By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — The strong censure vote against Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) by Republican grassroots leaders here in his own home county should serve as a warning to GOP politicians like Wisconsin Cong. Paul Ryan, who seem to think it’s good policy to cut big deals with left-wing Democrats.
McCain, who long has bragged of his ability to “work across the aisle” by conceding to leftists, was repudiated overwhelmingly in a January 11 vote by the GOP precinct committeemen of Maricopa County, Arizona’s most populous county by far and home to state capital Phoenix.
At the general meeting of the county’s committeemen, McCain was censured by a vote of 1,150 to 351. The winning resolution noted the gravity of this action against an officeholder but concluded McCain won’t return to the party’s values on his own.
The resolution censured McCain “for his continued disservice to our state and nation,” and “until he consistently champions our party’s platform, we, the Republican leadership in Arizona, will no longer support, campaign for, or endorse John McCain as our U.S. senator.”
News of the significant resolution’s passage was slow to reach the general public, apparently because liberal media prefer to protect their friends. However, both the web-only Tucson Citizen and Arizona Daily Independent posted the news soon after the results were announced.
A few days earlier, “moderate maverick” McCain also was censured by the Republican Party committees in Arizona’s rural Mohave and Apache Counties.
Then, on January 13, the Arizona Daily Independent reported, “According to various sources, residents in Pima and Pinal Counties are currently gathering support for a censure of McCain by their members.”
Pima County is home to Tucson, and Pinal County is immediately southeast of Maricopa County.
When Paul Ryan devised a federal budget agreement with left-wing Sen. Patty Murray (D., Wash.) in December, the brainy Upper Midwest Catholic congressman reportedly said he got the best deal he could with the Democrats. Ryan was eager to show he could work with Barack Obama’s party.
Among other negatives, the deal meant some tax increases, a weakened sequester, and even higher airline fees for hapless fliers. Just kicking the can down the road again, and another pinch in the taxpayer’s pocket.
National talk-radio host Sean Hannity perceptively commented on December 13 that Republicans “squandered” the opportunity to “differentiate” themselves from the Democrats by signing onto this deal.
If your duplex is caving in, do you just nail more plywood reinforcements on the walls shared with your slovenly neighbors, or conclude that it’s time for an entirely new structure of your own? Nor does the GOP need another “compassionate” big spender like President George W. Bush.
The last thing that exasperated voters across the United States want is more deal-making by the established political class with its pals.
It didn’t seem to occur to Ryan that he should have declared Obama’s left-wingers are impossible to work with responsibly. If voters want real change, he should have said, they’ll have to give the GOP control of both houses of Congress in November 2014, as well as the White House as soon as possible.
What does it take to get the message across on Capitol Hill, when Congress is held in continued low repute and voters keep changing their political registrations from Republican and Democrat to Independent? The U.S.A. doesn’t want to gulp another bottle of bad business as usual.
Politicians like McCain and Ryan want to be known as people who “get things done,” but jumping off the edge of Arizona’s Grand Canyon abyss gets something done, too. It’s just that the result is a mess.
McCain hardly endeared himself to conservatives when he rushed off to the White House last year in a “bromance,” to help radical Obama push forward his agenda, including legalizing massive illegal immigration to strengthen his Democratic Culture of Death.
The Wanderer asked the immediate past chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Party, conservative Catholic Rob Haney, about GOP politicians’ ambition to be known as doers in D.C. The popular Haney retired as county chairman last year after serving two two-year terms, as well as leading a state legislative district before that.
Haney replied on January 12: “A doer does not necessarily advance the cause of better government. If past is prologue, the reverse is more frequently the case. Over the past 60 years the liberal doers have devastated our republic. Whether they manifest themselves in the Obama or McCain peacock colors, the results are the same.
“The great deceivers have destroyed the people’s faith in government,” Haney continued. “We now need politicians who will stop the madness in the belief that change is good.
“Politicians who fight for the principles held by our Founding Fathers and advance policies that return us to those principles are what we need,” he said. “And if that be working against ‘getting things done,’ let it be to take us back to sanity by blocking the policies of the ‘doers’ who have given us a tyrannical government our Founders could never have imagined in their wildest nightmares.”
A restive spirit has been growing in the nation, spurred on by deep resentment of Obama’s defiant lawlessness. The national GOP, however, still seems more eager to cut corners with Obama’s cronies than trumpet a roaring challenge against them.
In early December the director of health-policy studies for a major national think tank warned in congressional testimony that resentment against Obama’s lawlessness could lead to armed revolution against the government.
If some Tea Partier had said this on camera in the nation’s capital, national left-wing media could have boiled over in outrage about supposedly violent right-wing extremists.
However, the fact that Michael Cannon, an analyst for the libertarian Cato Institute, issued this warning apparently sent such a chill down media spines that they decided his grim advice was better kept quiet. Better not to reinforce any rebellious ideas among the public.
In early 2009 the Tea Party arose suddenly from spontaneous combustion. Citizens became fired up in opposition as newly inaugurated radical Obama’s congressional team rammed through nearly $1 trillion in new “stimulus” spending that clearly was unsustainable but fed his Democratic pals’ greed and hungers.
The Republican Party dithered while citizens took things into their own hands, in the revolutionary spirit of the Boston Tea Party. In mere months a formidable new political force coalesced from sea to sea to fight for the nation’s future.
What did the GOP establishment eventually conclude? This: It’s time to fight against the Tea Party, which we don’t control, not against the wild liberalism that Tea Partiers rose up to oppose.
The cozy establishments of both major parties in the U.S. seem to think it’s their job to dictate to the citizenry rather than take orders from the electorate.
Newly energized Tea Party citizens empowered the GOP in the 2010 elections. The brain-dead Republican establishment could take no credit for this surge but only resented this spontaneous energy outside its ken.
Ryan, as well as freshman Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), had fueled high hopes across the nation as being conservative Republicans who could put some tang in the tea.
However, both these national Catholic political figures were sucked into the deadly establishment D.C. deal-making themselves, Ryan on the budget and massive illegal immigration, and Rubio on lawless immigration.
Ryan negotiated in secret with left-wing Cong. Luis Gutierrez (D., Ill.) to help legalize the massive number of alien border jumpers who receive preference over aspiring immigrants who follow proper application procedures.
Rubio dropped so sharply in the polls that he began distancing himself from his “amnesty” efforts, but he’d already done notable damage by helping the massive “Gang of Eight” bill pass the Senate last June.
This was telephone-book-size legislation, just like the wicked Obamacare of 2010, but the establishment never learns from its errors. If you hated the last disaster, the establishment says, have another heaping helping!
Although neither Ryan nor Rubio has earned a record yet of betraying conservatism as seriously as McCain, the Arizona “maverick” should serve as a warning of how badly conservatives can start going astray when they try to play along with the establishment, or even integrate themselves into it.
The Maricopa County Republicans’ resolution of censure against McCain noted that they were aware of their obligation to support Republicans, but concluded that “with sadness and humility, we rise and declare” against him.
The resolution began by stating, “As leaders in the Republican Party, we are obligated to fully support our party, platform, and its candidates. Only in times of great crisis or betrayal is it necessary to publicly censure our leaders. Today we are faced with both. For too long we have waited, hoping Sen. McCain would return to our Party’s values on his own. That has not happened.”
The senator, the resolution said, “has amassed a long and terrible record of drafting, cosponsoring, and voting for legislation best associated with liberal Democrats, such as amnesty, funding for Obamacare, the debt ceiling, liberal nominees, assaults on the Constitution and Second Amendment.”
Although McCain campaigned as a conservative and made promises about protecting the border and completing the border fence, the resolution said, he flip-flopped on his pledges and “has abandoned our values and has been eerily silent against liberals, yet publicly reprimands conservatives in his own party.”
Although he hasn’t announced whether he intends to run for another Senate term in 2016, the 77-year-old McCain recently has fanned speculation that he might.
A Symbol Of Opposition
McCain and his amnesty compadre, Sen. Jeff Flake (R., Ariz.), stayed away from the important county GOP meeting, although Maricopa County’s law-enforcing Catholic sheriff, internationally known Joe Arpaio, arrived to cheers.
A separate resolution at the Maricopa County meeting expressing support for Arpaio passed overwhelmingly, 1,249 to 247.
Because of his law-enforcement efforts, Arpaio is viewed as a symbol of opposition to massive lawbreaking immigration.
If the resolutions’ results had been reversed, and Arpaio had been overwhelmingly rebuked by the Republican leaders, the news quickly would have made international headlines. But when untrustworthy McCain was repudiated, the result in the weekend news was crickets.
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