
Too Afraid to Fight
Early Wednesday, I brought you the story that had erupted in Washington over Republican capitulation on Presidential appointments on Tuesday evening. While Ted Cruz was winning the Republican run-off for Senate in Texas, the House Republican leadership was busy selling us out, but it didn’t end with the matter of Presidential appointments. They also came to an agreement on another temporary spending extension that will carry the budget problems until after the elections by virtue of yet another continuing resolution, as the Heritage Foundation reports. Let’s get real: If we can’t win by standing for the constitution, let’s just quit, surrender the country, and simply lie down and die. This is another example of the preternatural fear exhibited by Republican Congressional leadership over the prospects of a government shutdown. I don’t understand why, because this nation has survived many shutdowns, including at least three major ones during Reagan’s administration, and at least one during Clinton’s. Of course, it is the shutdown of 1995 that leadership fears, because in that instance, Bob Dole over in the Senate undercut Gingrich because Dole was seeking the Presidency in 1996. Now, the leadership is selling-out for Mitt Romney’s sake, but if this continues, we will have a repeat of the 2006 disaster.
Somebody should tell Speaker Boehner and Leader McConnell that they don’t answer to Mitt Romney, but more, Mitt Romney should make a case on behalf of budgetary discipline, but just like last summer, Romney didn’t say a word about the deal-making over the Debt Ceiling until it was finished, only then remarking on it. This is precisely the sort of spineless approach I have feared from Mitt Romney, and from any Congress that would work with him. If this is what it will be like in a Romney administration, I’m not interested. More, we shouldn’t get our hopes up too high since it’s now apparent that Boehner and the boys in the House simply don’t have the stomach for a battle. As usual, the GOP establishment is in collusion with liberals to screw the rest of us for the sake of politics.
Here’s the list of problems Heritage offered with this latest continuing resolution(CR):
- It stifles the economy by adding to the uncertainty among investors and employers, making them reluctant to pursue growth-producing, job-creating activities.
- It erodes public confidence. Congress’s repeated failure with such routine matters as annual spending bills breeds cynicism about how lawmakers are handling more than $3.5 trillion of the economy’s resources each year.
- It weakens Congress’s ability to budget at all. Each repetition makes fiscal mismanagement the norm. Past vices become present-day habits, and the chance of Congress restoring stable budgeting practices grows more remote. Without them, Congress will be unable to address the huge entitlement spending challenges that are growing larger and more imminent.
- It risks an economic breakdown sooner than expected. Former Senator Judd Gregg (R–NH) has warned that “once reality sets in that there is going to be no improvement in leadership, whether on the fiscal cliff or on long-term deficits and debt, people and markets will react. They will not wait until January. Historically, September has been a good time for such a reaction.”
More than any of this, however, I believe it simply “kicks the can down the road” again, in search of a more favorable time to address the impending catastrophe. By “more favorable,” they mean a time when there is no impending election, but I have news for these establishment weasels: There’s always an election pending, and this is precisely why we never actually address these issues. Kicking the can down the road is much less painful to politicians, but it does precisely nothing to repair our nation, and it helps to promote an eventual collapse of our system.
Congressional Republicans ought to wake the Hell up. Mitt Romney’s campaign didn’t appoint them to office. We elected them. They’re in office to represent our interests, but not Mitt Romney’s electoral aspirations. This is not a winning strategy, but merely a plan for perpetual retreat. We can’t afford this sort of leadership any longer, and if this is what Romney offers, we’re better off without him too.