By DEXTER DUGGAN
It’s supposed to be “the party of business,” but Republican Party leadership couldn’t seem to sell its way out of a wet paper bag.
When customers aren’t buying, that should be a clue to change the product. However, GOP salesmen like the Senate’s Mitch McConnell and the House’s John Boehner insisted that signing with blind faith on the dotted line is a great deal.
Don’t bother to read the fine print, said McConnell and Boehner. In fact, there’s no print to show the customers at all right now. Just trust that Barack Obama will deliver such a good buy later on with his international trade deal that everyone will be glad they inked away their jobs, incomes, and futures.
What’s wrong with this picture? GOP leaders shouted from the housetops in 2014 that Obama was such a lying, conniving, lawbreaking trickster that voters absolutely had to save themselves by giving the Republicans more power to stop him.
So voters gave them that clout. At which time the Republicans revealed they were as big a bunch of tricksters as Obama himself, really a fine Democrat fellow who needs to be helped and pleased as much as possible.
The GOP-majority Congress funding Obama’s lawbreaking “executive amnesty”? Of course. The Senate confirming his lawless Loretta Lynch as attorney general? Sure, with support from as many Republican senators as McConnell could command. Slowing down a major pro-life bill? Just as Planned Parenthood liked.
Walking blindly into a secret international trade deal that even most Democrat senators rejected? No problem when McConnell delivered a solid majority of his own party’s Senate crew.
Suddenly, stopping Obama’s deadly dangerous politics was forgotten. Instead, the GOP was eager to do “bipartisan” deals to help a president whose only purpose has been to weaken this nation.
Somehow, his core beliefs for massive permissive abortion, massive illegal immigration, strong-arm coercion of religious believers, promoting sexual disorientation, and even foisting transgender damage on children are to be ignored.
This record should give Americans more than adequate warning of what type of person the president is, but instead voters were urged to believe Obama actually wants to help the U.S. economy and wage-earners with his furtively contrived trade deal to give him more arbitrary authority to remake chunks of the world.
The Seeing Red Arizona blog, among other sources, reported that the trade deal “provides an unrestricted flow of workers into the United States.” If you think massive border-jumping immigration hasn’t been good for this nation already, better fasten your mandatory seat belts for a rougher ride.
It’s not only that the GOP leaders were eager to sign Obama’s blank contract on trade. The honchos had another problem with contracts — tearing up the fresh, explicit contract they signed with voters a half-year ago.
A Pew Research Center poll released May 21 said the GOP congressional strategy was way out of touch with what voters expected. “Just 23 percent of Americans say congressional Republicans are keeping the promises they made during last fall’s campaign, while 65 percent say they are not,” Pew poll results said.
They added: “The survey finds deep differences in how Republicans and Democrats want President Obama and GOP leaders to deal with issues. Fully 75 percent of Republicans want GOP leaders to challenge Obama more often; just 15 percent say they are handling relations with the president about right, and 7 percent say GOP leaders should go along with Obama more often.”
Polls can be wrong, but they also can confirm the glare coming from fed-up conservative voters awakening to having been betrayed, and deeply, once again.
If you think the sun has risen because there’s so much harsh light coming through the curtains, that’s not because the curtains cause the illumination but the sunbeams shove their eye-opening way through.
Conservative Republican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal told radio host Laura Ingraham on May 21 that the GOP won the majority it asked for last year but isn’t doing anything with it now except to “wave the white flag of surrender.”
Ingraham asked if Obama deserves to get his trade deal. Jindal replied no, explaining that Obama needs more scrutiny, not less.
Pointing out that it’s the GOP, not Democrats, helping Obama on the legislation, Ingraham said phone calls were running 25-1 on Capitol Hill against the deal, and that House Speaker Boehner was taken aback by this level of opposition.
Not that Boehner seems capable even now of understanding the heart of the Republican Party or of revising the leadership’s mulish course. Or maybe Boehner understands the heart all too well but figures that the Wall Street corporatists’ game is the only one he can play.
If the GOP base is dispirited and suppressed for the 2016 elections, oh well, Republican leaders can be comfortable going back to their passive minority status and emitting futile cries that they just can’t get anything done until they have a congressional majority.
If insensate backroom dealing ends up producing a 2016 presidential contest between exhausted old establishment faces like Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Jeb Bush, it wouldn’t be surprising if the idea of activating the third-party option acquires new urgency.
Hope For Next Year
But it’s still possible to avoid the Clinton-Bush cul-de-sac. Fired-up major conservative Republican presidential candidates give grassroots GOP activists hope for next year.
In a May 25 telephone interview, a Tea Party activist in Virginia told The Wanderer that he takes heart from GOP presidential candidates who challenge the basis of liberal reporters’ questions instead of accepting their premises.
Michael Wood, an activist in Spotsylvania County with the regional Fredericksburg Patriots, lives in Virginia’s Seventh Congressional District. Last year in the GOP primary election, the Seventh dumped out-of-touch establishment Republican Eric Cantor, the powerful House majority leader, replacing him with upstart GOP conservative economist Dave Brat.
The Wanderer mentioned some recent examples of candidate feistiness, like Texas’ Ted Cruz refusing to let a reporter portray him as having a “personal animus” against homosexuals, and Kentucky’s Rand Paul suggesting that instead of a reporter quizzing him on exceptions to allow abortion, how about asking the Democrat stand on aborting a seven-pound baby?
“I think that some of the Republican leadership has not countered the questions that the media like to take,” Wood replied, but “some of the new blood will counter the argument by putting it on its head.”
Asked if he has a favorite among the presidential candidates yet, Wood said, “I’m definitely behind Rand Paul, and for that exact reason. He’s taking a lot of the traditional argument used against Republicans and standing it on its head.”
Later in the interview, Wood said, “I hope we’ll actually have a true conservative” securing the GOP presidential nomination next year, not Jeb Bush. Paul “can bring both sides together” on certain issues, Wood added.
As for Republicans pushing for Obama’s trade deal, Wood said he opposes it because “it goes back to the crony capitalism” issue, with big corporations “going overseas for cheaper labor.”
Labor is cheaper there, Wood said, because government regulations drive up the cost of doing business here. “That’s the aspect of the trade deal that has an impact on middle-class Americans.”
Get rid of a lot of the regulations here, he said, so there really is a free market — “especially when a lot of these regulations end up being written by bigger corporations” that disadvantage small business.
The Wanderer asked Arizona conservative Republican consultant Constantin Querard about the collapse in promised national GOP leadership for 2015, and how this may discourage voters in 2016.
“I think voters may be able to expect more from the GOP in and after 2016 depending on who our nominee is and if we win the presidency,” Querard replied. “If we elect a conservative leader, then our party will finally have a conservative leader. Right now we barely have any leaders at all.
“Neither Boehner nor McConnell can legitimately claim to be leading our party,” he added. “But a Republican president would bring a great deal more order to the ranks. If it is a conservative president, I think we’ll finally see real results.”
San Francisco conservative commentator Barbara Simpson told The Wanderer that voters were fooled into believing a GOP congressional majority would make the difference, but “not a chance. The GOP has caved in to the smothering political correctness of Washington. It’s simply not acceptable to oppose what Obama wants.”
Republican leadership’s capitulation to support the trade deal “means the GOP has sold out to Obama, essentially giving him the power to negotiate any kind of trade deal he wants with congressional approval, and no modifications allowed,” Simpson emailed.
She said Matt Drudge, the online king, likened Boehner’s words to treason. “I agree,” Simpson said. “It is treason and is just another example of what this country faces. . . .
“It boils down to the fact that people don’t trust their elected representatives, the media, or the man in the Oval Office,” she said. “When words like treason are being used, when those in high office are called liars, and when there are open accusations of deceptions, it seems to me it’s a recipe for revolution.
“How it plays out is anyone’s guess,” Simpson said, “but it doesn’t look good.”
Profiles In Courage
However, one recent example of political courage was Bobby Jindal refusing to surrender when big business tried to make him do so on the issue of defending traditional marriage.
An IBM official sent Jindal a letter with the customary sort of threats to harm Louisiana economically if it respected religious conscience — the type of threats that have made GOP officials in other states cower.
But Jindal proceeded to issue an executive order to affirm traditional law in this area — unlike Obama, who illegally uses executive orders to create laws from nowhere, or to dispense with duly enacted laws.
Another profile in courage was Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.), who battled against the GOP’s big-business deceptions promoting Obama’s free-trade legislation. In a letter to the editor in the May 18 Wall Street Journal, Sessions wrote of “many assurances of economic gains but…no data to back them up.”
Giving unfortunate examples, Sessions recalled that a South Korean trade deal was to boost U.S. exports by $10 billion but they actually increased by less than $1 billion, while 2 million U.S. manufacturing jobs were sent to the Asia region since 2000.
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress