According to Daniel Henninger of The Wall Street Journal, John Boehner is resigning as Speaker of the House of Representatives “in large part because of opposition to his leadership from 40 to 50 House members called the Freedom Caucus.” Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) says, “[T]he heartland hasn’t seen us fight” for conservative ideas and policies.
It may be true that the so-called “base” hasn’t seen Republicans “fight” President Obama, but that may be as much because they haven’t been paying sufficient attention as for the lack of fighting. The sequester is limiting government spending. (It is doing in a terribly inefficient, meat cleaver-like way, but it is doing it.) We got a decent estate tax law and income tax law passed permanently. Affirming John Boehner’s idea, courts have said that Congress has standing to sue the Obama administration for the way it is, in the view of House Republicans, spending money without a proper Congressional authorization to do so.
But the main problem is that the kind of “fighting” the Freedom Caucus seems to want to see, i.e., government shutdowns, etc., are actually going to help keep in place the very policies that the Freedom Caucus opposes.
Most of the things President Obama is doing now that conservatives, and many moderates, oppose are not being approved by Congress. They are being done by administrative and regulatory actions of the President and his administration. (I have talked about this several times; most recently here.)
There is little House Republicans, or even both houses of Congress together, can do to stop him. He is going to keep issuing those regulations and orders, expanding federal power, while restricting the states and eroding individual freedom, until January 20, 2017. The courts have limited some of these excesses, but they can only respond to actual lawsuits. Congress can try to limit what he is doing around the edges, but the best way to stop him, and roll back what he has done, is to elect a new president in 2016.
But the Freedom Caucus and certain parts of the Republican base don’t seem to understand that. They think that government shutdowns and arguing about things won’t and can’t happen with a Democrat in the White House are more important than actually winning in 2016.
In spite of what the Freedom Caucus, et al, might think, elections are won – and lost – in the middle 20% of the electorate. Each party will get about 40% of the vote no matter what (see Goldwater in 1964* and McGovern in 1972). To win, you need to get a majority of that 20%, and the evidence is that government shutdowns, etc., don’t win the votes of that group. Pointing out the abuses, excesses, and failures of the Obama administration will win those votes. (Even the Democrats in the presidential debate last week said the economy is bad, though they did so without mentioning who has been president for the last seven years.)
It doesn’t appear enough Republicans understand that, if we want to put our principles into effect, we need the power to do it. Which is sad because, if Republicans emphasize “principle over power” and fighting over winning, the result will be another version of Barack Obama getting elected in November of 2016 – and four more years of the policies we all oppose.
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* Some Republicans like to claim that Goldwater’s 40% in 1964 was okay because it led to the Reagan revolution. Maybe, but it took sixteen years to get there, and a lot of things Republicans don’t like happened in those sixteen years.
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