Money is once more flowing out of Congress to all manner of follies and outrages, thanks to an omnibus spending bill that funds everything except Homeland Security through September of 2015 – throwing away every scrap of leverage the incoming Republican majority could possibly exercise against Emperor Obama, ensuring that no one outside the authors of Democrat Party fundraising email spam will be talking about shutdowns, and effectively neutering freshly-elected conservatives. The GOP leadership can get through another year with its favorite wheezy excuse for not standing up and fighting for anything: Our hands are tied. Sure, the knots are a bit clumsy, but that’s to be expected when you tie your own hands. It’ll be good enough for the permanent Beltway culture, which can have a very merry Christmas, riding their one-horse open sleighs down streets coated with a fresh blizzard of taxpayer dollars, jingling all the way....
The Republican leadership isn’t just bad at standing up for its principles and fulfilling commitments to its voters. It seems institutionally incapable of understanding, as Democrats do, that power won today must be used to set the stage for tomorrow’s elections. Democrats target constituencies and service them, including constituencies that aren’t actually American citizens. Republicans try to figure out how badly they can get away with disappointing their base while they service a Beltway culture some of them fear, and others profit from.
If the Republican leadership was smart, they’d be looping events such as Jonathan Gruber’s disastrous House testimony into a big-picture assault on arrogant, wasteful government, and reminding the hard-working, rules-obeying American taxpayer how much contempt Democrats hold them in. A proper budget debate right after the holidays would be a great way to do that. The Democrats fear nothing more than a sharp Republican Party playing that kind of hardball and appealing directly to the working middle class, which is so comprehensively betrayed by the Democrat philosophy of rewarding its big contributors and powerful special interests at the expense of everyone else. There’s a lot of junk in this “cromnibus” spending bill that could be used to buttress such a case, such as a juicy payoff to outgoing Majority Leader Harry Reid’s casino backers… but then, in order for Republican leaders to make hay over such corruption, they’d have to give up their pork and payoffs, and they don’t want that.
CROmnibus passage was gang related.
#tcot #rednationrising
— That Conservative (@ThatConservativ) December 13, 2014
