By DEXTER DUGGAN
Dedicated right-wing activists who power the Republican Party’s base convene every year in late winter to showcase the booming voices and crooning promises of national politicians who swear to be the salvation, finally, of the conservative movement.
The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) did it again this year near Washington, D.C., February 25-28. They’ve been gathering in ever-growing numbers since the 1970s, a sign, they say, that the nation yearns for conservative governance.
Despite all their commitment, energy, and seeming influence, this year’s gathering turned out to be perfectly timed to demonstrate how little the conservative legions matter to Republican power brokers at key moments.
Conservatives build up winning momentum, as they did in the 2010 and 2014 elections. Then the “moderate” establishment jumps in to fritter it away and alienate the voter base that conservatives once more are going to have to fight to re-energize.
Instead of being able to dash across the finish line, the conservatives have to keep going back and back again to start the race over.
As the CPAC gathered this year in the shadow of the nation’s capital, back-to-back betrayals of the country’s conservative majority were engineered by GOP leaders on Capitol Hill.
On February 26, three squishy Republican U.S. senators provided the winning margin in the GOP-controlled Senate for key committee approval of Barack Obama’s nomination of left-wing, open-borders, pro-abortion Democrat Loretta Lynch to be attorney general.
Lynch’s nomination could have been stopped right there. The 2014 wave election showed voters thoroughly rejected Obama’s policies and want border protection.
Moreover, Lynch openly told the Senate Judiciary Committee that she thought Obama’s “executive amnesty” is constitutional. Don’t expect her to have the Justice Department say no to his thuggish lawbreaking.
But open-borders Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) pronounced her “well-qualified” and worthy of his vote. Graham was joined by open-borders Jeff Flake (R., Ariz.) and Orrin Hatch (R., Utah). This advanced Lynch’s nomination for a later vote by the full Senate.
Were the situation reversed and, say, a major conservative GOP nominee told a Democrat-run Senate that she supported Republican lawbreaking, her nomination would be dead on arrival. But odds-makers seemed to think Lynch’s chances of further approval were good when the question was to be taken up in the GOP-controlled body in mid-March.
The Washington Examiner reported on March 10: “Lynch needs only 51 votes to be confirmed, and she’ll easily get them. Democrats control 46 votes and there are at least five Republicans who plan to vote for her, including [Senators] Susan Collins (R., Maine), Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), and Jeff Flake (R., Ariz.). ‘I’m ready to vote right now,’ Graham told the Washington Examiner.”
But what fate do the nation’s voters want for Lynch? “Moderate” Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), who hadn’t yet announced if he intends to run for another term in 2016, showed he knows where the wind’s blowing from when he called on Republican senators to reject Lynch specifically because she approves of Obama’s lawless “executive action” on immigration.
You can take it to the bank, that shows McCain intends to seek his electorate’s approval in 2016, when he turns 80.
Then, on February 27, the very day after Lynch’s committee approval, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s GOP Senate surrendered to minority Democrats, who demanded that the Department of Homeland Security be funded to provide for Obama’s November 20 amnesty for millions of illegal aliens.
Whether they’re in the minority or majority, Democrats dig in their heels, hiss out their defiance, and cackle as spineless Republican leaders maneuver the GOP into surrender.
A few days later, on March 3, Republican House Speaker John Boehner made the surrender complete by putting the Senate DHS-funding bill on the floor so it could be whooped through to passage with 100 percent House Democrat support, although less than 30 percent GOP support.
Boehner thus shredded the “Hastert Rule” that had been crafted to avoid this very spectacle of the majority party ripping itself apart so the minority liberal Democrats could triumph.
Democrats were so pleased with Boehner, they said they’d protect him if Republican House members tried to remove him from the speakership.
Meanwhile, conservatives wailed that McConnell and Boehner actually were helping enact hard-left Obama’s program.
“Strategists” and “consultants” constantly say the national GOP has to nominate “moderates” to run for president. The GOP usually does, and the candidates usually lose.
But Democrat Obama was no moderate when he ran for president. He was the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate and a radical pro-abortionist who had fought to deny care to babies who survived abortion. His background was filled with Marxist theorizing and left-wing radicals like Frank Marshall Davis, Saul Alinsky, and married couple Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.
However, the dominant liberal media, loving what they saw, kept this political dirt quiet because they knew publicizing it would doom his presidential campaign. Although Republican bigwigs live in constant fear the liberal media will attack them for daring to breathe, Democrats know that even their worst excesses will be ignored if the media possibly can.
So Obama got elected, and the nation has kept paying the price of acting in ignorance.
Even though Obama’s regime by now has appalled tens of millions of Americans, who fear he intentionally is maneuvering the nation into decline if not outright destruction, the Republican leaders whom the voters empowered to fight back instead were behaving like, face it, cowards.
Or were they behaving like strategists who’ve accurately taken the measure of their own patient, polite, ever-tolerant conservative supporters?
Just think back to January 22. An overwhelming half-million or more pro-lifers, trekking to wintry Washington, D.C., for the annual March for Life, happily anticipated a House vote on a bill limiting permissive abortions after 20 weeks. However, right under their noses, games-playing GOP leaders yanked the bill off the House calendar.
One would think GOP leaders would be smarter than to expose themselves to the massive displeasure of phalanxes of activists who instantly could come storming down congressional halls and overpowering office staffs to stage sit-ins from January through Christmas, until Congress protected hordes of innocent babies from painful deaths.
Just think if the issue had been disappointed liberals protesting the lynching of blacks, instead of traditionalists protesting the aborting of black, and other, babies.
Well, of course there were no massive January sit-ins. The pro-lifers had their day of peaceful prayer and disappeared into the distance, so they could come back next year and next decade and maybe next century to continue to be taken advantage of.
Politicians fear being punished. But Republican leaders don’t appear to fear much when they grievously aggravate and disappoint their own supporters, even if these politicians are promoting and assisting the deadly agenda of “opponent” Barack Obama.
Or is the public resentment building and bubbling out there, but the dominant liberal media prefer to ignore it? Aside from the Internet, reporters generally didn’t make a big deal out of Boehner’s caving on funding Obama’s amnesty on March 3, even though it sent shock waves through the electorate.
Insistent Movements Succeed
A frustrated caller to Bill Bennett’s national talk-radio program on March 9 bemoaned that people vote for the GOP, then Boehner and McConnell ignore them. What to do? The program’s guest host, Kevin Wall, answered by citing insistent movements that got themselves taken seriously, like civil-rights and homosexual-rights campaigners.
Wall agreed that Boehner is “essentially giving the president what he wants.”
On March 8, the Washington Examiner reported that even though Republicans made “historic gains in the 2014 midterm elections, party leaders remain extremely wary of confrontation with the president and the Democratic minorities in the House and Senate.”
How’s that as a recipe to inflame a voting populace that looked to the GOP for help in dire straits, but now is hearing the Republican bigwigs still fear their foes?
Obama’s radical-left presidency has gone to extremes like no other. On March 6 national radio talkmeister Rush Limbaugh posited the unlikely scenario that if Obama fears the Democrats will lose the presidency in 2016, he’ll simply declare he has to remain in office anyway in order to protect his achievements.
Such speculation would have seemed downright crazy, were if not for the fact that Americans have seen, time and again, the supremely vain and arrogant Obama airily break serious laws to advance his agenda and lie through his teeth.
If Americans see they can place no faith in Obama and his party, and have no hope for the GOP to step forward, they may turn to solutions no one ever could have expected to save this nation.
The Republicans still can be the master of events. But the time for choosing positively is here.
Boehner, you choose or you’re finished politically.
McConnell, you choose or you’re finished politically.
And maybe we’ll find we never really needed you at all.
It wasn’t so long ago that a previously little-known guy proclaimed to the nation, “We are the ones that we’ve been waiting for.”
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