It’s a tale as old as time. Conservatives vote for a Republican because they want to see conservative, small government, and fiscally responsible policies. Said Republican gets elected and heads off to Washington promising to hold the line in the nation’s capital and check the power of Democrats to prevent clumsy, ineffective, and expensive big-government programs. Then, upon arriving in the heady Senate chamber, all principle goes out the window and the fresh Republicans quickly become indistinguishable from stale Democrats.
Well, it happened again this week as the U.S. Senate, thanks to a “bipartisan” group of Democrats and Republicans who came up with a way to spend some $1.2 trillion taxpayer dollars. They say it's for “infrastructure” but it turned out to be porky special projects for radical leftists.
As the infrastructure bill made its way through the Senate, several Republicans — at various points — enabled the kind of wasteful spending they campaigned against in their home states. The result of Republican negotiation efforts was a massive bill with loads of nonsense.
Talk of “gender identity” appears in the more than 2,500 pages that made up the final text of the bill, as does $2.5 billion in green energy subsidies for non-profits and schools, along with a “Digitial Equity Act” — whatever that is, $5 billion for low/zero-emission school buses, and $250 million for electric ferries. Silly me thinking water and electricity don’t mix.
The Republican negotiators knew these allocations and ideas were in the bill text, but they didn’t stop them. “But,” you may say, “surely having Republicans at the table as the bill came together saved Americans from a worse fate with infrastructure!” You can make that point, but whatever happened to the idea of “peace through strength?”
If President Reagan could get up from the table with Gorbachev in Reykjavík when the threat of mutually assured destruction loomed, couldn’t Senate Republicans have threatened to kill one bill to keep their promises of conservative lawmaking?
Apparently not.
The truth is, Republicans allowed this trillion-dollar debacle of a bill to happen. Without their weak members, a filibuster could have been maintained and the final vote we saw Tuesday wouldn’t have happened. Republicans were unified in temporarily blocking debate when Schumer attempted to move forward without any text. They could have done the same thing with the final text when they saw it contained such waste and leftist inanity. But they didn’t.
There are those who say the bill was proof that bipartisanship in Washington isn’t dead and that Republicans and Democrats can still work together to get results for the American people. But it’s not. The only thing the infrastructure bill proves is that Republicans can always be counted on to wuss out when it really matters and leave their constituents scratching their heads as to why they ever trusted someone based on a capital R that followed their name.
What’s more, these Republicans didn’t just negotiate the bill and they didn’t just allow the bill to be debated by removing their one final check on its progress. They also voted for it.
And by “they,” I mean Senators Roy Blunt (MO), Richard Burr (NC), Shelley Moore Capito (WV), Bill Cassidy (LA), Susan Collins (ME), Kevin Cramer (ND), Mike Crapo (ID), Deb Fischer (NE), Lindsey Graham (SC), John Hoeven (ND), Mitch McConnell (KY), Lisa Murkowski (AK), Rob Portman (OH), James Risch (ID), Mitt Romney (UT), Dan Sullivan (AK), Thom Tillis (NC), and Roger Wicker (MS).
They are the ones — supposedly committed to conservative principles — who made inflation-spurring, tax-increasing, freedom-diminishing policies a reality. Instead of holding the line against the Democrat agenda, they handed the Biden administration a win on one of Joe Biden’s biggest priorities. This bill wasn’t a win for bipartisanship, it was a win for Joe Biden. And Republicans made it happen.
Back in their home states, the people who elected them expecting to have a Republican voice represent them now need to understand that their “leaders” advanced gender identity madness, institutionalized the Left’s equity agenda, and gave new life to Green New Deal policies.
Conservative voters deserve to have a voice and a vote in Washington that represents them and their values. Remember the names of those who decided that temporary personal popularity — won through a phony show of bipartisanship — was more important than the values of those who sent them to Washington. And think twice when you next choose who you want to be your proxy in Congress.
