposition, it opposed these doctrines and preached the gospel of free enterprise with very little qualification. Almost every post-war Tory victory had been won on slogans such as “Britain Strong and Free” or “Set the People Free.” But in the fine print of policy, and especially in government, the Tory Party merely pitched camp in the long march to the left. It never tried seriously to reverse it. Privatization? The Carlisle State Pubs were sold off. Taxation? Regulation? Subsidies? If these were cut down at the start of a Tory government, they gradually crept up again as its life ebbed away. The welfare state? We boasted of spending more money than Labour, not of restoring people to independence and self-reliance. The result of this style of accommodationist politics, as my colleague Keith Joseph complained, was that post-war politics became a “socialist ratche” — Labour moved Britain towards more statism; the Tories stood pat; and the next Labour Government moved the country a little further left. The Tories loosened the corset of socialism; they never removed it.
This is an exact description of what Paul Ryan and the GOP House have just done. Mr. Ryan as Speaker has turned out to be a “socialist ratcheteer” — and then some.
Again, is it any wonder that the base of the Republican Party is so disgusted with the GOP leadership? Is it any wonder that Donald Trump and Ted Cruz continue to lead the GOP polls?
No.
By the end of Thursday Trump was on Sean Hannity’s TV show castigating Ryan and the House GOP: “You look at what’s going on with our budget process, it’s a disaster. It’s a joke.” Trump was dead-on right. The Ryan budget deal is exactly the kind of rocket fuel that powers the Trump campaign.
This budget deal has undermined the credibility of the Speaker, the House Freedom Caucus, and the entire promise that if voters just give the GOP control of the House and Senate they will stop the Obama reign in its tracks. A promise now revealed in detail to be so much BS.
On the bright side? What was done in this budget deal was to quite effectively make an “in kind contribution” to the Trump and Cruz campaigns.
Make book on it.
