Why It's Called "The Stupid Party": GOP Turns Fight Against The Horrors Of ObamaCare Into A Process Story

You know why the GOP loses a lot? Because it deserves to.

Yesterday a bunch of Republican Senators went around to the various Sunday shows and instead of talking about why it's imperative ObamaCare be repealed because of the damage it's doing, they decided to make it about how much they hate Ted Cruz. Some Republicans went as far as to offer Fox News Sunday Host Chris Wallace what he termed, "opposition research" on Cruz.

The anti-Defund talking point went for criticizing Cruz for surrendering without a filibuster on Wednesday to criticizing him on Sunday for promising to mount a filibuster.

I like however one is supposed to pretend that Cruz and Lee thought Reid would just give up on Day 1 and agree to the House's CR. No one did. Everyone knew the idea was to put the GOP in the position of keeping the government open while killing or at least wounding it (Here's what supporters of the plan say defunding will do. It's a pdf).

Filibustering the bill while the ObamaCare defund language is still in it is actually a bad idea. Let Reid strip it out with 50 votes. That would force some Democrats to vote for a very unpopular program or a few Democrats would vote to defund it, thus making the opposition to it bi-partisan.

But Cruz can't drop the filibuster now because the go along, get along GOP would kill him for dropping it. Now they get to kill him for keeping it. Nice game they've got going on.

One thing we shouldn't kid ourselves about is that if the House passed a clean CR and then included the delay plan in their budget ceiling bill it still wouldn't have the votes in the Senate and we'd still be in the position of having to find them by having the House play chicken not with a government shutdown but with what would be called "defaulting" on the full faith and credit of the United States.

Given the level disingenuousness in the delay camp's hits not on Obama or ObamaCare but the Devil known as Ted Cruz I'm seriously doubt they would do what they claimed. Right now it seems like one big shell game to avoid actually fighting against something they all claim to be against.

You know why Cruz is so popular? Because he's actually fighting. Maybe it's a losing fight, maybe it's a fight to raise money (though let's not pretend he's the only one doing that) or to raise his popularity (the sight of professional politicians accusing anyone of self-aggrandizement is too precious) but at least he's fighting.

Something I think we should all remember is that when the GOP had the House and the Senate before we never saw this kind of fight from the GOP. We saw a slightly less robust rush to bigger government than we did under the Democrats but we saw Denny Hastret, Tom "There's No Fat Left To Cut In The Federal Budget" Delay, Trent Lott and Bill Frist just muddle along without any energy or drive to bring the federal government under control. The professional Republican class wants to say, "hey we need more votes to do anything", well a lot of us remember when you had more votes and not only did you not do anything, you made it worse. Remember "Pork Busters"? Yeah, we didn't love you then and we don't trust you now to do the right thing.

Added note: Keep something in mind...the four Senators fighting this the most Cruz, Lee, Paul and even Rubio all had to beat go along, get along establishment picks to get there. Do you really think that if the GOP had the Senate majority the old guard would suddenly adopt the new blood's tactics and issues or go back to (big) business as usual?

Dan McLaughlin made the political case for the GOP to fight not Ted Cruz but Obama.

You motivate the base by showing them you fought & lost b/c you needed reinforcements-not by telling them the party's not worth reinforcing.

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) September 22, 2013

So what happens next? We'll since focusing on ObamaCare seems to be off the table I think we can move on to the next best thing...the destruction of the GOP. How could that happen? Cruz mounts his filibuster and Reid manages to break it. If he can keep all the Democrats in line he'll need 6 Republicans to join him to get to 60. Lisa Murkowski, Bob Corker and Susan Collins are always up for screwing the GOP just fun fun so that leaves 3 more. Imagine if Reid says he'll turn off the sequester as it applies to the Defense Department. I bet that would get you John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Kelly Ayotte. Just for fun Reid might also be able to get McCain's protege Jeff Flake and even Tom Coburn seems annoyed at the whole thing.

If Reid could get 60 votes then the House would fold in 30 seconds.

There are only a couple of ways the GOP can possibly lose the House next year. A shutdown isn't one of them but completely demoralizing conservatives certainly could.

posted by DrewM. at 10:00 AM

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