As we saw in the recent vote to increase the debt ceiling, Republican leaders in the House and Senate have decided that taking a stand on issues as long as Harry Reid is Senate Majority Leader is futile and will cause Republicans to lose big in the November 2014 election. This reductionism says that the only way to win in the November elections is to compromise on everything.
Therefore, as the argument goes, House Republicans should not be fighting against raising the debt ceiling or defunding ObamaCare. As we saw in last week’s passage of a “clean” debt ceiling increase, this gave Democrats, in effect, a majority in the House, when the leadership in the House joined with them. And Harry Reid had his filibuster-proof Senate as Republicans joined with Democrats to allow the debt ceiling increase.
It took 28 Republican Representatives in the House and 12 Republicans in the Senate to defect to the Democrat side of the aisle to give us what is now technically a Democrat-led Congress. Abandoning the Hastert Rule in the House, which says never bring a bill to a vote if a majority of Republicans oppose it, Speaker of the House John Boehner led the way in making the House a rubber stamp for the President’s agenda.
Now the national debt plunges toward $18 billion dollars and Republicans have been neutered in the issues that would help them to increase their majority in the House and win a majority in the Senate in the November election.
It would have been a completely different story if, last September, Republicans would not have backed down during the President’s 16-day government shutdown. Even though the liberal media made most people think the shutdown was bad and caused by the Republicans, the more the rollout of ObamaCare continues, the more the percentage of people opposed to it grows.
After all, it was for the purpose of defunding ObamaCare that the deadlock occurred which caused the shutdown. Yet if Republicans had kept hammering the issue that it was President Obama shutting down the government for the sake of his ObamaCare mess, it would have redeemed the Republican cause eventually, and helped them in the November election.
Leadership that does not agree with the prevailing sentiment will not be able to rally people around it. They will only ride along in support of that sentiment until they find a way to compromise with the opposition. When it is time to take a stand on an issue, and rally support for it, they give reasons why they have lost before the battle takes place.
Speaker of the House John Boehner doesn't know how to fight a political battle - he always puts up a front and then caves. If Republicans in the House and Senate would have been united in their support of Senator Cruz and others leading the fight to defund ObamaCare last October, instead of attacking them, it would have forced Obama to back down eventually and they would have been in a much stronger position to oppose another debt ceiling increase and begin defunding portions of ObamaCare.
