By DEXTER DUGGAN
Perhaps the fastest way to cure a doubter about the existence of everlasting life is to point to the undeniable reality of unending politics. Not only are there interminable two-year, four-year, and six-year election cycles, depending on the contested race, but also all the backroom warfare that fills any spaces left over on the calendar.
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) announced on April 11 that he’d serve the remaining months left in his two-year term but wouldn’t seek the seat again in November’s elections. That may have sounded like a modest plan until buzz started over whether Republicans even wanted to continue with a “lame duck” speaker who’d effectively removed himself from the party’s near future.
Ryan’s corner countered that he shouldn’t step aside immediately because Republicans needed an experienced team to take them through the fall campaign battles.
On the other hand, what better time to get a fresh leadership start right away instead of continuing to be hampered by a speaker who’d served in that role only since late 2015 and couldn’t get united with the Senate’s top command to fulfill a memorable two-chamber GOP agenda?
How often have Republicans been so fortunate in recent decades as to have the clout of controlling both the legislative and executive branches? And, skeptical voters can ask, how much have they done with it recently?
Even though Ryan’s House was more productive than standpatter Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R., Ky.) wing of the Capitol, the burden seemed to have been on Ryan to infuse some of his energy into the other chamber rather than allow McConnell’s lethargy to prevail and drag down both chambers’ record.
It’s a balancing act, to be sure, to unite various portions of the congressional GOP membership. But the Republican platform and identity are conservative, and that’s the kind of action voters expect when giving Republicans their majority over Democrats.
To think that a conservative GOP majority kept fumbling away and deferring to a leftist Democratic agenda on outrages like tax-funding Planned Parenthood and maintaining the roots of Obamacare was more than simply disappointing.
Congressional Republican leadership had made no secret of its resistance to candidate Donald Trump leading up to the 2016 presidential election. And Trump’s bluster and temperament could have caused reasonable doubt.
But, whatever his flaws, Trump had made himself a successful multibillionaire developer in the private sector. And the Electoral College showed that voters wanted to give him a chance to put his proclaimed conservative political agenda to work from the White House, too.
His firing off undisciplined tweets, though, may have become as much of a handicap as a valuable direct connection with the public.
Still, a sufficient number of voters thought they needed a bull in the china shop to wake up some self-satisfied snoozers in the corner. So if we start hearing about the preferability of accepting settled ways of choosing a new House speaker, or deferring to dubious tradition, or rewarding what has amounted to failure, it might be a good idea to beware.
No one, and certainly no politician, is perfect. But viewed from a distance outside Washington, D.C., conservative Cong. Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) seems to have qualities of firm commitment and principled belief needed in a House speaker.
Jordan hadn’t been elbowing to the front to position himself to replace Ryan. An article posted April 13 at The Washington Examiner quoted him that the near future isn’t about getting himself leverage but about the GOP delivering on promises to Americans.
“That’s not the point. That’s not the focus. That’s not even a question that should be asked about at this moment,” Jordan was quoted. “We’re so far from that. The next six months are about maintaining the majority, and the way we do that is to do the things we told (voters) we were going to do.”
This Examiner article was headlined, “Jim Jordan for speaker? Not so fast, GOP members say.” It sounded like a hit piece against Jordan’s prospects for advancement by casting him as not being a team player. But a person might ask how well some Republican team members have contributed to getting goals won.
Reporting that Jordan said he’d consider a bid for speaker if Republicans hold on to their House majority in November, the Examiner wrote:
“But his GOP colleagues are skeptical at best, and, at worst, mock the notion that the founding member of the House Freedom Caucus could garner the support needed to win a senior leadership post. Jordan, an antagonist, hasn’t laid a political foundation for advancement by supporting, through fundraising and legislation, a broad ideological cross-section of the House GOP majority.”
Just how “broad” does the GOP spectrum need to be, though, when it already can’t unite on delivering key proclaimed goals? The party doesn’t have to demand 1,000 percent ideological conformity. But it wouldn’t hurt to have enough of an operating agreement in effect that Republicans can act as if the platform actually matters to them.
A separate Examiner story, posted April 17, presented conventional wisdom that the top contenders to succeed Ryan are his lieutenants Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) and Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R., La.).
As for the suitability of having team players, Arizona’s two “moderate” U.S. senators probably fit in as well as anyone on the roster for being part of the comfortable establishment. But the Grand Canyon State currently might be thought to have no representation at all in the upper chamber, with its total of only 100 members.
Seriously ailing John McCain hadn’t been working in D.C. since last December but he continues to hold on to his job title, while colleague Jeff Flake still makes a point of his opposition to the president of his own party and of the nation, Trump. Both senators take the open-borders position.
Meanwhile, McCain and Flake’s home state continues to make more than its share of news, partly because of its position as a prime entry point for illegal aliens.
The April 14 issue of the state’s largest daily paper, The Arizona Republic, which also favors open borders, reported that U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions was well-received by some border sheriffs listening to him at a sheriffs’ conference in New Mexico.
The newspaper said Mark Dannels, sheriff of southeastern Arizona’s Cochise County, said rural people still feel the pressures of border lawlessness.
“They’re tired of living where they can’t walk into their backyard without having a gun,” the Republic quoted Dannels. “They’re scared to leave their properties unattended out in the rural parts that get broken into.”
The paper said another Arizona sheriff, Pima County’s Mark Napier, said large areas of his county’s border with Mexico still lack barriers that would provide protection against criminal organizations. “It’s an ongoing crisis, and it has been for many decades,” Napier was quoted.
Reform In Native Lands
A hopeful note, such as it was, was sounded a few days earlier in an April 10 Republic story about the Central American caravan coming toward the U.S. The story said caravan leaders staged a brief protest outside Mexico City’s Our Lady of Guadalupe Basilica, “denouncing Central American governments for not addressing the conditions that force people to leave their home countries.”
It’s welcome to hear awareness that the solution can’t be simply demanding that the U.S. accept limitless numbers of illegal aliens, but that serious reform must be carried out in native lands. It’s not as if God created an entire planet but made most of His handiwork so repulsive that only a few countries were naturally decent enough to live in. House cleanings can be needed.
Certainly one attraction to the U.S. has been the perception that it has treated alien criminals leniently, or even sheltered them in unconstitutional “sanctuary” areas. Less alarming, but still unfair to American citizens, has been the practice of extending in-state tuition rates to students not even legally in the U.S. while denying the preferred rates to legal Americans from other states.
On April 9 the Arizona Supreme Court unanimously agreed, 7-0, with a state Court of Appeals decision that state and federal law don’t allow DACA recipients to receive in-state tuition here.
In a news release the same day, Arizona Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich said about the decision: “In 2006, Arizona voters approved Proposition 300 with 71.4 percent of the vote. The law provides that state-funded services and benefits, including in-state tuition and financial aid, can only be provided to individuals who have legal status.”
Brnovich said, “As attorney general, my duty is to uphold the law and the will of more than one million voters who passed Proposition 300 in 2006.”
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