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Redstate
House
Conservatives Beware the New Whipping
Strategy
Preemptively whipping general principles to get
past conservatives and pass Democrat bills
By Daniel Horowitz
July
17th, 2013
Over
the past few years, the number of conservatives
in the House has grown exponentially.
Well, at least to the extent that you
can’t count them on your
fingers. Unfortunately,
House
conservatives are about to become a victim of their own successes if
they fail
to change course.
In
a sane world, Republicans would have more
leverage than the Democrats over the legislative process. They have full control
over the House and a
filibuster-strength minority in the Senate.
Consequently, they have the ability to
block bad legislation from
passing the Senate, while jamming the Democrats with good bills from
the House.
But
such a process is predicated on a
Republican leadership that actually stands for Republican values. The reality is the
opposite. We have
Mitch McConnell outsourcing his leadership
to McCain and Graham so that a number of bad bills pass the Senate
(McConnell
makes sure to vote against the bills, of course).
Then, instead of ignoring unpopular
bills
that pass the Senate, House leaders work indefatigably to see how they
can pass
Senate bills.
Here
is how the cycle of capitulation plays
out. House
conservatives balk at
leadership’s initial attempt to pass bad legislation.
Leadership is defeated.
Conservatives prematurely view this as a
sign
of strength. Then,
McCarthy and the whipping
team come to conservatives and “whip” up general principles from
conservatives. They
ask them what it
would take to get them to a “yes vote.”
Conservatives mistakenly perceive this
as a conciliatory gesture form
leadership, when in reality, it is an attempt to get them to sign on to
bad
bills. Conservatives
offer some general
principles. Leadership
commits to those
general principles. Then
they offer a
new bill that employs a subterfuge in which those principles are
addressed on
paper in general terms, yet they are completely voided out by the
specifics of
the bill or the strategy behind the process.
But because those principles are
addressed in a superficial way,
conservatives feel as if they had already given their word to vote for
the
bill. Repeat and
rinse as needed.
During
the 2011 debt ceiling fight,
conservatives rallied behind Cut, Cap, and Balance as a precondition
for
raising the debt ceiling. Leadership
had
no intention of abiding by that condition.
They offered a new plan that gutted the
spending cap and initial cuts
but retained a balanced budget as part of the second tranche of the
debt
ceiling hike. All
but 22 conservatives
signed onto it because it officially contained a balanced budget
amendment, as
promised, even though it wasn’t CCB.
As
we all know, they ultimately caved on that deal and passed a new plan
to merely
require a vote on a balanced budget amendment, not passage. Leadership hoodwinked
conservatives into
abjuring their principles because their ridiculous plan was supposedly
“in the
spirit of cut, cap and balance.”
Last
January, leadership confronted another
debt ceiling and a CR that contained funding for Obamacare. They asked conservatives
what they needed to
get to yes. Conservatives
said they
wanted the sequester cuts and a budget that balanced in 10 years. The sequester cuts were
going to be enacted
by default anyway. So
what did they do
with the budget? They
repackaged last
year’s Ryan budget, which balanced in 2040, to include all the new
revenue from
Obamacare tax hikes, fiscal cliff tax hikes, and overly optimistic CBO
revenue
projections, and poof….they had a balanced budget in 10 years. The budget actually called
for more spending
than the previous iteration. So
they
manipulated conservatives into a trap where they co-opted their general
principles with a crap sandwich.
Moreover, they never committed to
actually standing behind that budget
as a pre-condition for raising the debt ceiling this fall…
Read
the rest of the article at Redstate
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