By DEXTER DUGGAN
Strong Republican congressional efforts to help approve Barack Obama’s secretly devised international trade legislation are “the most cowardly and inexplicable move within the Republican ranks today,” a quotable conservative former southern California congressman told The Wanderer in a telephone interview.
Robert Dornan, who had been an actor and Los Angeles television talk host before first being elected to the U.S. House as a Republican in 1976, is one of numerous conservatives appalled that his party’s leadership has been fighting to give the deceitful Obama more power over the U.S. economy while hurting this nation’s workers.
“If we’re going to be the party of job creation, this is not job creation,” Dornan said of the package being called Obamatrade.
“. . . Is this going to help the moral ethos of my country? Is it going to create jobs or crush jobs? . . . Any bill that doesn’t help jobs, vote against it.”
Later in the interview he added, “As I used to say on the House floor, of course I believe in free trade — but fair trade.”
It makes no sense for Republicans to say they need to give untrustworthy Obama new power to exercise in the furtively designed Obamatrade, Dornan said. It’s “like saying I know my fiancé cheats on me all the time, but if I marry him,” that will solve the problem.
Dornan, 82, who closely identifies with his Catholic faith, keeps an eye on politics these days from his Virginia home. He narrowly lost re-election in a hotly contested House campaign in California in 1996 that featured illegal Democrat votes.
Along with many other conservatives, Dornan says current Republican congressional leadership makes a serious mistake by thinking it pleases voters by being “bipartisan” and “productive” as it sends bills to Obama to sign.
Even the “dumbest pollster” can see that when the GOP won more power in the November 2014 elections, energized voters were saying to “block everything [Obama] does,” Dornan said.
“Here is the poison, and it’s lethal come the 2016 election,” Dornan said, referring to the GOP frittering away its mandate by succumbing to the belief that voters want Republicans working in cooperation with Obama’s Democrats.
“We can’t let the media beat us up as ‘the do-nothing Congress’,” GOP leaders think, he said. So, “within months, the mandate of 2014 is forgotten. . . . They want to appear to be doing something.”
Congressmen fear losing their $174,000 Capitol Hill jobs and trying to find work back in their home districts that pay as well, he said.
Ninety-five percent of them know that if they don’t get a Denny Hastert type of highly paying lobbying job after serving in Congress, Dornan said, they won’t be able to match their pay level back home.
Dornan strongly criticized Hastert, the GOP House speaker for eight years, beginning in 1999, for significantly enriching himself with subsequent lobbying work.
In May, former Speaker Hastert was indicted for making nearly $1 million in bank withdrawals in a way to avoid bank reporting requirements, then making false statements to the FBI about the withdrawals.
As for congressmen who oppose Obamatrade, “Bless their hearts for this,” Dornan said.
On June 4, conservative syndicated radio talk host Mark Levin pointed out the perils of giving new trade powers to Obama in hundreds of pages of legislation that the public isn’t even allowed to read.
Moreover, Levin said, Obama is far from being any sort of free-market capitalist. Instead, Obama is working with corporatists who want to use government to crush their opponents.
Some news reports have disclosed that Obama intends to use Obamatrade to promote discredited “climate change” policies, as well as opening up for more “immigration” of foreign workers here.
On June 5, conservative GOP Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama wrote Obama to remind him that the president failed to respond to Sessions’ earlier letter on May 6. Sessions pointed to “global governance” powers tucked into the legislation.
“The details of this new governance commission are extremely broad and have the hallmarks of a nascent European Union, with many similarities,” Sessions wrote.
For this trade legislation, Sessions wrote, “Congress transfers its authority to the executive and agrees to give up several of its most basic powers. These concessions include: the power to write legislation, the power to amend legislation, the power to fully consider legislation on the floor, the power to keep debate open until Senate cloture is invoked, and the constitutional requirement that treaties receive a two-thirds vote.”
The desperation of some Republicans to explain away their support for Obamatrade is enough to make one gasp. Some of these Republicans say that by giving Obama this new executive power, they’re binding him down with rules.
Have they completely failed to see that Obama openly breaks and ignores clear rules whenever he pleases, and purports to create laws on his own?
In a June 5 story, CNN reported one important GOP congressman, Wisconsin’s Paul Ryan, making excuses and claiming it’s a misunderstanding to think that Obama would get more power with the trade authority. The story was headlined, “Paul Ryan’s new partner: Obama.”
Similarly, the Phoenix-based Arizona Republic posted on June 9 that local GOP Cong. Matt Salmon was urging other Republicans to support Obamatrade in the belief this would inhibit Obama.
“Salmon said voting for trade-promotion authority allows Congress to set strict standards for the president to meet when negotiating the trade deal and requires a 60-day public review period,” the Republic said.
Egregious Harm
The Wanderer asked the retired chairman of the Phoenix area’s Republican Party, Rob Haney, what he thought about GOP attempts to let Obama cut secret trade deals after the party last year described him as a lying, conniving president.
Haney replied to ask “what has Obama done previously that would lead anyone to believe he would not do egregious harm to the country if he were given the additional power of fast-track trade agreements? There is not one instance in his previous actions and policies that would lead us to trust him or his word.”
Columnist Pat Buchanan, long a foe of loose international trade deals, had denounced their results once again in the December 2012 issue of The American Conservative magazine, pointing to the U.S. losing six million manufacturing jobs and 55,000 factories since 2000.
“Swiftly, U.S. multinationals shut factories here, laid off workers, outsourced production to Asia and China, and brought their finished goods back, tax-free, to sell in the USA,” Buchanan wrote. “Profits soared, as did the salaries of the outsourcing executives.
“And their former workers? They headed for the service sector, along with their wives, to keep up on the mortgage payment, keep the kids in Catholic school, and pay for the health insurance the family had lost,” wrote Buchanan, who frequently warns of the damage the GOP does to itself as well as the nation by betraying workers.
And is determined to do so again at the insistence of GOP blind men, and good friends of Obama, like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner.
Former Cong. Dornan also said during his Wanderer interview that Obama might well think he’s not a foe of the Catholic Church despite his actions against it, due to the people who consider themselves Catholic yet staff his administration.
“He doesn’t see the Catholic Church as you and I do,” Dornan said, adding, “What is Obama supposed to think? ‘I’m not in trouble with the Catholic Church’,” because he sees someone like Chicago Archbishop Blase Cupich asking Obama to bring in still more millions of illegal immigrants.
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