By DEXTER DUGGAN
While CNBC’s liberal moderators at the third Republican presidential debate on October 28 in Colorado sought to embarrass the candidates, new House Speaker Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) did more than enough to embarrass himself and the GOP thoroughly and astoundingly shortly thereafter.
The Catholic Ryan had just assumed the powerful House post at the strong urging of the failed departing speaker, John Boehner (R., Ohio), also a Catholic. Boehner told CNN that God Himself wanted Ryan to be speaker, and that Boehner “laid every ounce of Catholic guilt I could on him” to shove Ryan into the role.
With this background, the newly crowned, muscular Ryan quickly issued lame excuses and assertions of powerlessness when the topic of continuing to appropriate a half-billion dollars of annual taxpayer funding for barbarous abortion giant Planned Parenthood came up in a CNN interview aired November 1.
Ryan reeled off nonsense about being constrained by the U.S. Constitution and of his belonging to the “opposition” political party. It was the same pitiful defensive crouch that continues to drive disgusted Republican voters to switch their registration to Independent.
Apparently God had wanted a weakling as speaker, one whose trembling hands must keep shoveling mountains of taxpayer money to the baby butchers at PP, the kind of ruthless butchers that God had dealt with harshly in the Bible.
Why are we talking Bible here? Maybe because Boehner designated Ryan as God’s anointed.
If Ryan doesn’t think he can devise a successful strategy to cut off taxpayers’ support for this repellent, monstrous organization, what else does he ever hope to attain that demands some effort?
Some Republican congressmen reportedly were planning to put riders on funding measures that would oppose targets including Planned Parenthood, but they didn’t hear their new speaker cheering them on.
Even if PP had all nine U.S. Supreme Court justices swear that it’s doing nothing illegal, Americans are recoiling from a ruthless enterprise whose officials casually speak of routinely, precisely crushing unborn babies so as better to harvest and sell their organs. Indeed, if this cruelty was affirmed unanimously to be legally acceptable, one must ask what has become of U.S. law.
Was the brainy Ryan unaware that his GOP flexes workable majorities in both houses of Congress? That, indeed, his Republicans enjoy the largest majority they’ve had in the House in nearly a century? Ryan apparently so shares the GOP elite’s beaten-down mindset that he reflexively emphasizes he’s just in an “opposition party”!
Where in the Constitution that Ryan reads was any private business awarded guaranteed federal funding, even an innocent, small lemonade stand, much less a lawless conspiracy that lynches millions of black lives, and other babies’, before they’re born?
Imagine that a Republican president had come into office in January 2009 with solid majorities of his party controlling both houses of Congress, but due to that GOP president’s arrogance, extremism, and intransigence, the voters decisively turned congressional control over to the Democrats within a few years.
Would the hypothetical victorious Democrats today be saying they dare not offend the weakened, embarrassing Republican president, but must conform to his agenda? Or would the Democrats be cornering and hogtieing him on every possible occasion to drive home that they’re in control on behalf of the American people’s plain wishes?
Imagine if this foolish GOP president demanded that the Democrat congressional majority provide a half-billion tax dollars a year to, say, Americans United for Life or the conservative Family Research Council, and the Democrats quickly surrendered rather than, ulp, “shut down the government.”
Unthinkable? Not when the situation is simply reversed and it’s Democrat Barack Obama, not a Republican president, who squandered his own party’s congressional clout and empowered the other party. However, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) and Boehner did all they could to carry out Obama’s wishes, not the voters’.
McConnell and Boehner couldn’t even whip a majority of GOP members into line to vote for Obama’s disastrous spending levels, but these party leaders moved legislation forward so a solid Democrat minority could join with sufficient Republicans to give radical Obama his win.
Ken Cuccinelli, president of the independent “Senate Conservatives Action” Republican organization, said, “This debt vote is significant because it is the 20th time in the past 10 months that the new Republican majority allowed a bill to pass that was supported by a majority of Democrats and opposed by a majority of Republicans.”
And conservative GOP presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) rejected this slick dealing, saying, “For anyone wondering about the source of the American people’s volcanic frustration with Washington, one need look no farther than so-called ‘Republican’ majorities in both houses of Congress increasing the budget and our debt by more than $400 billion.”
This “is not a ‘grand bargain’ or negotiation — it is complete and utter surrender,” Cruz complained.
Just before the Senate action, only a fraction of House Republicans but all House Democrats voted to pass this budget deal. Just 79 Republicans including Ryan voted for it, but the Democrats added up to the winning majority.
Here was another opportunity when Ryan could have opposed the cronyism and corruption of the entrenched politicians, but instead he joined them. The departing Boehner had negotiated this deal in secret with Obama then thrust it forward, demanding quick approval.
As Boehner’s successor, Ryan probably could have made the rotten deal collapse if he announced he’d be voting against it, thereby inspiring Republicans and knocking liberal Democrats back on their heels, but he facilitated what he could have stopped.
How far Ryan had fallen from the happy days in 2012 when conservatives celebrated because GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney tapped the Wisconsin congressman as his vice-presidential running mate. Just stick around on Capitol Hill for a while and get transformed from being a conservative into something else.
It was a stark reminder of what happened to another celebrated conservative, Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), who within two years after his arrival in Washington signed on as a key supporter of the toxic “Gang of 8” “comprehensive immigration” bill being pushed by the usual open-borders, leftist crowd in 2013.
The conservative Rubio’s reputation gave the bill momentary valuable breathing room, until it was exposed as the same old amnesty deception, and Rubio suffered a collapse in conservative backing.
Currently a presidential candidate, Rubio now may be starting to soak up the “moderate” establishment GOP support that otherwise would stay with flailing Jeb Bush.
Speaking of amnesty, that’s another issue Ryan strongly favors — although, in order to be selected as the new speaker, he promised not to bring up amnesty in the House until 2017. We’ll see how long this promise lasts, considering that Ryan has a past of secretly trying to negotiate amnesty legislation with the radical leftist House Democrat Luis Gutierrez of Illinois, a big supporter of abortion and aggressive homosexuality.
Ryan also told tall tales earlier this year in order to help Republicans push Obama’s international trade powers through Congress — the kind of globalist, big-government capitalism that has kept the U.S. middle class flat on its back.
Republicans had the golden opportunity to repudiate John Boehner’s negative record when selecting a new speaker, but they ended up with a speaker whom Boehner himself had begged to succeed him — a new speaker to carry on the sorry establishment Republican traditions of promoting amnesty and borderless corporate capitalism while professing inability to oppose Planned Parenthood’s Culture of Death.
The Republican establishment thinks the key to winning elections is to scoop up the golden “independent” vote, but the GOP elite doesn’t seem to understand what has driven many voters into becoming independents.
In many cases these aren’t “moderates” who just can’t commit themselves to the platforms of either party. Often they’re disgusted conservatives who don’t want to identify with Republicans any longer because they’ve finally lost patience with GOP betrayals of its own conservative platform.
If Paul Ryan is to represent the image of what the GOP stands for as the 2016 elections approach, disaffected conservative voters hardly seem likely to be inspired by him.
Declining The Bait
CNBC’s liberal moderators at the Boulder, Colo., presidential debate hoped to embarrass the Republican candidates with certain questions rather than stick to the evening’s declared theme of economics. However, the moderators just as well could have embarrassed them by highlighting GOP leaders’ own betrayals and capitulations.
The CNBC interrogators, for instance, could have asked: Are you ashamed that the budget deal negotiated by your own Speaker Boehner and President Obama won only 79 of the 246 House Republicans’ votes, and was passed only with a solid liberal Democrat minority?
Or, are you worried about party unity when Boehner went behind your backs and secretly arranged this deal with that implacable enemy of your party and conservatism, Obama, then demanded that you quickly vote for it?
Or, why was Boehner, a failed politician who’d handed in his resignation, allowed to be the House’s negotiator to lock in Obama’s priorities for the next two years?
Well, liberal moderators wouldn’t ask these questions because they liked the results of the GOP leadership’s surrenders. They didn’t want the presidential candidates twisting in embarrassment over them. Better to ask if presidential candidate Donald Trump is a comic-book character, or if he has any moral authority, and to invite the candidates to attack each other there on stage.
Instead, the candidates declined to take this bait and focused their fire on the moderators’ open bias.
It was a debate evening that left the Republican Party looking better and liberal media looking worse. If only this elixir could be bottled and forced down some throats, including the new speaker’s.
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