Tim Huelskamp: Boehner Retreat On Debt Shows GOP "Cowering"

by JASmius

Mr. Speaker, I yield the floor to Representative Huelskamp for seven minutes and sixteen seconds to indulge in his unhelpful, fratricidal rampage.  Ladies and gentlemen, the gentleman from Kansas:



Thank you, Mr. Speaker.  Now I will fill in all the nuance the gentleman from Kansas saw fit to omit.

Now then.  This is not a defense of Speaker John Boehner's decision to pre-emptively cave on the next debt ceiling showdown, though I have to say that anybody who was surprised by it must have been in a coma for the past six months.  Rather, it is an explanation of it.

My friends, the genesis of this latest disappointment can be traced straight back to the ill-fated, quixotic Ted Cruz/Mike Lee ObamaCare-defunding debacle and the pre-mature government shutdown confrontation over same into which they bulldozed the House GOP.  It was a confrontation that could not, at that time (before the ObamaCare rollout) be won, as a whole lotta non-RINO conservatives [AHEM] pointed out.  "Wait on this," we said; "Let's bide our time," we said; "We can't stop ObamaCare now, but it will be a cataclysmic disaster that will destroy the Democrats' political capital, enabling a confrontation on much more favorable public relations ground in the near future," we said.  We were vilified by TPers, led by the aforementioned junior senator from Texas, as "the surrender caucus," among other, more colorful endearments.  "There's only one thing to do, and that's FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!, and if we FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!, we can WIN!" they said, reminding the historically literate of Adolf Hitler's military strategy on the Eastern Front after Stalingrad, the same sort of "stand and fight/don't yield an inch" approach against a numerically superior enemy that proved such a boon to the Red Army.  It was also powerfully reminiscent of the obnoxious Christine O'Donnell senate campaign in 2010 that kicked away a guaranteed pickup of Joe Biden's old seat.

The Cruz/Lee-driven showdown had much the same dismal results: the Dems held firm, there were no changes to ObamaCare, and the GOP got destroyed in the polls (in the short term).  Fortunately, they cut their losses and got out of the way of the rollout disaster, which quickly reversed those poll fortunes and sent the Democrats into confused, panicked, pell-mell retreat, a condition in which they've been pretty much ever since (except Barack Obama, of course, who has effectively made himself the federal government).  But because Cruz and Lee coerced House Republicans into that showdown too soon, all their combat appetite was squandered, leaving little or none for the entirely winnable battles that have passed with nary a whimper - the Sequester surrender last month, and now another "clean" debt ceiling hike.

Plus, of course, Boehner is loathe to do anything to distract from the continuing ObamaCare blast wave, the biggest detonations of which are still to come in close proximity to the 2014 midterms, as evidenced by O's continuing series of unconstitutional Executive decrees.  But if the gentleman from Kansas is looking for someone to blame for the Speaker's debt ceiling el foldo, he should look in his own faction, to Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, and their patented approach of "shoot first, shoot later, shoot some more, and then when everybody's dead, shoot their corpses."

Except, of course, that those corpses are all Republicans.  Because evidently, that's the price of impurity.

I yield back the balance of my time.