While we were all talking yesterday about Benjamin Netanyahu's speech - and rightly so - another story got lost in the mix. With a Republican supermajority opposed, the House completely caved on executive amnesty and passed a bill that funds the Department of Homeland Security with no restrictions whatsoever on funding for Obama's executive amnesty.
That's it. Obama won. He decided to operate outside the law on the theory that there is really nothing Congress could (or at least would) do to stop him, and he was right. Now there is still a federal court ruling against him, and we'll see how he does ignoring that too - which he apparently has every intention of doing. But the whole idea that Congress can rein Obama in using the power of the purse is obviously a gigantic delusion. The Republican's couldn't hold the caucus together on a unified approach to fund the DHS without funding amnesty, and I'm not sure it would have mattered anyway. Obama would have refused to sign any bill that he would claim was not a "clean" funding bill, and that gets us to what is perhaps and even bigger problem.
It's true that the Republicans completely bungled this. One faction wanted to also defund immigration orders Congress had been funding since 2012. McConnell and Boehner couldn't figure out if they were going to tie the entire DHS funding package to the defunding of amnesty or separate them. And of course, they botched the messaging and got beaten up by the media. But there's a messaging battle that Obama won several years ago, and that's the one where he started talking about "clean" funding bills. What is a "clean" bill? This started when Congress tried to defund ObamaCare and Obama insisted that he would only sign a "clean" bill that funded ObamaCare fully. The media picked up on the language and portrayed the Republican attempt to pass a bill without ObamaCare funding as a huge politically charged gambit.
Once Republicans backed down in the face of the media criticism, Obama saw that he could now do this any time he wanted. And he did the same thing this time around with DHS. A "clean" bill gave him everything he wanted, including funding for amnesty. Anything other than that was a politically manipulated trick. The media portrayed the GOP's bills as irresponsible attempts to play fast and loose with national security, and ultimately Boehner caved when he realized a) Obama would never bend even the tiniest bit; and b) if there was even a partial DHS shutdown, Republicans would take the blame.
Consider what's happened here. It used to be that when the president wanted to do something, he asked Congress for funding. Maybe they would agree, maybe they wouldn't. Most likely they would insist on some sort of changes and the two sides would see if they could negotiate a deal. If they got one, then the president got to do, if not exactly what he wanted, some variation of it. If they couldn't get a deal, then he didn't.
That's not how it works anymore. Now, Obama just decides he's going to do something and announces this. Once Obama has expressed his desire, the inclusion of funding for what he wants to do is now presumed in any future spending bill. In order for it to be considered a "clean" bill, it must provide 100 percent funding for everything and anything Obama wants. If Congress tries to send Obama a bill in any other form, he will refuse to sign it, the government will shut down, and it will be the Republicans' fault because they told the King no about something.
This is now how the federal government works. It's partly a failure of courage on the part of the Republicans. It's partly a failure of diligence on the part of the media, which is more interested in taking sides ideologically than in really telling the public what's happening. And of course, it's the product of a Democrat administration that cares for nothing but the raw exercise of power no matter what it has to do.
The next time you hear someone use the term "clean bill," understand that this is what it means. A bill that gives Obama everything he wants and only what he wants. And the term has only taken hold because the media played ball and embraced it as their own. The Propaganda Ministry is doing its job very well.
