Real America fought like hell last year against a full-on onslaught from the Sorosbots and the media to wrench control of the House away from the walkers.
And this is what we got for the effort. Bupkes.
In re the impending cave-in, Allahpundit put it pretty well:
The most pitiful part of what’s happening right now isn’t the cave itself, which was predictable since day one of the quixotic “defund” effort, but the fact that they’re going to drag it out another day or two to the bitter end purely for theatrical purposes. There’s a 99 percent chance that Reid will reject whatever emerges tonight from the House, leaving Boehner to float a clean debt-ceiling hike tomorrow and let Pelosi and the Democrats bail him out, but in order to marginally reduce the upset among grassroots conservatives, he’s going to push this to the last possible moment. That means passing — hopefully — one more House bill to show that he really did try to get something in return for raising the debt limit, even though what he and House Republicans are now asking for barely qualifies as “something.”
That Boehner didn’t even try to repeal the medical device tax, and get something useful out of this, adds injury to insult.
We need a new speaker of the house.
And while I’ve never been one of those “primary ’em” kinds of conservatives, and the people who say “better to have 30 solid conservatives than a workable coalition of 51 conservatives and moderates” are idiots, we definitely need a GOP leadership that hasn’t gone native inside the Beltway.
Not sure what that’ll take – a Tea Party majority in the caucus? Moving the party HQ someplace away from DC?
I don’t know. But not since this have I been so tempted to break my “no gratuitous profanity” rule.
Boehner’s failure was not that he failed to reign in the Tea Party caucus, his failure was that he didn’t provide the leadership they needed.
Defunding Bammycare was a non-starter; OK fine. But the opportunity to get major concessions was there. Cruz has the passion, but not the experience or clout to put a coherent plan into action…even if he had a plan at all, which he clearly didn’t.
It’s all well and good to rail at take no prisoners conservatives, but you can count me among those that find the status quo so intolerable I’d rather just let the Demorrhoids run amok long enough to hang themselves. At least you wont find my fingerprints on the wreckage.
And since I never had a gratuitous profanity rule, please allow me to bid a hearty Fuck You to that dried up bag of crap McCain and (to my shame) my worthless Senator Lindsey Graham.
Boehner literally CRIED when the GOP won the House. HE. CRIED. I wouldn’t expect him to be able to fight his way out of a paper bag.
John Boehner is the weakest and least effective speaker in my memory. I read “various plans” as “vacuous plans”.
Which is a better description?
I don’t think Boehner is bad or not conservative enough. But he lost control of his caucus, and that rates him as an ineffective leader.
A good speaker over the past month would have sent his Tea Party members into attack mode when it suited the overall plan, and been able to reign them in when it suited the overall plan.
Would I rather have 30 “true conservatives” in the Senate instead of 51 Lindsay Grahams and John McCains? Is this a trick question?
If I had 51 RINOS, they’d be actively pursuing the Democrats agenda instead of merely going along with it. At least with 30 TCs, we might have a chance of slowing the headlong rush over the cliff.
Republicans at the moment are essentially a coalition government between two separate conservative-leaning interests, but without the structures in place to create negotiated frameworks for governing. Since they’re all branded under the “Republican” logo, the establishment expects its splinter groups to fall in line when the time comes, and that’s not happening.
Might be better all around if the Tea Party interests really did just form as a separate party, elect their own leaders, and have those leaders negotiate position and strategy with Republicans as peers.
What would an effective conservative speaker look like? Gingrich? Hastert? Boehner? Or Pelosi?
Any Democrat Speaker will have an advantage over a GOP speaker. They are elected by a safe district (i.e., Pelosi’s San Francisco, Gingrich’s 6th District in FL). It is always possible for the media to depict a Speaker as an extremist. The media will never depict a Democrat as an extremist.
The United States is a conservative country that puts liberals in Federal office. Until conservatives control (or render unimportant) popular culture, this will be the case.
What Joe said.
Joe-
that couldn’t be more wrong. 30 true conservatives in the Senate would be forced to sit the sidelines just like our Republicans in the legislature this last year. All they could accomplish was to slow the Dayton/Bakk/Thissen show to Warp 3 instead of Warp 4.
51 Rino’s can at least be spooked and herded in the right direction by a couple of true conservatives and a large base of angry activists.
Dave, that’s a grand theory. I’d like to see it put to practice. Seems to me today’s Senate deal shows spooked RINOS run to the LEFT.
@davethul
Supposing none of your suppositions materialize, America nonetheless has been given a chance to learn something about the Tea Party.
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I suppose that is worth quite a few dollars.
“America nonetheless has been given a chance to learn something about the Tea Party.”
True ‘dat. When they make a promise, they keep it; when they say a thing, they mean it. I can’t think of another instance of a largely outnumbered minority owning a debate for as long or as well as the Tea Party caucus just did.
Who is going to hold the Federal government accountable to the people?
It damn sure ain’t the press.
I think the main development is that the Republican Congressional leadership has decided that they will allow a funding bill to come to the floor with very few conditions attached, which effectively means the standoff is over. As the real issue was within the Republican Party rather than between the two parties, the fact that the Republican leadership is conceding that the bill will likely pass means it’s effectively over.
The other major development may be less obvious but no less significant. I think the Republican Party may be having a realization regarding the Tea Party that I would call a Selena Moment: that moment when you realize the president of your own fan club is completely out of control. That, I think, will lead to some quiet but very substantial changes going forward.
Emery, the problem isn’t with the TEA Party members of Congress. They are the people elected now, who represent the ideas of grassroots Republicans today. The problem is the John McCain types, who have been in Congress 30 years and is more interested in good publicity than good public policy.
The debt problem hasn’t been solved, only kicked down the road. The Democrats have no plan to address it so it’s coming up again in February. And again a few months after that. And right before the elections. The issue will keep coming up because the debt isn’t going away and neither is the TEA Party.
Careful, Mr Doakes, or the GOP will end up like the Democrats in 1972–stuck with an extreme and vocal faction that led to undetectability …
Powerline links to a story that shows that the ‘cooler heads of the senate Republicans’ apparently got pork as their price for accommodating the Democrats: http://www.buzzfeed.com/johnstanton/shutdown-deal-includes-nearly-3-billion-for-kentucky-dam-pro
Darn those extremist TEA partiers! Don’t they know that bribing politicians with borrowed money is the moderate, sensible way to govern the 50 states?
Maybe I can help: Would a person throwing his neighbors off a bridge as a means of advocating bridge safety and neighborliness be radical?
So, you are talking about Obama threatening to veto any bill that did not fund Obamacare?
Keep your lines of responsibility straight, please. The house passed many bills that would fund most government services, including service on the debt. Obama and his minions in the senate refused to allow votes on any of them.
http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/16/budget-deal-includes-174k-payout-to-widow-of-millionaire-senator/#ixzz2hxMCJJo3
Thank God those radical TEA party people lost and calmer heads prevailed!
$174k is about two decades worth of income tax payments by yours truly. Glad it went to a good cause!
Looks like the Widder Lautenberg really needed the bucks more than I did:
http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2012/1025/Who-are-the-10-richest-members-of-Congress/Sen.-Frank-Lautenberg-D-N.J
Y’know, I’ve never owned a new car in my life. Other priorities. Maybe now Lautenberg’s widow will be able to buy a new, top-of-the-line BMW. I mean, another one. God bless ‘er, she deserves it . . .
Emery, your concern for TEA Party Republicans electoral success is touching. But the analogy isn’t quite apt.
If Republicans were tossing babies off the bridge to safety on shore as the bridge was groaning, creaking and settling under its own weight about to collapse . . . that’s the situation TEA Party Republicans believe they face.
Rockafeller Republicans believe the bridge will hold for another three months while we pile more weight on it.
Democrats believe the bridge cannot collapse no matter how much weight is placed on it, because . . . Obama.
Let me paraphrase MBerg: ‘the basic fact is no matter what you do to a turd, polish it, paint it, it’s still a turd, and there is nothing you can do about that underlying fact’
I for one was sure that the man married to a high level director at Goldman Sachs would stick to his principles. Spinal injuries from being twisted in too many directions?
Lincoln fired McDowell, McClellan, Pope, Burnside and Hooker, trying to find a general who would fight.
Add Boehner to the list.
There is only so much fightin’ a speaker can do. Despite the plain wording of the constitution, and presumably what is taught in whatever passes for public school government classes these days, voters have come to believe that it is the president, and not the congress, who sets tax and spending policies and creates laws in the United States.
From Politico: Eureka! Tea partiers know science
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/tea-party-science-98488.html
Politico is another left-leaning MSM outlet that claims to play it straight down the middle.
Love this quote from the researcher:
“But then again, I don’t know a single person who identifies with the tea party,” he continued. “All my impressions come from watching cable tv — & I don’t watch Fox News very often — and reading the ‘paper’ (New York Times daily, plus a variety of politics-focused Internet sites like Huffington Post and POLITICO). I’m a little embarrassed, but mainly, I’m just glad that I no longer hold this particular mistaken view.”
Next he might discover that black people don’t like fried and watermelon more than white people. The characteristic of elites isn’t intelligence, education, or morality, but the social power to judge the intelligence, education, or morality of others.
The members of the Tea Party feel dis-empowered by:
1. The loss of the demographic dominance of Americans of Northern European descent.
2. The loss of economic clout of low skill Americans due to technological change and the flood of low skill workers who have joined the global labor market.
3. The loss of Geo-political power of America due to the growing strength of the rest of the world.
4. The loss of economic hegemony and the inherent power therein by America as the post-cold war world has adopted the American economic system (ironically).
5. The flood of new and often contradictory ideas and cultures which has been forced upon them by the ease of communication in a hyper-connected world.
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The members of the Tea Party used to be more important in the world, in their country, in their towns. They have discovered that they have lost their accustomed political, economic, and Geo-political power, and they don’t like it. They do not, of course, have a solution, as there is none. This movement will pass as they die. Their children don’t understand what was lost, so object to this loss of status much less. It is possible to draw parallels to William Jennings Bryan and his Populist followers who resented the loss of status of rural smallholders in an industrializing America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Though briefly popular, the Populists never won anything important, and were eventually displaced by the more forward-looking Progressives as the dominant force for change in America.
All of your points, Emery, are either moot or are unsupported by argument.
One might as easily argue that Blacks are in favor of affirmative action because they cannot effectively compete with whites and East Asians in the workplace.
Let’s not forget that Obamacare began as a Republican think-tank plan for delivering universal healthcare without embracing the single-payer systems of Europe and Canada. The Democrats have no innovative ideas of their own; their core membership desires nothing but more of the status quo ante. The money-men behind the Republicans need to stop throwing money at electing ignoramuses (ignorami?) and start funding innovative ideas to re-invent government. It’s ideas that will win the support of the next Republican majority.
If they had had the courage to embrace their own ideas, rather than surrendering them to the Democrats, they might well control the White House and Congress now.
Y’know, Emery, I think many of your remarks regarding the TEA party can be written off to semi-informed bigotry.
The master of semi-informed bigotry is NY Times columnist Thos. Friedman.
Friedman says, for example, that H1-B visa holders with engineering and science post-grad degree holders are over-represented compared to natural born citizens. Therefore, we should give automatic citizenship to people with student visa’s who get an BS from an American in an engineering or science field. The reason Friedman’s bigotry is semi-informed is because he does not understand the job market for visa holders.
With no experience, a new engineering or science grad has a hard time converting a student visa into an H1-B. However, as long as you are going for your masters or PhD, you can extend a student visa, and with a master’s or PhD post-grad diploma, you’ve specialized your knowledge and made connections that make getting an H1-B a snap.
So there is a selection advantage that favors student visa holders over native born US citizens when it comes to grad school applicants. If the selection advantage disappears (as Friedman proposes) so does the advantage of the foreign-born.
The great fault in Tea Party and current conservative strategy in general is its backward-looking nature. History rarely moves backwards, and particularly not in the United States. This is because the past is, taken as a whole, not a desirable condition to aspire to, even if some elements of it are appealing.
The difficult mission of a conservative party which wishes to be constructive is to create new systems of government which deliver much of what people like about government now, while removing those parts which people don’t like, and which sap the strength of the country. People dislike the possibility that medical or elder care will drive them to bankruptcy; hence the appeal of universal health care coverage, Medicaid, Medicare, etc. How do we achieve that while still using market forces to hold costs down, letting people make most medical decisions for themselves, paying doctors and hospitals fairly but not excessively? How do we provide quality education to all while encouraging reform and innovation? How do we protect workers and the environment while minimizing the costs and the dampening effect on innovation of that regulation?
The Democratic party (and the Labour Party) is allergic to addressing the flaws in the welfare state, as many of their coalition are the welfare state providers who fear its change (e.g. teachers’ unions, federal workers). The challenge for the Republican part is to make government smaller by making it better. Simply rolling back the gains of the social democratic policies of the last 70 years is a political non-starter. The public decided long ago that while they may dislike many aspects of their implementation, they very much like the comforts and safety that the welfare and regulatory state offer, and fear their removal.
The success of Reagan and Thatcher was not a rolling back of the welfare state. They succeeded in changing the way the welfare state was delivered. They changed the structure of taxes (they did not reduce them) to encourage innovation and business. They de-regulated what did not need regulation (and went too far in some areas like finance). They shrank Leviathan by privatizing government owned assets, forcing them to be at least partially subject to market forces. A return to the days of Reagan and Thatcher requires a return to the intellectual pursuit of new and better ways to deliver what is best about the regulatory and welfare state. The Tea Party wishes to stand athwart the path of history and cry NO! That caricature of Conservatism is and has always been a concession of incremental failure, as history will eventually move forward around obstacles, but never backwards. The only path to success is through the embrace of an innovative re-imagining of government. It is hard to remember now, but the Republican party and the British Conservatives in the 1980s were the parties of ideas (whether you liked them or not). That was the genesis of their success, and that is what they have lost.
Mitch and the other complainers about John B:
Instead of complaining about John B may I point out the real problem is Mitch M. and the Senate Republicans. If Mitch got just 41 Republicans to vote against cloture Harry Reid would’ve never had a bill and the House Republicans wouldn’t have the media and brain dead democrats saying just pass the clean CR.
It is the Republicans in the Senate who has helped kick an amnesty bill to the House.
To that one person who said that the Senate can’t do anything they can do a whole lot, but we need the 46 to stay together and give Harry no power to pass a bill unless he makes a real deal.
Mitch hasn’t learned from what the Senate Democrats did to President Bush’s agenda.
Walter Hanson
Minneapolis, MN
Emery wrote:
“The great fault in Tea Party and current conservative strategy in general is its backward-looking nature.”
Why do you think that you know what the future will look like, Emery?
The Democrats were opposed to the notion of single-payer Universal Healthcare because it would have required large new taxes and an intrusive federal bureaucracy to displace the current private payments to private providers. Large new taxes and an intrusive federal bureaucracy are exactly what people dislike about the Democratic party most. That hard lesson was learned by a generation of Democrats and they aren’t about to forget it. Single payer healthcare might well have sunk the Democratic party for a generation. Obamacare is either a good-faith effort to provide universal healthcare without a massive federal bureaucracy and tax system, or a Machiavellian scheme to ‘prove’ the need for a single payer system by the failure of a Republican-inspired alternative.
You paint with too wide a brush, Emery. Just as it’s not reasonable to punish all Kulaks for the mistakes of one, it’s not sensible to attribute to every TEA Party member the views of another. That’s why Democrats send plants wearing Confederate flags to the rallies, so they can blame the whole crowd for the fake beliefs of one person in the crowd and thereby dismiss an entire movement.
Just a reminder: TEA stands for Taxed Enough Already. If you don’t believe that you, personally, are taxed enough already, then you believe you, personally, should pay more in taxes. So you’re not ready for membership in the TEA Party and don’t properly have much say in how it runs. The unifying factor is taxation, not race, demographics, immigration, foreign policy, or some silly girl shaking her butt on the interwebs.
So why did the TEA Party want to shut down the government over Obama-care? Because Obama-care is a budget-buster and we can’t afford to pay the taxes it will require. The federal budget already is $600,000,000,000 short every year. We cover that by taking a cash advance off our credit line, which increases our total debt to high that we’ve exceeded our credit limit of $16,000,000,000,000. But there is no plan to cut spending so we can stop borrowing, no plan to pay raise taxes so we can stop borrowing, no plan to pay down the existing debt. Democrats and RINOS in Washington’s entire strategy is – literally – to kick the can down the road and hope to be gone before it all collapses.
TEA Partiers don’t want it all to collapse simply because we were too greedy and stupid to make hard decisions now.
What do you want, Emery?
I wonder where these champions of government shrinkage were during President G W. Bush’s eight years of federal-government expansion, and why their calls to repeal Medicare Part D and defund the TS A are so much quieter than their calls to repeal and defund the ACA. There is a crucial difference between showing people how much you want to shrink the state and actually shrinking it. To do that, they will have to convince people that it’s worth doing. Destroying things is easy. Building is hard.
Most of the ideas behind Romneycare and Obamacare came from the Heritage Foundation, a Republican think tank, as a response to the proposed Hilarycare in 1993-4. But when Obama embraced it, they had to oppose it — even though it was their idea in the first place. It’s not the ACA that they hate, if you ask them about it carefully. It’s the first 5 letters of “Obamacare” that drives them bats.
I wonder where these champions of government shrinkage were during President G W. Bush’s eight years of federal-government expansion,
I supported Forbes in 2000, and warned people about Bush’s spending habits. Plenty of us did. When he started cuddling up to Ted Kennedy on Education and Medicare Part D, many of us, from Limbaugh all the way down to the grass roots, were up in arms. Then 9/11 happened.
Either your memory is selective or your sources aren’t all that curious.
and why their calls to repeal Medicare Part D and defund the TS A are so much quieter than their calls to repeal and defund the ACA.
For the same reason that calls to plug the growing leak in the dam are louder than calls to fix the potholes.
The Democrats were opposed to the notion of single-payer Universal Healthcare because it would have required large new taxes and an intrusive federal bureaucracy to displace the current private payments to private providers.
Many democrats are for a single payer system, Emery.
The ACA is as close to a single payer system as possible while still getting 50% +1 in the House and senate. A parliamentary trick was used to avoid a filibuster in the Senate.
You make a mistake if you believe that any aspect of the ACA involved prudence on the part of the people who wrote it or voted for it.
I’ll grant you all of those problems with medicine. But none of the various socialized medical systems around the world is problem-free. All have serious problems with over-spending, and in particular determining where to allocate limited resources for the maximum good when the demand is huge and always increasing. Without market signals, we have only ‘values’, which are not consistent throughout the population. It is far from true that adopting a single-payer system is a panacea for solving the problems of a health care system. Couple that with the philosophical objections many Americans have to a single-payer system, and the need for creative solutions remains.
Emery wrote:
All have serious problems with over-spending, and in particular determining where to allocate limited resources for the maximum good when the demand is huge and always increasing.
How can a government know what is and what is not over-spending, and how can a government know what a thing called ‘maximum good’ is?
Without market signals, we have only ‘values’, which are not consistent throughout the population.
This is nonsense. Market signals determine values. Money is denominated in called ‘values’. A ten-dollar bill is ‘valued’ at ten dollars. Get it? What you call ‘values’ are really ‘opinions’.
I didn’t see a solution anywhere in that word–salad of yours. Had you offered a solution, I might offer my ‘valued opinion’.