Monday, the conservative presence of November was indeed felt and heard from the likes of Steve King, Marco Rubio and Allen West, as well as others voicing their disapproval of these 3-week stopgaps (i.e., “kicking the can down the road”). Throughout the day, Rep. King called on constituents to keep the pressure on their representatives in an effort to get the GOP leadership on board with removing recently discovered funds for Obamacare implementation in the latest Continuing Resolution:
“Obamacare is today’s Gordian knot…The law was drafted to be incredibly difficult for lawmakers to unravel. When then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, President Barack Obama, and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid drafted Obamacare, they quietly included provisions that automatically spend $105.5 billion over the next 10 years to implement the law.” Some of the automatic funding continues forever, King notes. “Unprecedented in scope, these self-enacting provisions grant Obamacare its own self-contained, automatic money machine. These are the resources that fertilize this malignant tumor, which is extending its roots into every aspect of our health care system.”
Sen. Marco Rubio posted a statement to RedState declaring, “I will no longer support short-term budget plans. While attempts at new spending reductions are commendable, we simply can no longer afford to nickel-and-dime our way out of the dangerous debt America has amassed. It is time our leaders in Washington wake up and realize that we are headed for a debt disaster.”
And Rep. Allen West declared “I will NOT be voting for another short term CR…There is a confrontation coming on this budget and the sooner we get to it the better.” He added that this isn’t playing well back home and that constituents “are tired of half-measures.”
“I make myself clear. I will not support anything less than HR 1 (the House bill with $61 billion in cuts) as it was sent forward to the Senate. Nor will I support another two week Continuing Resolution. Alexander the Great once stated, ‘Fortune favors the bold.’ The American people are looking for principled and bold leadership. I understand ‘political maneuvering’ but the time has come to engage in the battle for the fiscal responsible future of America. I shall take my position on the frontlines.”
So while we have courageous statesmen ready to battle, on the opposite end of the pendulum we find our own GOP leadership in the House (Boehner, Cantor, McCarthy), along with Senator minority leader Mitch McConnell, touting how this next CR needs to be passed, despite its address of massive Obamacare funding, for fear of a government shutdown. Spineless!
Colleagues throughout the weekend and into the beginning of the week have signed on with conservative Republicans and joined the responsible call for real fiscal cuts and a return to fiscal SANITY! So, why the kickback for our 'leadership'? Well, here it is in a nutshell:
• Obama/Pelosi/Reid snuck $105.5B of spending over the next ten years into the Obamacare bill for its implementation.
• The GOP leadership doesn’t want to do anything about it for seemingly the sole fear of a shutdown (which is a bit of a misconception that Heritage covers).
• Conservative Republicans want the leadership to remove it, thus requiring a suspension of the ‘rules’, which state that only discretionary spending can be discussed/removed in a Continuing Resolution (Obamacare funding snuck in there is “authorized”).
• House Leadership (Boehner, Cantor, McCarthy) says they are going to obey the rules (despite having made hundreds of exceptions for other 'mandatory' spending...we'll get to this).
• King/Bachmann have explained how this can be removed without breaking 'the rules'.
• The Leadership thinks voting for ‘repeal’ was enough, and continues to observe the ‘mandatory’ status of ‘the rules’.
The people in November didn’t vote for this to be ‘the argument’ among Republicans! They didn’t vote for Republicans to get mired down arguing ‘among’ themselves, PERIOD!
We can respect the new leadership for wanting to set a higher standard; however, Democrats played dirty getting this passed by changing and dodging the rules, so it’s going to take getting our hands dirty to rip this plunder out.
Here's an important question: Why are we wrapped up in ‘rules’ that don’t appear to be following proper legislative procedure in the first place?!
The new law attempts to bypass the normal appropriations process. By making advance appropriations for tens of billions of dollars up to the year 2019, these provisions of Obamacare seek to remove spending decisions from the reach of the current Congress and from future Congresses and Presidents.
Existing and advance appropriations need to be rescinded, just as the House last month voted to repeal billions of dollars from previous appropriations deemed ‘mandatory’ to 123 federal programs. An effort to restrict use of the funds appropriated within Obamacare was thwarted because the House did not waive the same point of order as it waived to allow de-funding those 123 other programs.
Boehner’s sitting back ‘waiting’ and ‘hoping’ that “the committees of proper jurisdiction will bring forward the bill to eliminate mandatory spending that is involved in that bill." Speaker Boehner, do you think Pelosi would be so nonchalant in tackling a problem of this magnitude? Of course not…she helped create THIS PROBLEM with the relentless vigor that we know all too well from the modern liberal. She would also scoff at the chatter associated with shutting down the government. Heritage covers the liberal’s motivation well:
Indeed, to force Americans into accepting the spending habits that have led to the crisis we face, liberals and their interest groups are trying to scare us with visions of a “government shutdown” that will deprive us of government services.
Do not buy any of this. What they seek is clear—to sap the resolve of those in Congress who want to carry out the mandate they were given at the elections: to cut spending and keep America strong.
Liberals have a much different vision of America than we conservatives do. If liberals can win this initial battle over the borrow-and-spend culture of Washington, they believe they can continue spending at reckless levels and force tax hikes to fundamentally transform America. If they win, there is no way we can bequeath to our children and grandchildren the country our forebears left us.
The time is NOW for our Speaker, and our Leadership on whole, to show equal vigor from the Right. Unfortunately, their record thus far leaves MUCH to be desired. If the leadership betrays the freshman conservatives, who are supported by the base, this will set up an untrustworthy precedence for the new Congress, and a tense situation that could have been avoided by having one key quality of a true statesman: COURAGE.
ADDENDUM: I'll leave you with Levin's words to reflect on...
...as well as, David Limbaugh's new column: "GOP Fear That History Will Repeat Helps Ensure It Will". He's exactly right!
Now we're coming up on another deadline, and congressional Republicans are presenting yet another continuing resolution, which contains $6 billion in spending cuts but doesn't, any more than the previous CR, include so-called "policy riders" that would address important issues, such as defunding Obamacare and Planned Parenthood.
The maddening irony is that Republicans seem to be ensuring that history repeats itself precisely because they are behaving as if they fear that history will repeat itself. We can only assume that they're looking back in horror at Bill Clinton's deceptive PR triumph over Newt Gingrich in effectively pinning the government shutdown on congressional Republicans. Utterly paranoid of being scapegoated by Obama for a current-day impasse leading to a shutdown, they are acquiescing to ongoing temporary Band-Aid budgets that, despite the budgetary cuts they contain, are improving the Democrats' long-term negotiating position and thus -- and more importantly -- imperiling their efforts to slash the actual budget.
I believe that Republicans are severely miscalculating the public mood. We are no longer in the '90s; we face a nation-threatening debt crisis, and Republicans' primary opponent is a weak president who is doing more to exacerbate our problems than he is to solve them. A government shutdown would not be the end of the world, but the GOP's failure to act emphatically on spending could be -- so to speak.
One unfortunate constant is the Republicans' incapacity to handle their electoral prosperity. They need to take a lesson from Obama's playbook and start behaving as if they understand that "we won." They must get over their irrational fear of a government shutdown and negotiate as if they have the superior hand -- the will of the people -- because they do.
UPDATE: Though the vote was closer, the House has approved yet another short-term CR...and the frustration grows! This is now Boehner's 'can' to kick down the road. Here's the roll call.
