Erick Erickson was fairly succinct when he found out that John Boehner was going to fund the Department of Homeland Security through the end of the fiscal year without having any strings attached to the funding.
I told y’all he was lying when he puffed his chest and said he’d stop the President. He had no intention of doing so. And now Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) will ensure President Obama’s executive amnesty is funded.
He will, like so many other Republican leaders, hide behind a court to fight for him. Coward.
All afternoon I have been trying to find a good analogy for this. My first thought was the Black Knight from Monty Python and The Holy Grail: “Running away, eh? You yellow bastards! Come back here and take what’s coming to ya! I’ll bite your legs off!”
Somehow, this didn’t quite capture the insane futility of Sir Erick and his Round Table of the conservative Freedom Caucus. After all, Erickson isn’t yelling at the Democrats. He’s yelling at Sir John the Not-Quite-So-Brave-As-Sir-Mitch.
Or is it the other way around?
I don’t know. Who can tell with these miscreants?
Maybe the better analogy is the Japanese soldier who, stranded on some remote Pacific island, refuses to believe that the Emperor couldn’t have prevailed if he had just fought on a little longer. Maybe he doesn’t believe that the Emperor has surrendered at all.
No wait, Erickson knows full well that the Republicans surrendered. He predicted it all along.
Where is the analogy I seek?
Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), a close ally of Boehner’s, made the motion Tuesday to use an obscure House rule to bring the Senate-passed funding bill to a House vote…
…Simpson blasted the conservatives’ strategy as a path destined to fail. He pointed out the DHS funding bill doesn’t contain money for processing the executive actions in the first place, since those are funded by fees.
“What it will lead to is a closedown of the Department of Homeland Security. And that is not a victory. That is dangerous,” Simpson said…
Rep. Simpson was perhaps constrained by the rules of the House or he might have said what he actually meant, which was, “You people are out of your goddamned minds!”
Instead, we got this, “I will fight with anyone, and I will stand on their side, as long as they can show me a path to potential victory.”
Simpson is no kamikaze.
There was no path to victory for the Republicans, and every sane person knew this from the moment that the Knights demanded a hostage. But we all had to go through the motions of accommodating the lunatics. We all had to pretend that the votes they forced and the delays they caused were part of a real fight between two parties where the outcome was in some doubt. After all, it was theoretically possible that Mike Tyson could have had a coronary in the 30 seconds it took him to knock out Michael Spinks.
The Knights didn’t even have that kind of chance of winning.
In the end, what can you say about the Republicans’ performance here?
They smelt of elderberries.
