Did the 2014 midterms really happen? Less than three months after a red tide rolled over the country, the Senate Republican Rollover Caucus is back to its default position in Washington, D.C.:
Hands up, bow down.
Last week, senior GOP supplicant Sen. Orrin Hatch announced that he will support the confirmation of President Obama's attorney general nominee, Loretta Lynch. He praised her "qualifications" and decried the Justice Department's previous leaders who "have facilitated executive abuses by this president rather than upholding the rule of law."
Guffaw. A Utah Republican, Hatch was one of the biggest, fattest facilitators of that lawlessness from the first days of the reign of Obama. Beltway amnesia among entrenched incumbents is a chronic disorder.
"I like Barack Obama and want to help him if I can," Hatch declared in January 2009, just weeks before the Senate voted on President Obama's attorney general nominee, career corruptocrat Eric Holder. In the interest of "comity," Hatch and 16 other Senate Republicans backed Holder, despite his long, sordid history of questionable ethics and national security-undermining politicking in the Clinton administration -- from the Marc Rich pardon scheme with former White House counsel Jack Quinn to the clemency deal for 16 members of the violent terrorist groups Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional (FALN) and Los Macheteros, which the FBI had linked to more than 130 bombings and six murders.
With the blessing of Senate Republican enablers, Holder went on to preside over the bloody malfeasance of the Fast and Furious scandal; the Gitmo jihad evacuations and recidivist release program; installment of far-left lawyers who had represented our worst enemies; and the establishment of a "culture of hostility" toward Justice Department employees committed to election integrity, immigration enforcement and equal treatment under the law.
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Now, Holder's Senate GOP handmaidens are shocked and dismayed at the cesspool Holder is leaving behind. Their solution? Replacing him with a woman who explicitly championed and defended Obama's executive power grabs on illegal immigration, crusaded for the manufactured "right" of illegal aliens to work in the U.S., and refused to answer GOP Sen. Ted Cruz's questions last week about whether any limits on a president's executive discretion to choose or ignore laws (Tax law? Labor law? Environmental law?) exist at all.
Beltway Republican poseurs claimed a victory for the right after the 2014 midterms. But conservatives knew the crusty barnacles who habitually use and abuse grassroots voters would immediately revert to form. Or rather: formlessness.
Let's face it: Seven-term incumbent Hatch embodies everything that's wrong with the GOP brand. He's a mascot for the Big Government Republican parade and masquerade of career politicians who stand for nothing and roll over for everything.
In addition to supporting Holder and now Lynch, Hatch embraced tax cheat Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and the TARP bailout, lavished praise on Joe Biden's manhood and spoke kindly of Obamacare implementer Kathleen Sebelius upon her departure.
In case you'd forgotten, Hatch co-sponsored the $6 billion national service boondoggle and dedicated it to his good friend Teddy Kennedy, with whom he also joined hands to create the ever-expanding SCHIP entitlement. That program is now an $8-billion-a-year entitlement and growing.
At a time when Obama's executive amnesty measures are wreaking havoc on the border, public schools, public safety and the American workforce, don't forget: Hatch was an original sponsor of the open-borders DREAM Act illegal alien student bailout and voted to fully fund the Obama amnesty during the lame-duck session.
Hatch was joined by GOP Sens. Jeff Flake of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina in announcing support for Lynch last week. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday he will let her nomination come to a vote out of "courtesy" rather than block it in protest of Obama's continued lawlessness on deportations and mass issuance of work permits to countless foreign criminals.
Cruz, who called on McConnell to put the screws on Obama over the Lynch nomination, diagnosed the bipartisan Beltway corruptocracy perfectly: "Far too many Americans are losing faith in our elected officials," he told Politico this week. "They've seen too many times politicians who say one thing and do another."
Unfortunately, it's difficult to play hardball with deflated ones.
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