Posted on 11/21/2008 6:43:56 PM PST by JSDude1
House Minority Leader John Boehner’s reelection on Wednesday to the top House Republican leadership post was the result of skillful political maneuvering before and after the Nov. 4 elections, Capitol Hill sources and an expert on Congress told CNSNews.com.
Boehner’s work strengthening one-on-one relationships with members and offering key leadership positions to powerful members of the House’s conservative faction, Reps. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) and Eric Cantor (R-Va.), ensured that he would not face a serious challenge for his position...
(Excerpt) Read more at cnsnews.com ...
Goodness when we have leaders more concerned with their politicing rather than advancing conservative principles..I don't know when Republicans will come out of the wilderness 7<20 years.
The most important any Republican leader can do is to strictly enforce party discipline. The more the bloc can fiercely stick together, the more powerful they will be, the more effective they will be, and it will be obvious to their supporters and the rest of the voters as well.
Most of their problems come from a lack of discipline.
This article lays the groundwork for Pence to possibly challenge Boehner next.
If Boehner wants to spend more time in DC and less time in Butler County, OH, now is his last chance to fight the Dems and side with the true conservatives in the caucus.
Goodness when we have leaders more concerned with their politicing rather than advancing conservative principles..I don’t know when Republicans will come out of the wilderness 7<20 years
Got that right.
The only difference is one smokes and the other one doesn't. They both are politicians, and therefore willing to lie cheat and steal.
Per your tag-Pence didn’t vote for the Bailout; both Cantor and Boehner not only lobbied for it, but did; both times!
Pence should of seriously challenged him instead. Come on, Pence! Pence actually harmed himself by agreeing to do this instead of challenging Boehner! Boehner stinks as a leader, and he will definitely help the GOP lose again in ‘10 when the GOP should be gaining seats instead!
fair enoug, though everyone is allowed one mistake in my opinion.
It’s when someone demonstrates a pattern of lack of committment to the principles of conservatism, then they shouldn’t be in leadership!
We have to force them out of the wilderness through the threat of a primary in 2 years.
I think the left; with moveon.org has found the right idea: WE can whine, we can call, we can write all we want, but it will have minimal impact: Republicans will only listen to those who give the money: If we want to compete and kill off politically RINOS then we have to start a funding org-0r PAC that will raise HUGE amounts of money (even if at the expense of the Republican Party itself), and other ineffective and RINO-Moderate Conservative orgs, the grass-roots is with us and urging the party to “move to the right”..well it’s only going to happen if we DO it ourselves! That means we start orgs and STARVE the GOP that will give money ONLY to the most Conservative candidates for State, local and Federal office...
Good idea, but it has to overcome practical limitations with GOP coalition structure. Monied Republican donors may be economic conservatives or libertarians but nor necessarily social conservatives - thus you have many so-called RINOs, particularly in rich "blue" financial centers (North East and West coast) where they are also a minority and are ashamed of their socon "party comrades".
That means we start orgs and STARVE the GOP that will give money ONLY to the most Conservative candidates for State, local and Federal office...
While I can't argue against starving feckless and wayward GOP [leadership] and its committees of cash, we already saw the results of how it worked in 2006 and repeated, to noone's surprise, in 2008. As the saying goes, if you keep doing the same thing you'll keep getting the same result. The "lesson" they unfortunately "learned", instead of changing course, was that they have to go for money to whoever will give it to them and who will then be their "master". What are the chances that they have learned the lesson this time? If there is any, I haven't seen any evidence of it yet.
What hasn't happened is the other side of the equation - finding and funding principled conservatives (if one can even agree on what that is, FR itself was eating their own and wound up with McCain and most congressional incumbents) before the GOP primaries. 501(c)(3) groups work to a degree but they are not coordinated (by law and by nature) and have their own limited agendas which are more general and/or devoted only to Presidential election, and they are not really a vehicle for candidates' funding operations. They are also relatively easy to derail, the way it was done to great effect by the (Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer) strategy of running so-called "conservative" Democrats in conservative districts.
Lack of money, ideas, strategy, candidate "farming" system and inability to attract good candidates to either run in stacked state and local primaries or going to Washington cesspool is not as easy to overcome for Republicans who are not generally a "party of the government", the way Democrats are. Organization needs money and lots of it, but it also has to overcome inherent conservative Republican weaknesses in principle of not thinking of government as the "solution". They misinterpret this Reagan's principle as we don't "need" government to "solve" the nation's problems, while what it should really mean is we have to be in it to constantly "remove" the excess of its power and potential for it growing like a cancer, from our lives. Few conservatives even think of going into government, lest it be or become a problem. Those few need to be supported, but many more need to be cultivated, which takes time... and money. The current "professional" Republican political class is not very different from Democratic one, except being happy enough in the minority.
Democrats win when they run "Trojan Horse" candidates that tell people what they want to hear and pablum like "Hope" and "Change" (Clinton, Obama). Republicans won two "Revolutions" (Reagan and Gingrich), which they couldn't hold when GOP "professional" class took over again. When economic conservatives see the results of ruinous liberal policies they contribute to GOP and join social conservatives in victory, else everybody loses but social conservatives keep losing more and more with every iteration of the cycle.
I do not agree with the Pence immigration bill...but did the thought ever occur to you that Pence’s bill is what killed McCain-Kennedy????? Think about and do some research....
Good point.
He divided the opposition by giving them a watered down version that would please no one.
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