Posted on 10/06/2015 3:55:16 PM PDT by robowombat
The Cold Anger of Republicans
PETER WEHNER / OCT. 6, 2015
In a recent exchange with a family friend, I was told what I already knew: Many Republicans today feel “a sense of deep betrayal.” This person went on to convey what she hears from her friends: “This Congress keeps rolling over and giving Obama everything that he wants.” My correspondent added, “This feeling has now translated into despising most of the GOP’s establishment candidates … there is a cold anger which I’ve never before witnessed.”
The topic then turned, as it seemingly must turn these days, to Donald Trump. “He is vocalizing — in his bombastic, egotistic manner — what many in the electorate have been thinking. Trump has also been ahead of other candidates with certain plans and statements — extreme as his statements are and as distasteful as some of what he says is to me on a rational level.” She mentioned illegal immigration in particular. The note from this person, who is intelligent and follows politics fairly closely, reflects what I often hear and read, and it affords me the chance to correct what I think are some fairly widespread mis-impressions that exist.
To start with, illegal immigration was being talked about long before Mr. Trump got into the race. What he has done is inject into the presidential race language (strongly implying that most illegal immigrants are drug dealers and rapists) and proposals (like the deportation of 11 million illegal immigrants in 18 months to two years) that are deeply problematic and detached from reality. The idea that we would deport 11 million illegal immigrants is risible. (This column by George Will is worth reading.)
As for the situation with illegal immigration, in recent years net migration from Mexico has fallen to zero, and perhaps less. According to this 2012 Pew Research Center report:
During the five-year period from 2005 to 2010, a total of 1.4 million Mexicans immigrated to the United States, down by more than half from the 3 million who had done so in the five-year period of 1995 to 2000. Meantime, the number of Mexicans and their children who moved from the U.S. to Mexico between 2005 and 2010 rose to 1.4 million, roughly double the number who had done so in the five-year period a decade before. While it is not possible to say so with certainty, the trend lines within this latest five-year period suggest that return flow to Mexico probably exceeded the inflow from Mexico during the past year or two. The standstill appears to be the result of many factors, including the weakened U.S. job and housing construction markets, heightened border enforcement, a rise in deportations, the growing dangers associated with illegal border crossings, the long-term decline in Mexico’s birth rates and broader economic conditions in Mexico. [emphasis added]
As for the claim that the GOP Congress keeps rolling over and giving President Obama everything he wants, it’s simply wrong. What exactly has Mr. Obama gotten through since Republicans have controlled Congress? What large new initiative has he passed? The answer, of course, is nothing. His initiatives have been repeatedly checked, including on gun control, as an angry Obama said on Friday.
As for federal spending: Because of the caps put in place by a Republican Congress, spending as a percentage of GDP has gone down significantly. This Wall Street Journal editorial points out, “the GOP takeover of the House in 2010 has led to a marked decline in federal spending.”
Even on Mr. Obama’s lawless actions on illegal immigration, there has been some good news, though in this case it was the result of the courts rather than Congress. Earlier this year a federal judge in Texas blocked President Obama’s executive action on immigration, which had drawn opposition from 26 states across the nation. (Late last year Mr. Obama attempted to shield as many as 5 million undocumented immigrants from deportation.)
Much of the rage of Republicans stem from wanting the House and Senate to reverse what Obama achieved in his first two years, when he had control of the House and Senate and passed a slew of measures, most especially the Affordable Care Act. Here’s the problem: Mr. Obama passed his legislation when he was president and had control of the House and the Senate. Republicans don’t have control of the presidency, and therefore cannot institutionally undo what he did without veto-proof majorities in both chambers.
As I pointed out in my most recent New York Times column, a lot of conservative are angry that Republicans didn’t defund Obamacare by continuing with the government shutdown in October 2013. Here’s what you won’t hear from them: Shutting down the federal government would not defund Obamacare, which is an entitlement. Shutting down the government affects appropriations bills, not entitlements. So even if Republicans had held firm on shutting down the government – and the public overwhelmingly opposed the shutdown and overwhelmingly blamed Republican for it – it would not have achieved what the advocates of the shutdown said it would achieve. Shouldn’t that matter?
Most recently, some conservative have said we should shut down the government to defund Planned Parenthood. The outrage toward Planned Parenthood that animates people is entirely appropriate, and Planned Parenthood funding should be stopped. The fact that the nation’s largest abortion provider gets a third of its revenue from federal taxpayers is outrageous and unacceptable. The issue here is one of means rather than ends. Shutting down the government in order to de-fund Planned Parenthood would backfire, because by huge numbers (69-23 percent, according to a Quinnipiac University National poll) the public says they do not want that to happen — and if it happened, they would blame the GOP. The net result would be that nothing substantive would be achieve while politically, Republicans would only hurt themselves leading up to a crucial presidential year.
The problem for those of us who are conservative is that Mr. Obama achieved what he did with control of both houses of Congress and the presidency. Because Republicans don’t have the presidency, they cannot undo much of what Obama has done.
The complaint Republicans have these days is less with John Boehner and more with James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, James Wilson, and the other founders who designed and passed the Constitution. (The irony is that so-called “constitutional conservatives” are the ones who seem most frustrated by the checks and balances put into place by the founders.)
I get that there’s “cold anger” out there. I hear about it all the time. But anger isn’t enough. Those who are furious still have to operate in the real world. And in the real world – in the American system of government, at least – there are institutional and constitutional restraints on what many on the right want to happen.
I should add here that I’ve never been particularly inspired by Speaker Boehner, and I agree with most of the goals and national concerns of those who are in a state of vexation at the Republican “establishment,” of which I am a card-carrying member. But I recognize that wanting something and being able to actually do something are often very different things. And while I know it’s not fashionable to say these days, and it risks stoking up even greater feelings of resentment among those in the base, I’ll say it anyway: Raging against Congressional Republicans for not doing what they cannot do is not rational or reasonable.
As for the situation with illegal immigration, in recent years net migration from Mexico has fallen to zero, and perhaps less.
What a pant load.
Another establishment supporter fearful of undoing entrenched elites who have contributed nothing towards resolving our national problems. Although I agree with some of his points, on the whole I still support Trump because he is the best Anti-Establishment candidate.
And I hate Boehner, McCain and their entitled cronies as much as I do the Democrats.
In simple fact, Congress absolutely can defund 0bamacare by a majority vote. And there is a Republican majority, and that's one reason why there is a Republican majority. And they didn't deliver. We had a "55 attempts to stop 0bamacare" institutional Kabuki-dance that fooled no one in the electorate. And we're angry that they tried to fool us. That was the political establishment grandly declaiming to the Little People that they simply didn't know how the system works, and the conclusion we drew - correctly, in my estimation - is that "the system" is not working as designed due to corruption. And the people corrupting it are the people who are patting us on the head and telling us that everything's OK.
There is quite a bit more to Republican anger than that. We're angry about the silence, about the supine submission to the kulturkampf being waged in the media and the Executive department - the armed services turned into a smirking cauldron of political correctness with nary a word of protest on the part of our elected representatives, the organs of the IRS and the EPA being turned into ideological war machines, the steady and inexorable increase in federal control over education, transportation, and economics. All of this could have been at least protested by establishment Republicans and the crystal-clear perception is that with a very few signal exceptions, they were not.
The real difficulty is that establishment Republicans and establishment Democrats are now simply the Establishment, and so anger directed thereto no longer differentiates between the parties since the parties do not appear to differentiate between one another. This is not a phenomenon restricted to the last two, or five, or even twenty years. It reached a flashpoint when the establishment, including the news and entertainment media, decided to inflict a New Normal and enforce it through the power of the state. Elected representatives of both parties have been far too silent, far too obedient, far too unrepresentative in the face of this not to excite a level of outrage and far too arrogant or unperceptive to sense it now that it's happening. It should not be a surprise to the author and it isn't going to be assuaged by a glib dismissal.
Mexico is empty, now the rest of central and south america is moving north.
Same old straw man arguments totally ignoring the stupid Corker Bill which empowered Obama, totally ignoring the attempted betrayals ala the Chamber of Commerce on amnesty. Also we all damn well know that without Trump they would be trying to sell us a pig in a poke on immigration like Rubio tried to do with his buddy Chuck Schumer and of course Jeb is still trying to sell the same pig just with promises to secure the border that we know damn well he has no intention to keep. Also many want to expand h1b1s and work visas. I mean what don’t these guys understand? They want to know why there is a “cold anger” its because they won’t do a damn thing even rhetorically to stand up to lawless Obama or his lawless Supreme court. They could censor him, they could actually send him bills to veto, they could censor members of the high court when they rule like they did on ssm and obamacare.
I’m not so concerned about shutting down the Government but the truth is we need to stop preemptively surrendering and stop playing by rules that the Democrats ignore to get their agenda put into law. The GOP needs to be as damn ruthless and willing to use brute power to undo the illegitimate laws that Obama and the Democrats broke the law to force through such as the totally illegal reconciliation process. We need leadership that will go to war to stop the left or else we will not stop them. We will simply tinker around the edges while they break all the rules to get their way.
They still come through Mexico.
Bullcrap. They were elected on the promise to defund Obamacare and his illegal EO amnesty. Then the first thing they did, before even the new members were sworn in was to pass a CR funding everything, so as to prevent any defunding effort. Obama gets 100% of everything he wants in the budget, because he threatens to shut down government and blame them. And the GOP is so cowardly and inept that they refuse to even consider fighting and telling the Amereican people that it's Obama who is shutting down government over some tiny fraction he won't get. They have internalized the enemy's propaganda and just accept it. Moreover they really don't care, as long as they keep their jobs. That's why we hate them.
It seems to me that the primary intention of this article is to misrepresent and insult Donald Trump. I think we are not only in a battle for our country, but in a battle for the soul our political party. The battle for the democrat party’s soul is lost, and we are headed in the same direction, their party has already lost its soul, and we are headed in the same direction. How do we deal with this, other than by supporting Donald Trump and hoping that he, with enough support, can make them all go away. If we cannot do this, then we must must must must join/start another political party, it may already be too late!
If PETER WEHNER was a serious person, his column would be directed at the elites. He would be warning them that the “masses” have been pushed too far.
In other words, don’t believe your lying eyes.
Yes, the public was so angry with the Pubbies that they completely wiped out the Dems all the way down to dog catcher in 2014. This guy is delusional.
The trick is to spread out the appropriations bills. Pass more or less clean bills for
. . .
Agriculture;
Commerce; Justice, and Science;
Defense;
Energy and Water;
Financial Services;
Homeland Security;
Interior and Environment;
Legislative;
Military and Veterans; and
State and Foreign Operations
. . .
at least ten days before they get to the problematic ones. If Obama vetoes them, he's shutting down the government. If not, they go into effect after ten days, and before the key bills are voted on.
Then it's not the entire bloated and dangerous FedGov at risk, just
. . .
Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education; and then
Transportation and Housing and Urban Development
. . .
The leverage there is a whole lot more favorable than with all the spending bills at once. Boehner and McConnell don't want to do things that way, but I'm hoping the remaining Tea Party members who haven't been bought out will push for that path. At that point, if we pass a bill that specifically bans all spending for Obamacare and Planned Parenthood, but funds everything else, Obama would be either giving decent Americans what we want by letting it go into law, or betraying his parasitic followers by shutting down the least useful parts of FedGov. I'm okay with either option.
Faux conservative posers are so clearly transparent.
Your verbal junk doesn’t work anymore. Next.
The GOP-e can go to hell.I had it with them in 2014 when they surrendered again to Obama on the health care bill.They can do whatever they like since I’m now an independent.
Lets see hoe they’re going to escape from this mess they created.Making McCarthy Speaker will just make it worse.
“This fool will need to listen to Ted Cruz’s speech before the US Senate during the Planned Parenthood debacle to get an idea on what is actually going on and why conservatives are angry with Boehner and McConnell.”
How can anyone who thinks they are a journalist not know the details Cruz spoke so passionately about? The MSM are just like the education system- ignorant and wanting everyone to remain that way.
Just another establishment puke spouting off. In this case, he notes it proudly.
You just can’t fix stupid.
This is just another blah, blah, blah apologist piece for the GOP establishment.
+1
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