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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." via Levin twitter
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