By DEXTER DUGGAN
What could it take to shake the ponderous Republican Party congressional leadership out of its determination to deliver a harmful globalist trade deal that would mean a major triumph to enhance the clout of the Republicans’ most powerful, arbitrary, and deceitful foe, Barack Obama?
Just to ask the question is to reveal the depths GOP leaders had sunk to. This was a totally self-inflicted wound after they’d been on top of the world with victory in the November 2014 elections.
They’d been empowered by voters to rein in and constrict the out-of-control Obama. But before you could blink an eye, diffident GOP leaders like the Senate’s Mitch McConnell and the House’s John Boehner desperately were waving their surrender flag so Obama would be reassured they were no threat to him.
They were, as one pundit noted, running on a hamster wheel whose only purpose was to produce something politically — no matter how irrational or inimical to conservatism or America.
With internationalist Obamatrade a current point of sharp contention, think back to the sudden birth of the conservative Tea Party movement in early 2009. The Republican establishment quickly recognized what this uprising meant, and didn’t like it.
Tea Partiers were an independent, constitutionalist force of energized activists who came out of nowhere to respond to a crisis. They were a force that GOP bigwigs figured wouldn’t be easily contained and controlled, so the bigwigs wished they’d go away. It’s harder to cut deals if expanding parts of the GOP coalition put principle foremost.
The establishment already had its problems from grassroots conservatives; now here was what amounted to probable reinforcements for that segment of the party. When the GOP won control of the House in 2010, it was mainly due to Tea Party power, not passive GOP bosses.
This summer’s protracted effort to help impose Obamatrade on economically suffering Americans is a reminder of what’s at stake when different factions of the GOP vie for dominance.
The elephants’ establishment wing often justifiably is criticized for being out of touch with, and hostile to, the GOP’s grassroots. And such was the leaders’ overriding determination to win a big one for Obamatrade that even various conservative Republican members of Congress joined in, or sometimes were coerced in, to the effort.
After a vital part of the Obamatrade package lost in a key House vote on June 12, House Speaker Boehner and his team insensately kept pressing forward to find some way to triumph for Obama.
Heavy pressure including political threats and payoffs can be exercised in pursuit of a goal. On June 16 three members of the House GOP whip team were removed as punishment for getting out of line with leadership.
National Journal reported: “Reps. Cynthia Lummis, Steve Pearce, and Trent Franks have been removed from the whip team after they sided with GOP rebels to vote against a rule governing debate on a trade bill, according to sources close to the team….
“House Majority Whip Steve Scalise said earlier in the year that he would not tolerate members voting against rules, and already has removed two other members close to the conservative movement,” the news report added.
It was reason for deep sadness to see someone like Cong. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin emitting one tall tale after another about what a blessing Obamatrade would be.
Nothing seemed impossible as Republican leaders and their aides unbelievably battled to further empower a lying, conniving Democrat president whose idea of free trade is “global governance” through under-the-table cronyism and secret legislation, intentionally hidden from the public and written in disappearing ink.
Just a few months ago, backed up by plenty of glaring evidence, campaigning national Republican leaders soundly condemned Obama as an untrustworthy, brazen lawbreaker.
The subsequent problem was, lots of Republicans considered this scandal was still real, and must be kept in mind when devising Republican strategy, even after the GOP won congressional dominance in the 2014 election. Why in the world try to ram a massive secret deal through Congress in 2015 to strengthen a grim liar who sought at every turn to weaken the U.S.?
The crushing tentacles of medical Obamacare had been viewed as the frightening lesson of what to avoid forever again, but now the secrecy and complexity of Obamacare seemed to be the Republican establishment’s model of how to legislate for Obamatrade.
In early 2009, horrified constitutionalist Americans had reacted with urgency when newly elected Peacock Obama began to spread his full socialist plumage with massive, crushing new spending rushed through a Democrat-majority Congress.
Inaccurate liberal news media had tried to minimize the new Tea Partiers’ potential power by portraying them basically as economic libertarians — unconcerned with moral issues and thereby uninterested in a larger conservative coalition.
However, anyone who spent time with the Tea Partiers soon saw their strong moral underpinnings and reverence for lessons from history, with the belief the United States is a nation blessed by God and reliant on His Providence and wisdom.
After an initial debate on whether they should go the third-party route, Tea Partiers decided to make their home in a GOP more congenial to them than the statist, secularist Democrats.
Of course, not all Democrats were the repellent examples represented by people like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, of San Francisco, and Obama. But the rest of the party had been put on notice over the last few decades to go along with the program or get out.
Thus, the emergence of “Ronald Reagan Democrats” in the 1980s. They got out. But headstrong Democrat leaders ignored the implications — just as headstrong Republican leaders today throw away 2014’s victory in order to win Obama’s chilly embrace.
At the end of April, Nate Cohn noted at The New York Times that outside of the solid liberal Democrat enclaves, “the party includes a large number of less educated, more religious — often older, Southern or nonwhite — voters who are far from uniformly liberal.”
Indeed, even liberal Democrats like presidential candidate Hillary Clinton realized the numerous negatives to her own sitting president’s Obamatrade. After biting her tongue on the issue as long as she could, Clinton finally said in mid-June that if the deal couldn’t be the best one possible, it’d be better to drop it.
She commented after strong opposition to some of Obamatrade by many House Democrats led to the key June 12 vote against part of the package.
Democrats fumed further when Obama simply ignored them while negotiating with compliant Republicans to search for a way forward.
The Washington Examiner reported on June 17 that Democratic Cong. David Scott, of Georgia, said: “If [Obama] goes ahead and signs it — I mean, to bypass Congress after an overwhelming vote [on June 12] of 302 to 126 — not only is it a violation of the Constitution…only a dictator would do that. We’re not a dictatorship.”
Both many Republican and Democrat members of Congress have been concerned about how ordinary U.S. working people have been hurt time and again by internationalist trade deals.
Could now finally be the time for a viable third party to start forming and yank the rug from under the aloof leaders in both major parties whose programs are so out of touch?
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