This is why I like Mike Lee as much as I find Ted Cruz so - at times - gratingly irritating: Lee doesn't grandstand and he doesn't waste time with fratricidal recriminations. He fights the good fight for all the right causes and all the right reasons, and if he loses, he's already off to the next battle.
I guess a senator can do that when he doesn't have any presidential delusions of grandeur:
Senator Mike Lee said even though the Senate failed to rally behind Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz's attempt to vote down President Barack Obama's executive order on immigration, GOP lawmakers would work to impose limits on the president's spending for it early next year when Democrats become the minority in Congress.
Senators approved by a 56-40 vote Saturday a $1.1 trillion spending bill to fund the government, thereby averting a shutdown. Cruz, supported by Lee, angered Democrats and some fellow Republicans when he moved to force a vote in the Senate on Obama's immigration order, which failed by a wide margin of 74-22.
And, logically, making it that much less likely that they'll be able to muster a majority for imposing limits on Obamnesty in the 114th Congress, as this vote - which never had a chance, and they both knew it - seems to have been pursued for no other purpose than to try to embarrass and "flush" out GOP Senators who are soft on illegal immigration. Of which they bagged at least nineteen, apparently. Would those nineteen-plus have been persuadable to cutting off Obamnesty next year? A few obviously aren't - Senators McCain and Graham come to mind - while the other half of the Republican side of the "Gang of Eight" from last year is a probably-not (Marco Rubio, since he thinks he's running for president) and a "Who knows?" (Jeff Flake). But it seems to me that Cruz and Lee would have had more to gain by not irretrievably alienating as many of those nineteen(+?) as possible with what amounted to a counterproductive stunt.
But there are still devious possibilities - such as offering to consider another round of "comprehensive immigration reform" "later" in exchange for legislatively repealing and/or defending O's unlawful amnesty decree "now" - i.e. February, when DHS funding expires. Attract enough votes to pass it, make The One veto it, and the PR waters you foolishly muddied with the CRomnibus are once again cleared. And then kick the CIR can to the next Congress and ride the anti-amnesty issue as one of your lead issue "horses" in 2016. Kind of like the GOP did in the 2014 cycle to great success.
It wouldn't turn on a lot of Tea Partiers, who over-emote and under-strategize and they would doubtless howl "sellout!" and "betrayal!" all over again as they have been about the abominable CRomnibus. But as is the case so often in politics and government, what ultimately matters is not how you get there, but that you get there. Put another way, if we want to ultimately drag this country back within constitutional boundaries and restore it as a constitutional federal republic, we're going to have to be willing to make a LOT of "sausage". Do TPers want to win, or do they only want to win by risibly unworkable means? Remember that when you're cleaning up a huge mess, there's really no way to avoid getting some of it on you - and that this will be a bitter, political scorched-earth war every step of the way.
Senator Lee, at least, recognizes the reality - and the wisdom - of not "crying over spilled milk":
"In February, the funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which is in charge of implementing and enforcing our immigration laws, including the president's recent program on this, will run out of funding," said Lee, a Utah Republican.
"I do believe, and I do expect, and I think most of our party's base and membership expects that we will do something meaningful to impose a limitation, a spending limitation, on the president's ability to implement this program," the Utah Republican told Fox News' "America's Newsroom" on Monday.
The CRomnibus was a gargantuan unforced GOP error. But the one semi-unstupid thing House Republicans did was to put DHS funding on a much shorter leash. Which means February is the new majority's last chance. Gutting Obamnesty, and standing against O's despotism in general, is what the new majorities were elected to do. If they don't muster the testicular fortitude to cut his tyrannical balls off then, when they will have no remaining excuses of insufficient numbers or only controlling one legislative chamber and on an issue where three-quarters of the voting public is behind them, they never will, and the ensuring electoral results will be....uncertain.
Senator Lee didn't put it quite that colorfully, but that's what he meant.
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