It’s interesting to see that Erick Erickson of Red State is declaring war on Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell and comparing him unfavorably to former Florida Governor Charlie Crist. This is a governor who is most well-known for pushing legislation that would force women to submit to government-spronsored forced vaginal ultrasounds who is now considered an apostate to the conservative movement. Let that sink in for a moment.
I don’t know if you’ve yet had a chance to read Ryan Lizza’s excellent eleven-page profile of Eric Cantor in The New Yorker. It took me a couple of hours to read because I had to intersperse parenting duties into the mix. I knew that the strategy that is currently being pursued by the leadership of the House is not something they actually support, but Lizza’s piece added some much-needed flavor to my understanding of the situation.
The GOP has gone bonkers, and it isn’t something that has gone unnoticed by Governor McDonnell, John Boehner, or even Eric Cantor. In fact, they are tied in knots and have no idea how to deal with the situation.
As Lizza points out, Cantor didn’t start out as a Tea Partier. His initial reaction to the election of Obama was to tack to the middle.
After Obama’s election in 2008, Cantor started a group called the National Council for a New America, which sought to embrace the idea that the G.O.P. needed to become more moderate. He told reporters that he was reading David Frum and Ross Douthat, two conservative writers at odds with the rightward drift of the Party. The efforts were short-lived. As the Tea Party movement took off, in 2009, Cantor worked to harness its energy.
What happened after the 2010 midterms is that a whole bunch of frankly stupid people were elected to the House of Representatives to represent the views of people who are even dumber than Donald Trump and Victoria Jackson combined. These are people who can’t understand basic concepts. Concepts like, you don’t get to enact things into law when you don’t control the Senate or the White House unless you are willing to compromise. Concepts like, the president just got reelected, so your revolution is over.
Boehner can tell them over and over and over again that they only control one-half of one-third of the government, and they still can’t understand why they haven’t yet repealed The New Deal.
Take sophomore lawmaker Tim Huelskamp, who represents the First District in Kansas. He was stripped of his committee assignment on the powerful tax-writing Ways & Mean Committee because he thought the Ryan Budget was insufficiently austere. Here’s what he has to say about the heavy-handed tactics of the House leadership.
“They will say, ‘Either vote this way or we’ll shut your money off,’ ” he said. “But nobody in Washington elected me, nobody in leadership. Outside groups came and helped me.”
He added, “I’m very upset about the lack of leadership. We came in with high hopes and high expectations—the class of 2010!—and left with a big tax increase, a big spending increase, more corporate welfare, and no entitlement reform. If the Republican leadership doesn’t look, at a minimum, like it’s actually articulated and attempted to advance some conservative principles, then I think we’ll lose the majority.
There seems to be absolutely no recognition on his part that the Republican House has, since it gained majority status in the aftermath of the 2010 midterms, simply refused to agree to anything that the Obama administration would like to do.
Rep. Huelskamp may be a radical, but he isn’t really that much of an outlier. Consider what the conservative Republicans demanded in return for agreeing to pay our bills for a few months and avoid completely destroying our credit rating.
To win over the right, House leaders promised three things. They would demand that the Democratic-controlled Senate write a formal budget, which Senate Democrats have avoided doing for several years; if the senators didn’t pass a budget, they wouldn’t get paid. Second, they promised conservatives that the cuts in the sequester would be kept intact or replaced with something equivalent. The final promise was far more daunting: Paul Ryan would write a budget that balanced within ten years. “Big goal,” Cantor said, and he sounded relieved that it wouldn’t be his job; Ryan’s last budget, which included severe spending cuts, didn’t promise to come into balance until the late twenty-thirties. “People were concerned that it took too long to balance,” Ryan said. To make the budget balance in a decade, the level of cuts will have to be extreme. Cantor may have led his colleagues out of the debt-ceiling canyon only to get them trapped in another one.
In this context, is it any wonder that we are about to impose the Sequester? What is happening (and what no one wants to admit) is that we are embracing the chaos of the Sequester not because Boehner or Cantor think it is good policy or even good politics, but because they think they have to for “member management purposes.” They think that they won’t be able to compromise until it is demonstrated to their members that the American people would prefer to be infested with chiggers than to be governed by these morons anymore.
Boehner is so defeated that I still have no idea why he hasn’t just resigned.
