Eric Cantor: You Know, I Never Believed We Could or Would Repeal Obamacare; But You Gotta Channel That "Anger" in the Public to Advance Your Career

Over at PJ Media's Hot Mic, there's a post about Trump selling out and surrounding himself with Democrats.

Fair enough. But Steven Green points out there's a lot of selling out to Democrats going on, right in the GOP itself.

I notice a certain kind of Republican likes to list Trump heresies while giving a lot of excuses and wiggle room to the sell-outs of the GOP Establishment.

Remember the summer of 2013, when the “Defund Obamacare Tour” drove the news cycle all through Congress’s August recess? The town halls organized by the political arm of the Heritage Foundation enlivened the base and furthered what had been the GOP’s core message since 2010—that Obamacare was bad and, if Americans helped Republicans hold both chambers, it could be repealed.

Cantor helped create that perception. Earlier that summer—after many failed attempts over the years to shred the law piecemeal—Cantor promised colleagues that the House would vote on a “full repeal.” But even after it did, the measure was dead on arrival in the Democratic-controlled Senate...

Asked if he feels partly responsible for [the now-in-power GOP Congress'] current predicament, Cantor is unequivocal. “Oh,” he says, “100 percent.”

He goes further: “To give the impression that if Republicans were in control of the House and Senate, that we could do that when Obama was still in office . . . .” His voice trails off and he shakes his head. “I never believed it.”

He says he wasn’t the only one aware of the charade: “We sort of all got what was going on, that there was this disconnect in terms of communication, because no one wanted to take the time out in the general public to even think about ‘Wait a minute—that can’t happen.’ ” But, he adds, “if you’ve got that anger working for you, you’re gonna let it be.”

It’s a stunning admission from a former member of the party leadership—that the linchpin of GOP electoral strategy for the better part of a decade was a fantasy, a flame continually fanned solely because, when it came to midterm elections, it worked.

I don't mind criticisms of Trump from the right -- I mean, criticisms about his deviations from conservative orthodoxy designed to push him more to the right.

However, people like the Weekly Standard's Jonathan V. Last have taken to claiming that the failure of the "conservative" Senate to repeal Obamacare is Trump's fault -- for not persuading them of what they claimed to ardently believed for four election cycles running.

And yet people like him will smugly insist upon his own holy devotion to "principle," while making excuses for #FakeNewsRepublicans' own massive deviations from those same "principles."

There's an awful lot of posturing among some Republican leaders, both in Congress and in messaging institutions -- many of whom are much, much more liberal than the party base -- about being #MoreConservativeThanThou, when in fact they're arguing for a much more liberal Republican party but are continuing with the dishonest game of agitating on behalf of more liberal policy while claiming to be zealously fighting for True Conservative Principles.

Don't believe me? Ask them where they stand on transgenders in the military.

They will attempt to dodge the question by talking up process issues -- "Oh, Trump shouldn't have announced it on Twitter," "Trump should have gotten his people on board," "Trump should have waited for the military's review."

Shut them down on that bullshit -- those are valid points but they're being deployed like aluminum chaff to keep the missile from hitting.

Insist they answer the substantive question of whether or not the military should begin recruiting transgenders.

I'll bet you they continue to offer up procedural diversions even after you tell them you're not interested in an answer about procedure, but are demanding an answer on the core substantive issue.

They're liberals on many, many issues, but like pretending to be TruCons.

Just like their fellow traveler Eric Cantor.

posted by Ace at 07:34 PM

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