Republicans lose again to Obama
Republicans did the predictable thing again last week.
After months of grousing about President Obama’s immigration executive order, they folded. They capitulated. They threw in the towel.
“Maybe I should be more angry, but I’m not. I think anybody who follows Washington knew this is exactly where we were going to be.”
Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.), before the vote on the DHS funding bill
Well, well, well.
America had witnessed a couple of weeks in which Republicans played brinkmanship with funding for the Department of Homeland Security.
Finally, many Republicans in the U.S. House joined every Democrat in passing a $37.7 billion bill in an exercise that proves, once again, that bluster is one thing – good governance is something altogether different.
Instead of passing that bill for a week, a day, or a minute, the final result was that the DHS will be funded through September.
Oh, 167 Republicans decided they’d still vote “no” on the bill.
I suspect those 167 Republicans were trying to convince their voters back home that they can “courageously” stand-up to Obama, no matter how fruitless.
Of course, during their re-election campaigns, their opponents will be able to claim here or she “voted against the nation’s national security.”
This is becoming a familiar Tea Party-infused theme.
Since April of 2011, Republicans have staged theatrical congressional showdowns 11 times, causing debt-ceiling crises; lowering of the nation’s credit rating; fiscal cliff skirmishes; and a 17-day government shutdown in October of 2013.
All of those impasses were generated by Republicans, hoping to strangle Obama’s agenda.
So far, they’ve failed every time.
And more disturbing – they knew their tactics wouldn’t work when they tried them.
That’s not courage. It’s foolhardiness.
Trying to block the president’s immigration executive order by attaching it to DHS funding – was a laughably hopeless ploy.
Republicans knew Democrats in the Senate would block it, thus setting up another stand-off.
Yawn.
Meanwhile, the Republican-dominated House and Senate can now point to only four pieces of legislation that have become law since the 114th Congress was sworn-in on Jan. 3.
What a day that was.
There were Republicans all over the U.S. Capitol carrying the “will of the American people,” as they planned to prove that “elections have consequences.”
That, as they say, is a bunch of hooey.
The American people want solutions to problems, not Republicans, or Democrats creating new ones.
So far, the 114th Congress has been no more productive than the 113th.
According to Republican sources, there’ve been 67 Republican-backed bills designed to repeal, defund or completely do away with Obamacare since it became law in March of 2010.
That includes another attempt to repeal it during the current legislative session in February.
As long as the Republican leadership in both house of Congress find themselves at the mercy of intransigent, Tea Party-enabled members of their own party, they’ll continue to be unable to get out of their own way.
The most recent legislative cliffhanger had little to do with Democrats.
They simply stood their ground.
Republican House Speaker John Boehner found himself in the unenviable position of having to “herd cats” within his own party.
He knew all along that despite there being little chance of eventually nullifying Obama’s executive order, he had to go through the motions of tying immigration to National Security.
There were even whispers that if he allowed the DHS funding bill to move forward, he could lose his House speakership.
He did move it forward.
It passed.
The president signed it into law, and the Republican Party took another public relations hit, because just about everybody knew that would happen anyway.
Anybody who’s watched the goings-on in Washington since President Obama was elected knows that, with few exceptions, there’ll be frazzled nerves; 11th hour posturing; and near-calamity before Republicans relent, and then attempt to blame Democrats for it all.
Peter King, a conservative congressman from New York claimed that his fellow Republicans who’d been trying to block DHS funding had been “self-righteous and delusional.”
For once, I agree with a Republican.
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net