Jonathon Strong reporting at National Review and Daniel Horowitz commenting at RedState provide a combination that we hope will spur Republicans to pressure Boehner to stand fast against funding Obamacare.
Speaker John Boehner strongly hinted on a conference call with rank-and-file House Republicans that the upcoming continuing resolution will not be a do-or-die fight over Obamacare spending.
Read Strong’s straight report which provides Boehner’s thought process and strategy. The level of response to that report, now several thousand, where conservatives spontaneously analyze the strategy is remarkable in number and level of outrage. The strategy does not appear to be going down well with conservatives to say the least.
Then read Horowitz’s devastating critique.
At some point, rank-and-file conservative activists will have to confront an inconvenient reality. The Republicans in Washington are not just dumb or spineless – they are the problem. They don’t share our values and seek to undermine our beliefs. . . .
I don’t think Charlie Brown would have attempted to kick the football so many times. Let’s review the past three years. In January 2011, Republicans pledged to defund Obamacare in the FY 2011 CR and cut of $100 billion in spending. They lied. Ultimately, they only cut $352 million and funded Obamacare. They promised to fight on the next debt ceiling battle and cut trillions. They caved on August 1, 2011 for the McConnell debt increase, and handed Obama a free $2.4 trillion debt ceiling ticket to take him past the election. The only thing we got in return was the sequester, which prioritized military cuts over everything else.
He goes on to provide an even more extensive timeline of Republican waffling, hand-wringing and back-tracking under Boehner’s “leadership.” Very revealing.
After first reading the Strong report we submitted our analysis of the Speaker’s strategy to the comment section of NRO and later to RedState.
Boehner says “The president is desperate to get rid of the sequester . . . so desperate that he says he’ll shut down the government if Congress follows the law and funds the government at the levels his sequester mandates. The president’s threat to shut down the government if we implement his sequester is not a defensible position.”
Yet Boehner fears Republicans will be blamed for shutting down government (weak kneed Republican “strategists” always adopt the rhetoric of the opposition) if they only put forth spending bills without Obamacare funding??
If the same forces that protect Obama are so formidable to turn the tables on Republicans when they have sent up bills funding just about everything, then they will turn Boehner’s scenario around and say Republicans are not cooperating and are shutting down government. Boehner and company promulgate Democrat intimidation strategies.
The more time Obamacare has, the more people will be dependent, whether or not satisfied. Boehner will have to invent a private insurance industry or go ahead and accede to single payer, of course only for the emergency transition.
Incredibly huge government causes the problems and the answer from the political class is more government.
Speaker Boehner can be contacted at http://www.speaker.gov/contact
R Mall
