For all the establishment grumbling about Ted Cruz, I don't see how any of them can deny this: He's getting results. Do you really think they would stood up to Obama and Harry Reid long enough to even get to a second day of a shutdown if Cruz hadn't forced their hand with his 21-hour barnburner and insistence on defunding?
They can complain all they want that he's just looking for attention or putting on a show, but Cruz is making things happen because he is proving he's willing to do the one thing the rest of them should be doing - fight.
And every time you hear some "realistic" Republican say it's impossible to repeal, defund or delay ObamaCare because the GOP doesn't have enough power by virtue of only controlling the House, you should understand it didn't need to be this way. The time to take this fight to the Democrats was in January 2011, when John Boehner took the gavel away from Nancy Pelosi in the aftermath of the red wave election of 2010.
Let's review:
The Republicans took power in a year, 2010, in which Democrats not only shoved ObamaCare down an unwilling nation's throats, but for the first time didn't even try to pass a budget. That was for a very specific reason, too. Having passed the $862 billion "one-time emergency stimulus" in 2009, Democrats wanted to add that spending to the budget baseline for subsequent years. In other words, they had no intention of making it a one-time move. It would now be part of the budget forever. But they knew they couldn't withstand the political heat that would come if they put that in a real budget, so they just skipped passing a budget altogether, funding the government instead with a series of under-the-radar continuing resolutions.
This gave us a budget deficit well in excess of $1 trillion, and for the first time, no one could stand up with a straight face and say George W. Bush had anything to do with it. It was their spending, their deficit and their dereliction of duty in ignoring the budget process.
The media didn't make a lot of hay out of this, but the public was still incensed with the Democrats over ObamaCare and was ready for Republicans to take a strong stand against them.
This was the opportunity for the new Speaker of the House.
Boehner could have called a press conference on Day 1 for the purpose of announcing several things:
There would be no more funding the government by continuing resolutions. The House would not consider one. The House would pass a normal order budget and would expect the Senate to do the same.
The stimulus money would not be part of the budget. The House would pass a budget that reflected the nation's priorities before the stimulus and before TARP. Since both had been sold as one-time emergency measures, the spending that made them possible would be over.
As a condition of passing the new budget, ObamaCare would have to be repealed.
In January 2011, the mood of the public was such that it would have supported all of these positions. Now I am not saying Obama and Reid would have caved and accepted this 100 percent. The nature of divided government is that you have to negotiate, but success in negotiating means taking a strong position and having the confidence to stick to it.
Boehner, however, was unwilling to do this. The House did pass a budget, but Reid predictably ignored it and refused to pass one in the Senate. This was where Boehner should have stood firm. But he didn't. He permitted the House to pass Reid's continuing resolution to keep the government operating, and instead chose to use the debt ceiling as his instrument of leverage. This did not go well. True, the GOP got the sequester put in place, but the "cuts" brought on by the sequester are not even real cuts. They are merely a small reduction in the scheduled increase in spending. The stimulus money is still part of the baseline. ObamaCare is still law. And by using the debt ceiling as leverage, the Republicans have opened themselves up to the criticism that they are willing to force a default to get their way.
That's nonsense, of course, because refusing to raise the debt ceiling would not force a default. But raising the debt ceiling is not the problem and never has been. The problem is that we are spending so much money and taking on so much debt. Boehner had a chance to stand up to that, and to ObamaCare, the day he became Speaker. It would have set a completely different tone for how Congress operated since then.
But he didn't do that. Instead, he spent two-and-a-half years putting up half-hearted resistance to Obama's agenda, while complaining that he just couldn't make a difference without winning the Senate and the White House too.
By the way, what a bunch of rot that is. The argument is that you can't govern when you only control the House. But isn't it just as true that you can't govern when you only control the White House and the Senate? You need the House to sign off before you can spend any money.
So why is it that the Democrats have managed to govern in accordance with their priorities, but Republicans have not?
Simple: Obama and Reid will do anything to get their way. Boehner will not. And that tone was set way back in January 2011, when he could have fought to win but chose not to do so.
I hope we get as much as we can out of those shutdown showdown, but we could have gotten all of it and more if we'd had real leaders when the GOP first took control of the House. Now we're forced to rely on this high-stakes game of chicken, led by people who don't really want to have the fight at all, but feel they must because a real fighter named Ted Cruz shamed them into doing so.
What could have been.
