If only the inside-the-beltway-for-too-long, establishment-GOP leadership could work up as much animus for the Liar-in-Chief, that cancels insurance people like, proscribes any economic recovery and appeases terror-nation-states, as they do for tea partier conservative Republicans; then just maybe the exceptional nation formerly known as America could be restored.
Last month, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell committed the Reagan-11th Commandment political party-equivalent of treason when he, John McCain and other GOP senate leaders conspired with Majority Leader Harry Reid to save Obamacare from Sen. Ted Cruz and other tea partiers in the Senate and House using the Article I-leverage granted them by voters after the 2010 and 2012 elections. The House would not be controlled by Republicans and the Senate would still have a filibuster-proof Democrat majority but for tea partier conservatives determined to repeal Obamacare.
Yet, you never hear of McConnell and McCain et al as having had uncomfortably confrontational meetings with President Barack Obama. But let conservatives outside the beltway dare to challenge a status quo that has the United States at the tipping point between a free market capitalist economy and the Rule of Law vs. a government-run economy and Rule by Executive Fiat; and you hear of the following:
On Tuesday, November 12, Nebraska Senate candidate Ben Sasse (see his candidacy announcement below) walked into Mitch McConnell’s office to clear the air. Contrary to the rumors, Sasse wanted to say, he hadn’t secretly vowed to oppose McConnell’s leadership if elected. In fact, he hadn’t been asked to make such a pledge and would never have even considered it.
That was the plan, anyway. [But] as soon as Sasse sat down, McConnell lit into him, criticizing him for working with the Senate Conservatives Fund (SCF) as well as for posting a viral YouTube video in which he demanded “every Republican in Washington, starting with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, to show some actual leadership.”
Republicans in Washington familiar with these kinds of sessions say the Kentucky Republican’s specialty is long, tension-filled pauses. But even for McConnell, this was awkward. Josh Holmes, McConnell’s top political hand, privately told friends afterward it was the most uncomfortable meeting he’d been in.
As he walked out of the room, Sasse turned to Holmes — “That didn’t go well!”
The nation’s youngest university president (Nebraska’s Midland University), Sasse has become the latest collateral damage in a GOP civil war between McConnell and Holmes, on the one side, and Matt Hoskins and Heritage Foundation president Jim DeMint, Hoskins’s political godfather.
The difference between liberal democrats and moderate Republicans aka DemLite used to matter before the USA had run up so much debt and elected a super-majority of Democrats to Congress that could pass their Democrat president’s and party’s dream of government-run healthcare. During the 1970s through the early 2000s, the worst Republican was light years better than any so-called moderate Democrat in terms of the level of spending, tax and regulatory increases they favor. And in many ways that circumstance still obtains.
But now that we have so much debt, regulation, and spending with an economy mired in a 5-year jobs depression and further threatened by full-implementation of Obamacare; even the DemLite policies of the Republican McConnells of the world not only won’t fix the problems, they actually help hasten America’s decline just as does the real Democratic Party’s.
Yes, there is a war for the soul of the GOP on tactics, but also on substance; and how that battle goes will determine America’s fate.
This tea partier conservative gamecock from the Palmetto State now roosted atop Stone Mountain of Georgia is pulling for the tea partier challengers, like Ben Sasse from the Cornhusker State, against those that sold out Ted Cruz.
G. Sand Lapper