Quick! Who were the Republican Leaders in the Senate and the House during the Roosevelt administration?
If you can’t remember, you’re not alone.
No one remember the ciphers who were stepped on by history-making leaders (for good or bad), in order to achieve their transformational objectives.
You see these losers, as props, in pictures of “signing ceremonies” for “bipartisan” liberal legislation that changed that very nature of our polity.
And you sense that they somehow feel that history will reward them for being there -- as though a wad of gum becomes noble because it’s stuck to the shoe of a famous man.
Which brings us to John Boehner and Mitch McConnell.
Barack Obama is reasonably close to rendering many conservative views inherently illegitimate in the public forum.
He is about to ban guns for 4.2 million law-abiding seniors who are not dangerous and did nothing wrong. He has dared the GOP to block taxpayer funding of the diabolical harvesting and sale of dead baby parts. He is ignoring federal courts in order to write non-legislative strictures to transform the law regarding the environment, union organizing, and (in direct violation of a court order) deportation.
He is about to produce a trade agreement with broad feel-good pronouncements concerning amnesty, labor law, and global warming, which his court-packed judges will use to write entire new bodies of federal law. [Title IX and affirmative action are paradigms for this.] [And, no, the do-nothing Hatch provision in fast-track purporting to protect current law doesn’t stop the creation of new law.]
And Boehner and McConnell have blocked off most of the GOP’s non-frivolous options for dealing with these incursions.
There’s the appropriations process and the debt limit, but Boehner and McConnell seem to have been convinced that the use of the power of the purse will produce a GOP electoral disaster comparable to the losses in 2014 after the 2013 shutd… Oh, wait a minute! That narrative turned out to be a fraud!
The Trans-Pacific Partnership will now be unamendable, meaning that the only policy in the agreement will be the policy Obama wants. …Although a Republican GOP senator should either invoke the statutory procedure or appeal the ruling of the Chair that fast-track is applicable.
Mitch McConnell made sure that the only attachment to the Obama-legacy-enshrining Keynesian infrastructure bill was his Democrat-backed bribe to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank.
And then there’s the trap that the short-sighted GOP Chairman Bob Corker fell into in connection with Iran -- where Republicans have made sure that their only “exit” is one that they are unable to fit through.
And the list goes on: an education bill, a sentencing reform bill, and so forth. All of these are intended to ease Obama’s journey to Mount Rushmore, and all of them are being shoved through without any demands concerning the vast array of Republican grievances.
So here’s an idea: Nothing -- NOTHING -- should move through the legislative process without addressing at least some of the GOP issues, particularly guns, abortion, and executive amnesty.
The House should toss McConnell’s Ex-Im bribe bill into the wastebasket, force him to go through the process again. Already, a majority of House Republicans are moving to oppose the Ex-Im reauthorization. And the first step to achieving this objective is to insure that, under no circumstances should the House recognize the McConnell bill as a legitimate starting point for negotiations.
And let the liberal press whine about how tax increases for infrastructure and released criminals are being held up by butchered babies. Frankly, a new $1-per-newspaper tax would pretty much resolve all our infrastructure needs for the foreseeable future.
Sentencing reform, in particular, should address conservative concerns: If drug dealers and murders (who pleaded guilty to lesser charges) are going to be let loose on the streets, why should federal white collar criminals be forever barred from petitioning BATF to regain their Second Amendment rights?
But, at a time when Obama is assembling a Rooseveltian coalition to wage the 2016 election and transform politics for a generation, Boehner and McConnell are systematically destroying the Republican coalition. And they are doing so because Obama and his media allies tell them to -- and because they fancy that they may get a little “good ink” if they shoot their own troops.
Sure McConnell believes that he defeated the conservative base in 2014, and that there’s nothing they can do to him.
But that’s not true.
Currently, the base is deciding whether to depose McConnell by deposing Kirk, Ayotte, Toomey, Portman, and Johnson -- as they did with Scott Brown in 2014.
Within the next three month, Boehner and McConnell will either give the base a reason to fight for them -- or a reason sit home and watch them lose their leadership positions.