In effect Jody Hice said 'read my lips,' I won't vote for Boehner and the Obama agenda, then immediately turned around and did so

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Rep. Jody Hice, R-Ga.

1/7/15, "The day the music died," Steve Deace

"This is the worst column I’ve ever had to write, because it’s about Jody Hice. A man I thought I knew. A man I had high hopes for. A man of God. An actual Southern Baptist pastor who graduated from the same seminary as my wife–Luther Rice Seminary in Atlanta, Georgia. 

See, he’s only been a congressman for about 15 minutes, but it appears we’ve already lost him to the system. And on his first official vote, no less. That sure didn’t take long. Maybe that’s a record or something. Sadly, he’s going to share it with several others.

Hice was one of several freshmen Republicans who despite pledging not to do so, voted to re-elect John Boehner, perhaps the best Speaker of the House the Democrats have ever had. The same John Boehner who has gone out of his way to punish conservatives and push through the Obama agenda, even to the point of repeatedly passing legislation through his chamber a majority of the majority Republicans oppose. The same John Boehner a super majority of Republicans nationwide just said in a recent poll they opposed as Speaker.

Last summer, in a debate with his supposedly more moderate primary opponent, Hice had this to say: "You’ve said a number of times that your political philosophy is closely identified with that of your dad. He was very good on some social issues, but he went along with the establishment (on issues like the debt ceiling)…(Your campaign) looks like a sequel that’s a nightmare."

Yet there was Hice, siding with the establishment over his own constituents despite pledging to “support new leadership with a backbone” over Boehner during his campaign victory, which was celebrated by conservatives nationwide. I even tried to reach out to Hice a few days ago, encouraging him to keep his word. He never responded to me, which should’ve been my first clue another one bites the dust.

All of this brings me back to the first time I ever met Hice. A few years ago I was flown into Atlanta in the dead of winter by local pro-life activists who had given up on the Republican Party after its many betrayals, and were now organizing for the Constitution Party. Hice and I were two of the featured speakers, and struck up a quick rapport over the weekend as kindred spirits. Ironically, my talk to these conservative dissenters who had bolted the party was to encourage them to come back, take advantage of the GOP’s weak local and state infrastructure in most places, and claim it for their own. Why reinvent the wheel if you don’t have to? 

Hice apparently took that advice when he ran for the GOP nomination in Georgia’s Republican-leaning 10th district. Once he won the primary, his general election in November was a mere formality. Which is why when I last saw Hice in September at a conservative dinner, I congratulated him on his looming victory. I also introduced him to the man sitting next to me, Ralph Hallow, the chief political writer for the Washington Times (where I’m also a columnist).

“Soon you’ll be writing those same stories about the GOP establishment whining about Ted Cruz and Mike Lee in the Senate about Jody Hice in the House,” I enthusiastically said to Hallow when I introduced him to Hice.

But I was wrong. It turns out I’ll be writing columns like this instead. Hice is not alone.

After hearing me speak at a conference, Barry Loudermilk made a point of coming to my book signing afterwards to introduce himself, and to pick up a copy of “Rules for Patriots: How Conservatives Can Win Again” for his staff. He also pledged not to vote for Boehner as Speaker, but went back on his word and voted for the Obama agenda by voting for Boehner as well. There’s more.

Glenn Grothman, a freshman from Wisconsin, said “I would have no problem looking for an alternative to Speaker Boehner and standing up to Republican leadership” during his campaign. But he also voted for Boehner for Speaker, even though three alternatives were nominated on the floor, and had he and several others publicly followed through with their pledge ahead of time, Boehner would be history.

In fact, of the seven incoming freshmen who promised not to support Obama’s Man of Perpetual Orange for Speaker, only Alabama’s Gary Palmer kept his word. That’s right, six out of the seven betrayed their campaign promises on their first official votes as members of Congress, which kind of makes you wonder what they said during the campaign that actually is trustworthy? If all seven of these freshmen had kept their word, the votes were there to dethrone Boehner.

And there wasn’t just the betrayals. There was also the bizarre, which showcased just how dysfunctional Boehner’s Animal House truly is.

How about Mia Love, a Republican media darling, getting a Judas kiss on the House floor from Boehner himself after agreeing to vote for him?  

Then there was one of my favorite congressmen, Justin Amash, voting for Ohio’s Jim Jordan for Speaker. Except Jordan voted for Boehner, too. Trey Gowdy, who has earned conservative hosannas for his work on Benghazi, couldn’t make it to the vote due to weather. However, he said he would’ve voted for Boehner, despite the fact Sean Hannity helped spark a “draft Gowdy for Speaker” movement within the base.

Finally, we’d be remiss if we didn’t hand Matt Salmon a profile in courage award for waiting until the second time through the roll call to finally vote for Boehner as Speaker, once it was clear he had the votes. The people of Arizona haven’t seen such bravery since Pat Tillman.

Yet my thoughts on this ordeal begin and end with Hice. It’s not losing the Speaker vote that bothers me. My worldview, a worldview I thought Hice shared, says you never lose when you do the right thing no matter the results. My worldview also compels me to keep fighting, no matter the odds. So we will.

But despite the fact this isn’t my first rodeo, Hice’s treachery still stings and it stings deeply. For if men of his caliber succumb to the corruption and cronyism within the beltway the first time they are tempted with it, then I truly don’t know where we go from here as a movement.

And if I’m naive for believing in Hice and trusting him to keep his word, let that never change. For when the time comes a betrayal like this from a fellow believer no longer hurts me, that means I’ve become part of the problem, too."

"Read more by Steve Deace and others at Conservative Review."

Image above of Jody Hice by ap via Conservative Review.

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"Republican leaders’ responses to cries of betrayal bring to mind Bush 41’s “read my lips,” and Lucy’s reassurance to Linus: “next time for sure!”"

12/21/2014, "Jonathan Gruber Republicans," Angelo M. Codevilla

"“The stupidity of the American electorate,” Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber repeated to his Democratic colleagues, was essential to passing that law. Had Americans suspected the reality: that the law does not let them keep their doctors or their plans, that it makes them pay more for less, they would have warned Democrats that voting for the law would mean being voted out. But the Democrats, combining deception with shortsightedness, passed Obamacare – and, when reality blew away their fog, got voted out.

In the 2014 elections the Republican leadership acted identically, trusting in the voters’ suspension of disbelief in its promises to change the U.S. government’s substance and manner of operation. They promised to defund Obamacare and to use Congress’s total power of the purse to reverse a host of the Obama administration’s illegalities. Once the votes were in the bag, most Republican members embraced the reality that their leaders had been preparing all along: the continuation of business as usual, with a few self-interested tweaks.

On December 11, the House of Representatives passed a 1603 page “CROmnibus” bill of $1.1 trillion dollars, which fully funds Obamacare and provides money to bail out insurance companies for losses they incur in its management, and whose substantive provisions include more money for the lawless EPA than even Obama had asked for. The bill also funnels campaign cash to party organizations at the expense of candidates, and authorizes Senators and Congressmen to lease luxury cars at $1000 per month on the taxpayer’s dime. Most significantly, by funding nearly the entire U.S. government until October 2015, the new law removes from elected legislators the power to do what they were elected to do.

Republican leaders’ responses to cries of betrayal bring to mind Bush 41’s “read my lips,” and Lucy’s reassurance to Linus: “next time for sure!” The Wall Street Journal congratulated the Republican Establishment, and deputy editor Daniel Henninger characterized the Tea Party and antiabortionists as “a weird political fringe.” Less perceptive than Gruber Democrats, they seem unaware that their victory depended on deception. Who would have voted for them if, rather than promising to defund Obamacare, they had promised to pass the CROmnibus that secures it? So, like Jonathan Gruber, showing contempt for their voters, Republican leaders ensured that their party will suffer consequences in the 2016 electoral cycle — perhaps in the form but in greater severity than what undid Bush ‘41 in 1992.

To what degree the Republican leadership insulted its own voters, what sort of Rubicon the Party crossed, by passing the 2014 CROmnibus — comparable in U.S. history to the  Whig Party’s passage of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska act that resulted in that Party’s death — may be seen by comparing the CROmnibus and what it portends to incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s victory statement, which summed up the 2014 Republican campaign: “I’ve made your concerns my own.”

Government, McConnell said, “can’t do basic things because it’s busy doing things it should not be doing at all…imposing its view of the world on folks who don’t share that view.” Republicans want to place it on the people’s side. They promise “to turn this country around.” “I’ve seen the damage that distant planners do to people in the state.” We are “tired of hearing that those of us who fight [for the American people] in Washington are somehow the problem.” “We can have real change in Washington-real change. That is what I intend to deliver.”

Instead, he delivered the CROmnibus to both chambers the day before it was voted on. Written in secret cooperation by leaders of both parties and President Obama, the bill was accompanied with the threat that whoever opposed it would be held responsible for “shutting down the government.”  
 
This, after Republican speaker John Boehner had acknowledged that “cramming…the entire federal discretionary budget and assorted policy changes into one [legislative] vehicle” is a terrible idea. He promised to return the Congress to “regular order” — namely to voting on individual bills and amendments openly considered.

President Obama did not force the Republican leaders to live by the CROmnibus this year or in past years. Republicans, in control of the House, could have passed individual appropriations during the course of the previous years. Collusion, not cowardice, explains why Republican leaders did not contest but embraced charges of “shutting down the government” leveled by Senate Democrats who refused to fund any part of the government and by a President that insisted on a CROmnibus or nothing.

Two of the CROmnibus’s provisions explain the Republicans’ collusion. First, funding Obamacare and especially the bailout of the insurance companies that are its major financial beneficiaries, anathema as it is to Republican voters, is a key objective of the Crony Capitalists who fund Republican leaders. Second, the provision that makes us taxpayers liable for bailing out the financial industry’s losses in its speculative maneuvers with derivatives, written as it was by Citigroup lobbyists, was arguably these Crony Capitalists’ primary objective. Only behind closed doors and under the deep cover of a CROmnibus bill that dissolves responsibility could Republican leaders satisfy their money constituency.

The price the Republican establishment paid was loss of credibility with the voters. Once lost, political credibility cannot be regained. The electorate of 2014 voiced demands that are widespread and deeply held. By failing to heed these demands, GOP leaders have invited others to satisfy them."


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