Dispatch From The Dark Side

When I was poking around at Delaware Politics yesterday, I came across this post by FVoshell.. It was about conservative disappointment with the Republicans in Congress. Not only did Harry Reid “eat their lunch” but President Obama drank their milkshake too. The post references a post in American Thinker about whether Republicans got the message from the election.

The lame-duck session of the 111th Congress proved one thing beyond a doubt: the Republican Party does not represent the interests of conservatives.  Despite the midterm election tidal wave, in which the Republican Party gained 63 House seats (eclipsing its historic 1994 success against Clinton), congressional Republicans failed to leverage their victory into political clout and collapsed like a house of cards in the lame-duck session.

The last two weeks ought to sicken conservatives.  Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell spectacularly failed to hold his caucus together to even delay ratification of New START until the 112th Congress is seated in January.  Republican leftists Olympia Snowe and Lisa Murkowski sided with Democrats to end the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, forcing the gay agenda from the streets of San Francisco right into the U.S. Marine Corps.  Congressional Republicans agreed to cut FICA taxes for Social Security (which is underfunded already) and expand the Democratic Party’s welfare state constituency by extending unemployment benefits — in exchange for maintaining current tax rates for a paltry two years.  The deal will add billions to the deficit.  Tea Party darling Scott Brown, mocked by Obama for driving a truck in his insurgent 2009 campaign in which he stole “Ted Kennedy’s seat” from the Democrats, voted for Obama’s agenda on all of these issues.

Give the Democratic devils their due.  They are astute students of Machiavelli.  They know how to exercise power.  The ink was barely dry on the DADT repeal when Obama cynically announced that he’d now “rethink” his (supposed) opposition to gay marriage, and Vice President Biden announced that gay marriage is “inevitable.”  Despite historically low congressional approval ratings, Speaker Pelosi rammed socialized medicine and cap-and-trade legislation through the House by one-vote margins and pursued the exercise of power right up to the eleventh hour of the lame-duck session.  When’s the last time Republicans pursued their agenda so ruthlessly?  Maybe 1919, when Republican Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge held his caucus together to defeat the Treaty of Versailles by one vote — unmoved by the plight of Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who lay crippled in the White House after having a stroke but still trying to rally public opinion in favor of the treaty.

Try not to laugh at the characterization of Democrats as Machiavellian geniuses. Anyway, I think this article is pointing out that the Tea Party/Republican marriage could be a short one. There is going to be a tension between what teabaggers want and what the real Republican overlords (big business) want. Big business managed to convince teabaggers that what they really wanted is tax cuts for the rich. Teabaggers also want a government shutdown and no extension of the debt ceiling. I don’t think big business will go for it. They won’t want to risk a catastrophic financial meltdown again.

Teabaggers are bound to be disappointed with the legislation coming out of the 112th Congress as well. Republicans may control the House but they don’t control the Senate or the presidency. If they want to get legislation passed they will have to work with Democrats to get it done. You might argue that Republicans don’t want to see legislation passed, they want a dysfunctional government and you are right about that. However, some Republicans (like Boehner and McConnell) remember the shutdowns in the 90s – they didn’t work out so well for the GOP. I want less government is a great slogan but people actually want their roads fixed, their parks open and their Social Security checks.

The battles in the next Congress will be epic and the teabaggers are going to be disappointed. We’ll have to see the response. Will the Tea Party rally together and punish GOP legislators or will they give up and gradually drift away?