Or "A Strong Reid and a Weak Reed"; or, "Majorities Come and Majorities Go, But the Democrats Always Win":
In an extraordinary sequence....
I know more than a few Tea Partiers who would disagree with that adjective.
....Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) offered Democrats Tuesday exactly what they have been asking for — “clean” full-year funding for the Department of Homeland Security.
For what possible reason or gain, nobody can fathom an explanation.
But the dynamic behind the following isn't difficult at all to discern.
And Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) — or at least, not yet.
Majority Leader McConnell’s offer of passing a clean full-year Homeland Security bill through the Senate shorn of immigration provisions — which he said could happen very quickly with Democratic cooperation — was put on hold by Minority Leader Reid, who told reporters he was waiting to hear Speaker John A. Boehner agree to pass it through the House first.
“We have to make sure that we get a bill to the president,” Reid said. “Unless Boehner’s in on the deal, it won’t happen.” [emphases added]
I wrote about the original gambit of splitting the Obamnesty defunding into a separate bill the other day. This report doesn't make it clear if a "clean" DHS appropriation means restoring that funding for Barack Obama's illegal power grab, but the furor it has unleashed on the Right, and Dirty Harry's arrogance, sure make it smell that way.
BTW, doesn't (G)Reid's Agent Smith impression....
....epitomize both him and this appalling situation perfectly? He already knows that he's taken back control of the Senate on behalf of the "clean-cut, well-spoken Negro" in the White House; now he's trying to seize control of the entire Congress.
Will Speaker Boehner capitulate in turn? He said last week that he was willing to let DHS "shut down" (which, as per every "shutdown," would leave 85% of that Commissariat - i.e. "essential functions" - intact, so it wouldn't really shut down anything), but his spokesman yesterday left that question a bit more vague:
Michael Steel, a spokesman for Boehner, didn't say whether the Ohio Republican would go along with a clean bill.
“The Speaker has been clear: the House has acted, and now Senate Democrats need to stop hiding. Will they continue to block funding for the Department of Homeland Security or not?
Sounds chest-puffing, doesn't it? But that describes the past, not the immediate future. In essence, what has happened this week is, as I said the other day, a function of Republican leaders not being serious about strategizing this showdown from the beginning, thinking that the mere threat of a confrontation would be enough to spook minority Democrats, as if the 2013 shutdown fiasco and the preemptive GOP cave in December's lame duck session had been completely expunged from their memories. Democrats know that Republicans don't have the stomach for hardball politics and that the media will run interference for them, meaning that the eight or nine Donk senators that earlier claimed to oppose Obamnesty but who are robotically lined up behind their caucus's filibuster will never be called on their hypocrisy, and therefore all the Dems have to do is wait out the GOP until the latter lose their collective nerve. Which has now happened right on schedule.
I speak in general party terms, rather than zeroing in on Mitchie the Kid, because.....wait, let me start this again. You would have thought that the Senate majority would have been put into the position of having to itself filibuster McConnell's "clean" DHS bill with their "leader" tapping the minority to try and push it over the top, right? Which, again, from a PR standpoint, would only feed into the Democrat Narrative of "racist Republicans are willing to sacrifice thousands of American lives to keep noble, hardworking Latinos from achieving the American dream". In essence, a propaganda-suicidal but necessary desperation counter to an act of craven, politically suicidal panic.
But as nausea-inducing as that spectacle would have been, that isn't what happened:
In what could shape up as a likely showdown between the two Republican-controlled chambers of Congress, the Senate voted 98-2 to proceed on a bill to finance the agency without provisions to stop Obama's orders granting deportation relief and work permits to as many as five million illegal [aliens].
The procedural vote to move the legislation to the full Senate came just days before a partial DHS shutdown. It was part of a deal proposed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to eventually create two bills: one on Homeland Security's funding and another regarding the immigration orders.
The Kentucky Republican Wednesday emerged from a meeting with Democratic Minority Leader Harry Reid saying that he hoped the bills could be approved by the Senate and "sent back to the House this week." [emphases added]
In case you were wondering who are the two owners of the four collective gonads in the Senate majority caucus.....
Republican Senators James Inhofe of Oklahoma and Jeff Sessions of Alabama voted against Wednesday's procedural action.
"Congress is not obligated to pay for anything it believes is unwise, and it has an absolute duty not to fund anything that is unconstitutional or illegal, which is what we are dealing with here," Sessions said Tuesday on the Senate floor. "So Congress, the House of Representatives, acted wisely and properly in funding Homeland Security and not allowing activities to be carried out that are unlawful and that Congress has rejected."
Fifty two Republican senators voted, in essence, for Obamnesty. They endorsed Barack Obama's tyranny and lawbreaking. They signed off on the eventual extinction of their own party. Why? Not because they actually support or believe in Obamnesty (although some - McCain, Graham, Flake, and Rubio come to mind - clearly do) - but because they've been brainwashed into believing that if they take a stand for the Constitution and the rule of law, they'll "lose the Hispanic vote," very little of which they win anyway, and completely heedless of their own base supporters that they quite evidently still take for granted.
And no, it's not lost on us that all nine GOP senators which that same base worked so hard to get elected back on November 4th voted, in essence, for Obamnesty yesterday. Hence the feelings of raging betrayal in the hearts, and out the keyboards, of so many grassroots righties today.
Now you all know me: I don't believe in fratricide. I maintain that we are all in this together, that we must all hang together or we will all surely hang separately, as Ben Franklin once quipped, and that, if nothing else, a Republican majority takes up space that Democrats cannot use to advance their agenda any farther. Indeed, for the preceding four years I took Tea Partiers to task on many occasions for their sense of victory entitlement that should have been whipped out of them in 2012, and their naive belief that "Fight! Fight! Fight!" was enough to overcome the ruthless logic of numbers. The GOP only controlled the House, and that was simply too narrow a platform from which to launch, much less sustain, a legislative counteroffensive. If we were going to successfully challenge King Hussein, we had to retake the Senate as well.
Well, almost four months ago, the base came through and put the Senate back in GOP hands. And by a comfortable margin to boot. And, as Uncle Ben once warned Peter Parker, "With great power comes great responsibility" - and justifiably greater expectations from others.
And this is what the conservative grassroots got for their strenuous, herculean efforts: Obamnesty 98, U.S. Constitution 2.
I'm not going to rant and rave and tear Senator McConnell multiple fresh orifices in his cute little turtle shell, or mention that his Kentucky drawl sounds like a hillbilly Eeyore on quaaludes, or that his visage could be licensed for use on adult novelty items in anime videos. After all, I don't believe in fratricide. But I will say that I understand, and can't blame, those that do. Because....with great power comes great responsibility. And because that Republican majority was pushed into power with the express mission of stopping Obamnesty. And now they've punted back to the House, as though they regret retaking the Senate in the first place.
Which leads to an unequivocal piece of advice for John Boehner: Remember the pathetic, weak-ass coup against your speakership last month? If you don't want a real one that will combust you like napalm, you'd do well to not follow Mitchie The Kid's craven example:
Representative Steve King told Newsmax Wednesday that he will not support any Senate-backed legislation to provide $39.7 billion to the Department of Homeland Security without defunding President Barack Obama's immigration orders — and he doesn't mind shutting down the agency to stop the president's executive overreach.
"I will not vote to fund a lawless, unconstitutional executive edict," the Iowa Republican said. "I will oppose it. I will work against it.
"It’s the only leverage that we have. The people who vote for it are voting to fund what they know is a lawless, unconstitutional act."
Sounds reassuring, doesn't it?
But.....
However, Representative Ed Royce, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, predicted that the House would provide Homeland Security with its funding without ending Obama's amnesty.
"At the end of the day, we have got to fund the Department of Homeland Security, and we've got to do that by the end of business at the end of this week," the California Republican told Wolf Blitzer on CNN. "I think that's exactly what's going to happen."
No, Ed, Congress doesn't have to fund DHS. That's why it's called the "power" of the purse. And the Founders put it in the hands of Congress, not the President, in part for situations precisely like this, where an out of control tyrant is wrecking the Republic and perpetrating escalating oppression upon the American people, but needs resources and funding to keep it up. It's called "checks and balances, Ed. And the Founders expected that Congress would use them in defense of the Constitution and Republic that they bequeathed thee and me, not be complicit in their demise out of some misguided, myopic, make-believe short term political calculation that is, in fact, dwarfed by the political consequences that will ACTUALLY ensue for the Republican Party when tens of millions of illegals - who poll pro-Democrat by an 8-1 margin, don't forget - are "normalized," elevated to the top societal tier, and guarantee Donk hegemony forever and ever, amen. Not to mention the fratricidal retribution that will be exacted upon your colleagues by your own base at the very next electoral opportunity, however self-defeating - but understandable - it may be.
I think I can sum up my own feelings about this burgeoning tragedy by analogy to the Civil War.
Looking at the tale of the tape between the Union States and the Confederacy, this conflict should have been over in a matter of months. It was a complete mismatch: The North had more than twice the population of the South, and the vast majority of America's overall industrial base. Used ruthlessly and to greatest effect to win the war as quickly as possible (and minimize loss of life that a protracted conflict would guarantee), hostilities should not have lasted for long before Dixie was overrun and the "rebellion" crushed.
And yet the Civil War lasted for four long, bloody years. Why? Because the Confederate forces were led boldly, aggressively, and brilliantly (for the most part) by General Robert E. Lee, and the Union forces were commanded by a succession of timid, incompetent, unserious boobs who fought not to lose instead of to win, and thus guaranteed defeat after defeat after defeat. Which is why, after President Lincoln went with General Ulysses S. Grant, and Grant ran up huge casualties but actually started making the progress against Lee that had been totally lacking beforehand, and Lincoln started catching hell for, and getting pressured to sack Grant because of, it, Old Abe retorted, "I cannot spare this man - he fights." And, sure enough, within less than a year of Grant taking the reins of the Union Army, the Confederacy was overrun and crushed, and the war brought to a swift and brutal end.
In much the same way, the Republican leadership is the twenty-first century political equivalent of George McClellan, Joe Hooker, George Meade, et al: men who are timid, incompetent, unserious, and simply don't seem to understand - or are unwilling to do so - that what's at stake is the Constitution and the Republic themselves, as well as their and their party's own political survival. Even if they don't actually give a damn about the former, you'd at least think that they'd grasp the latter and not stick their heads into Obama's immigration noose out of pure self-interest.
But no. Even after being given the reinforcements they needed and asked for, they're still not willing to do what needs to be done, even to avoid the political oblivion to which they are willfully blinding themselves.
Know this well, Mr. Majority Leader, Mr. Speaker, lady and gentle-pachyderms: This is your last chance. You will not get another. And it's exceedingly difficult to make the case for why you would deserve one.
Even for me.
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