Thom Tillis Is Why That Red Wave Didn’t Materialize - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Thom Tillis Is Why That Red Wave Didn’t Materialize
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Yes, the headline isn’t really fair to Thom Tillis, the North Carolina Republican senator who wasn’t on the ballot in last month’s midterms. You’ll forgive the unfairness, perhaps.

But life isn’t fair. And honestly, Tillis’ lame-duck-session amnesty gambit is deserving of much worse than the headline above. Here’s Stephen Kruiser at PJ Media:

One of the more frustrating aspects of being a conservative Republican is the constant need to look over one’s shoulder for stealth attacks by moderate squish members of the GOP on important issues like health care, gun control, and amnesty for illegal immigrants. Such ideological shivs in the back always arrive under the execrable guise of bipartisanship.

It should be noted upfront that I am not at all opposed to true bipartisanship. Nothing resembling it exists in Washington though. What bipartisanship means now is that the Republicans cave to the Democrats and move leftward on an issue in order to avoid having The New York Times write something mean about them.

Ever since last month’s red trickle election, it seems as if the Republicans are trying to prove to the electorate that they shouldn’t have won big anyway.

Kruiser refers to Townhall’s Matt Vespa, who had a good writeup about the “bipartisan” amnesty bill Tillis is cooking up with Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema:

I’m not a staunch social conservative, but you can arguably say that the recent repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act didn’t earn any dividends with GOP base voters. So, what do Republicans want to do now in the lame-duck session? Pass a grand bargain on immigration that could lead to millions of illegal aliens being put on a pathway to citizenship.

The deal was hashed out between Sens. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ). There is no funding to complete the border wall—that would make sense. Still, it will permit some two million recipients of Obama’s unconstitutional Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program to get on the citizenship track. The buried portion of this provision is that once these two million are through the process, they can sponsor extended family members so that two million-figure could be closer to seven million, and I’m being conservative in that estimate.

Coming right after joining 11 other brain-dead Republicans to pass the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) repeal and make same-sex marriage the new normal in America, that’s a hell of a lame-duck session Tillis is cooking up for Republican voters to have to eat.

Let’s start with the most obvious point of all: when your party, which was in an absolute minority (both House and Senate, plus the other side owns the White House), just took over one of the two houses of Congress in a midterm election, what you want is to pass zero legislation, period, in a lame-duck session.

Why? Because any bills left out there are going to be drafted and passed chiefly by the other side. And they will fill those bills with all kinds of awful things that victimize your voters and make life worse for your people. Wait until January and you get to write those bills, while the Democrats then have to deal with the consequences of either accepting or rejecting them.

It’s stupid. Doing business with Democrats is stupid. Even if it’s Sinema, who’s reasonably respectable, giving amnesty to illegal aliens is a non-starter with the Republican base, and to offer that up without confiscatory considerations of long-ranging and coalition-sundering impact for the other side is just unforgivable.

I bring this up often, but I’ll do it again because this is yet another example. Here’s how legislative negotiations work between Stupid Party Republicans like Tillis and Mitch McConnell, who isn’t stupid but stands as one of the most egregious political point-shavers in American history as the leader of the GOP caucus, and the Democrats:

Democrats: We want 100. Give us 100.

Republicans: What are you offering in return?

Democrats: Nothing. But we want 100 and you have to give it to us.

(Or maybe the Stupid Party even skips the question about what they’ll get for the 100.)

Republicans: What if we gave you 10?

Republican voters: Excuse us, but why are you offering these people anything? This is stuff we have to pay for, and we don’t want you to give it up.

Democrats: Shut up, you racists!

Republican voters: See? Why would you sell us out to these jerks?

Republicans: Forgive our voters. How about 20?

Democrats: We can’t even discuss this without getting at least 30.

Republicans: Well …

Republican voters: DON’T YOU DARE TAKE THAT DEAL!

Democrats: Terrorists! They’re terrorists! Send in the FBI!

Republicans: Will 30 seal the deal?

Democrats: We’ll have to see …

Democrat voters: Should we riot? Firebomb a care pregnancy center? Send in idiots in red t-shirts to harass people in the Dirksen Building?

Democrats: Sure. Knock yourselves out.

Republican voters: This is who you idiots want to do a deal with? You really are the Stupid Party.

Republicans: Well …

Democrats: Sure, we’ll take 30.

Republicans: Excellent! Glad we’ve been able to come together.

Republican voters: Come together for what? What did we get out of this?

Republicans: We got 70! Isn’t that great?

Republican voters: If you’d walked away from the table at the very beginning we’d have 100. You got taken to the cleaners, you morons, and we just got stuck with the bill.

Republicans: Yes, but look at this nice writeup in POLITICO.

This ridiculous pantomime has gone on for literally decades, and it fools absolutely nobody but the Thom Tillises of the world.

We’re governed by people who suck. The Democrats suck because they’re trying to. The Republicans suck because they don’t know how to do anything else.

And Republican voters are beyond furious with the party’s Washington establishment, so much so that even the fundamentally transformative failure of the Biden regime wasn’t enough to generate the red wave. You had five million more people voting Republican than Democrat last month, and it didn’t even move the needle in Senate races (and moved it just enough in the House for a precarious majority).

When there should have been a political sea change.

This stupid “bipartisan” legislation, which fulfills Democrat priorities at the literal expense of the Republican base, is why. Conservatives have zero faith, and zero reason for faith, in Republicans in Washington. Their performance has been utterly indefensible, and as a result nobody thinks they’re ever going to be anything but the Stupid Party.

They’re the Washington Generals, with the Democrats playing the role of the Harlem Globetrotters, in a never-ending rigged game.

McConnell is the least popular politician in Washington, something that should have led to his resignation years ago. Instead he keeps rolling along while screwing over his party’s base and training a new crop of losers to give away the store.

And where it’s going in America is that the ballot-harvested votes of the dead and gone will elect politicians who ultimately see to it that Christian pastors and priests go to jail unless they agree to officiate gay weddings. And the Republicans in Washington won’t lift a finger to reverse any of it.

So why should Republican voters lift a finger to help them?

Get rid of the McConnells and the Tillises and the rest of the Washington Generals. And then we can talk about the American revival we so badly need.

Scott McKay
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Scott McKay is a contributing editor at The American Spectator  and publisher of the Hayride, which offers news and commentary on Louisiana and national politics, and RVIVR.com, a national political news aggregation and opinion site. Scott is also the author of The Revivalist Manifesto: How Patriots Can Win The Next American Era, and, more recently, Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It's All Obama, available November 21. He’s also a writer of fiction — check out his four Tales of Ardenia novels Animus, Perdition, Retribution and Quandary at Amazon.
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