By DEXTER DUGGAN
There’s probably no danger if a hopeful politician indulges his election-day fancies by, say, wearing his old lucky socks or eating his magic meal of oysters with vanilla yogurt and sauerkraut. Just as long as he doesn’t equate these superstitions with the hard work actually required to win the race.
But what if he stubbornly insists on treating as serious strategy something that he knows is meaningless for winning or even counterproductive? All the socks in the world won’t race his feet across the finish line first.
Which brings us to the Republican establishment’s superstitious, counterproductive horror against having a “government shutdown” for even a day while negotiating federal spending with stubborn Democrat pols, even if the Democrats clearly are the guilty shutdown party.
One would think that if a tourist can’t get a parking space for a few days at a national park while Republicans show they’re serious about improving this country’s fiscal condition, the prohibitive little orange cones in the parking lot would be as awful as nuclear clouds caused by the GOP literally detonating monster bombs in every government glade.
Even when Dems demand maintaining the wildly unpopular, dangerous world of open U.S. borderlands, or continuing to shovel taxpayer cash to baby butcher Planned Parenthood, establishment Republicans curl up meekly.
This tempts one to think there really is a malign shadow government somewhere behind the scenes that pulls the strings for a prearranged agenda. How else to explain Republicans throwing away their winning hand and outraging their own voters instead of pressing their clear advantage against the incredible shrinking Democrats?
When the U.S. House approved the federal spending plan for the next five months on May 3, most Democrats voted for it, ensuring its passage, even though more than 100 Republicans said no.
“Many Republicans groused that the bill was written as if Republicans weren’t in charge of the House, Senate, and White House,” the Washington Examiner reported, adding that “the legislation failed to attract the support of conservatives, who were angered the GOP-led House, Senate and White House were not able to secure a deal with more Republican priorities.”
It wasn’t the first time that federal spending was determined by midget Democrats incredibly, and successfully, telling majority Republicans to dance to their tune.
The Senate was expected to okay the money bill, too, before the May 5 deadline.
This hardcopy issue of The Wanderer went to press the previous day, May 4.
As May had dawned, the bipartisan establishment confirmed its concurrent-resolution spending deal that was a cowardly capitulation to the minority. Dem capos were thrilled there was no need to fight to the death about killing babies at abortuaries, and GOP leaders shrugged off the slaughter as the price of getting good publicity.
Dominant left-wing media would have savaged the GOP as usual if it didn’t play the donkeys’ game. However, real government “shutdowns” might only strengthen Republicans with voters happy at a demonstration of determination and principle to get bloated government under control — even if editors churn out broadsides of bad publicity against the elephant party.
Even after having battled with wily “triangulator” President Willy Clinton over shutting down government in 1995-1996, and badly burdened with lackluster establishmentarian Sen. Bob Dole as the Republican presidential nominee for 1996, the GOP actually picked up two Senate seats and lost only two House seats, to hold at 227 in the lower chamber, maintaining its majorities in both chambers for 1997.
Said Wikipedia then: “As such, Clinton became the first president re-elected since Theodore Roosevelt in 1904 to win either of his terms without any Senate coattails.”
And consider the shutdown of 2013. Dominant media blasted away against the GOP, which, unscathed, the very next year actually added 13 seats to its comfortable House majority and retook control of the Senate.
If voters think Republicans actually mean business instead of spineless, they reward the party.
With such encouraging evidence, voters who thought Donald Trump was the presidential answer to lead the charge from the White House against GOP (and Dem) establishment game-playing were horrified when Trump hailed the disappointing short-term spending bill proposal as May began.
Conservative, pro-life Cong. Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), of the House Freedom Caucus, could only express the hope on May 1 that the budget agreement would be rejected.
He recalled on CNN’s New Day program that this continuing resolution was scheduled for now so the new, unified GOP control of government could show off its priorities sooner. But, alas, Congress might as well have waited until the regular end of the fiscal year, in September.
Indeed, as conservatives were told by the establishment just to wait until September and then see how great the new budget for the entire fiscal year will be, they could only ask what’s supposed to be different then, when Democrats still hold the strange minority leverage they had in the spring.
It’s not as if there’s a new national election looming before October 2017 that could reduce Dem congressional numbers to virtually powerless nothing.
How many times had pro-lifers in the past heard from House Catholic Speakers John Boehner then Paul Ryan that Congress had to fund PP because Barack Obama insisted on that? Well, Obama was replaced by pro-life Trump, who hailed the funding agreement that should keep PP in the money.
On May 2, conservative analyst Daniel Horowitz glumly told a national radio audience that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Horowitz told Mark Levin’s radio talk program that during the previous week, Democrats wondered if the game plan for budget battles really had changed with the advent of the Trump White House. However, when they saw Republicans still “maniacally” afraid of having a government shutdown, the Dems plunged ahead to assert their priorities.
Republicans want peace, Horowitz said, but Democrats want power.
Levin observed that “I’ve never seen such a weak Democratic lineup” with leaders like Sen. Charles Schumer of New York and Cong. Nancy Pelosi of California, but they’re still winning battles on the Hill.
Conservative GOP campaign consultant Constantin Querard told The Wanderer on May 1:
“Democrats in Congress, along with liberal or frightened Republicans, still form a working majority in both the House and the Senate. And the president, who aspires to be the world’s best dealmaker, has not yet shown a willingness to take no deal rather than a bad one.
“So it isn’t a surprise that the first budget agreement has only half the military spending Trump asked for, while it funds Planned Parenthood, continues funding refugee resettlement and visas from the six countries Trump wanted to suspend immigration from, funds sanctuary cities, increases foreign aid, increases spending on a host of liberal priorities, and fails to fund the actual border wall,” Querard said.
“$1.5 billion in border-security funds were added to provide a fig leaf for Republicans, but Democrats got the language they wanted prohibiting that funding from being used for the wall/fence,” he said.
“This is a deal that Chuck Schumer calls a win for the American people. There is no deal that is a win for Chuck Schumer and is also a win for the taxpayers and families of America.
“Keep up the fight, but replace the Republicans who don’t have the stomach for it,” Querard said.
As the disaster of the budget agreement was just starting to emerge, conservative New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin criticized how poorly the GOP dominance in Washington had delivered so far this year.
Goodwin told the Laura Ingraham national radio program that the public will give the Republicans only so much time to succeed, just as they did for the Democrats, and Trump himself isn’t immune from their dissatisfaction.
Can Trump Regroup?
Despite Republican Party dominance by the numbers, an Arizona Republican activist told The Wanderer on May 2 that “conservatives are in the minority in Congress. In a rare bipartisan effort, Republican and Democrat progressives have formed a UniParty which commands a majority in the House and the Senate.
“These progressives are responsible for the defeat of the initiatives and budget that Trump and his ‘drain the swamp’ supporters advanced during the 2016 campaign and Trump’s first 100 days” in the White House, said Rob Haney, retired chairman of the Phoenix-based Maricopa County Republican Party.
Haney, a strong Trump supporter, said the president “just did not have the experience of dealing with treacherous progressive Republicans, like we have in Arizona, to know how deceitful and destructive they will be. . . . It remains to be seen if Trump has learned enough to be able to regroup for a victorious budget in the fall.
“Two contests that RINO (Republican In Name Only) progressives always win are making promises and making excuses,” Haney added.
“In all moral and righteous legislation, they will lead the retreat. In failing so miserably to advance the Trump agenda this last week, the RINO progressives have again illustrated that they fear the wrath of their Wall Street globalist donors and Chamber of Commerce lobbyists more than they do their constituents.”
Some commentators said that establishment Republicans, who thought they were just being good bipartisans, felt stung when victorious Democrats began boasting of how they trampled the GOP on the budget deal.
There certainly was no tone of happy bipartisan cooperation when triumphalist headlines in the left-wing Washington Post proclaimed, “Democrats celebrate as Trump caves in his first budget negotiation,” and, “After spending-bill win, Democrats confident they can block Trump agenda.”
One Post story said, “Democrats are surprised by just how many concessions they extracted in the trillion-dollar deal,” despite the GOP’s “unified control of the government.” The Post also boasted, “The lopsided victory means it will be very difficult — if not impossible — for the GOP to exert its will in future budget talks.”
The Post may have overemphasized the Republican loss. But GOP establishmentarians who still haven’t learned the sorry lessons of all their past surrenders probably are beyond hope.
Or was there some Republican legerdemain lurking in the spending agreement that still could do good?
Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich told the Laura Ingraham national radio program on May 3 that Planned Parenthood isn’t specified to be funded in the legislation, and that Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price — a pro-life conservative — won’t direct funds its way.
Redirection Of Funds Needed
Two days earlier, the Washington-based, national pro-life Susan B. Anthony List provided the following statement to The Wanderer by its president, Marjorie Dannenfelser:
“A majority (53.3 percent) of Americans support redirecting Planned Parenthood’s taxpayer funding to community health centers that offer a full range of primary and preventative care but do not perform or promote abortion. With pro-life Republican majorities in both houses, it is incredibly disappointing that any Republican spending bill would contain continued funding for Planned Parenthood.
“This makes it imperative that Republicans also move quickly on a reconciliation bill that redirects the abortion giant’s funding to community health centers,” Dannenfelser said.
“In March, Vice President Mike Pence cast the tie-breaking vote in order to overturn . . . President Obama’s last-minute regulation which forced states to fund Planned Parenthood under Title X. That effort to undo Obama’s parting gift to the big abortion industry proves that the votes are there using reconciliation,” she said.
“Women would be better served by these comprehensive health-care entities, which outnumber the abortion chain by more than 20 to one nationwide. Planned Parenthood, which performs more than 320,000 abortions in a single year per their latest annual report, does not need or deserve taxpayer dollars,” Dannenfelser said.
On May 2, national talk host Hugh Hewitt said PP “did not get a nickel cut” from its funding in the budget agreement.
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