Category Archives: Conservative Caucus

Can we hope?

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Rumors of a political coup against Speaker of the House John Boehner (D-OH) arose when his partner-in-crime, Mitch McConnell caved on the DHS funding bill. Those rumors haven’t gone away. In fact, they’ve increased after Boehner pushed a DHS funding bill that included funding for Obama’s illegal alien amnesty. Boehner was able to do so by relying on his democrat partners who voted en masse for the bill. Only 75 ‘Pubs followed Boehner. All the remaining ‘Pubs, 167 of them, did not.

House Republicans weigh coup against Boehner after series of political defeats

Retreat in Homeland Security shutdown showdown latest embarrassment for GOP leaders

By S.A. Miller – The Washington Times – Thursday, March 5, 2015

Rank-and-file Republicans are openly contemplating a coup against House Speaker John A. Boehner and his top lieutenants after a series of self-inflicted legislative fumbles and political defeats in the first weeks of the congressional session.

This week’s retreat from the standoff over Homeland Security Department funding and President Obama’s deportation amnesty was only the latest embarrassment for Republican leaders, who also have had to yank bills on abortion, border security and education after rebellions within their own party.

Rep. Andy Harris, Maryland Republican, conceded that running the conference was like “herding cats” but said that is not an excuse for failure.

“I’m still optimistic that leadership can herd the cats. But if they can’t, then I think there will be consideration about whether a new leadership team needs to be put in place,” Mr. Harris said.

The leaders have acknowledged stumbles at the opening of the congressional session, when Republicans took control of the Senate as well as the House and members had high expectations for advancing a conservative agenda. But leaders have insisted that they don’t need dramatic changes in how they run the conference, a Republican aide said.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, California Republican, prides himself on having an open-door policy and listening to members, but conservative lawmakers say the leadership team hasn’t been listening to them or their constituents.

“I don’t think they are listening to all the members,” said Rep. John Fleming, a member of a small band of lawmakers who formed the conservative Freedom Caucus and have been at the center of rebellions against the leadership.

He said the party leaders haven’t kept up with an increasingly conservative Republican base that is electing lawmakers who are more conservative.

“The problem is we are used to being in this moderate lane and the people, our constituents who are sending us here, are trying to move us over into the more conservative lane,” said the Louisiana Republican. “I think the struggle is that leadership has not yet picked up the trim line that they need to put out more conservative legislation to get better results.”

Supporters of the leadership team blame the dysfunction on conservatives such as Mr. Fleming, who they say sabotage good legislation by demanding perfect bills and ideological purity.

“Our problem isn’t leadership around here; it’s followership,” said Rep. Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican who is a close ally of Mr. Boehner.

“We have a group of people who, frankly, think they are always right and their leaders and the conference collectively are usually wrong,” he said. “It’s actually a fairly small group.”

Rep. Peter T. King, New York Republican, put it more bluntly: “I don’t consider them conservatives. I consider them anarchists.

“The whole party is going to suffer, not just the leadership, all of us are going to suffer if we can’t get more organized. But I don’t know if that group of about 35 wants to be organized. It’s almost as if they sit by themselves in the floor there — like a separate party, like in France or Italy where you have the rump parties out there,” Mr. King said.

Apparently Representatives Cole, Fleming and King think the conservatives should shut-up and be quiet. They believe those rebelling congressmen should say and do nothing because, “Big Brother knows best!” No other contrary opinions will be allowed.

The column continues on a second page with a list of bills that were pulled after objections from conservatives. Those bills have yet to be refiled.

As an aside, there is a reason why Peter King has been elected from a heavily liberal district. He’s more progressive than any of the democrat candidates who ran against him. He has been and still is a subversive vote among the ‘Pub ranks.

The column continues.

Not all of the leadership’s dust-ups have been with conservatives.

The first blunder occurred with a bill that would ban abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy, with an exception for cases of reported rape, incest or danger to the mother’s life. The leaders pulled the bill Jan. 21 to head off a revolt by some of the conference’s female and moderate members.

“We’re continuing to listen to everybody,” Mr. McCarthy said at the time. “We’re still planning on moving forward with the bill.”

The bill has yet to return.

A week later, a border security bill was pulled amid complaints from conservatives that it was too weak. The legislation is expected to return combined with other bills that beef up interior enforcement of immigration laws.

The third bill pulled off the floor would have rolled back parts of the No Child Left Behind Act, but conservatives balked that it didn’t do enough to get the federal government out of education.

Mr. Fleming said the education bill underscored the disconnect between Republican congressional leaders and voters.

“That’s the reason why there is frustration out there,” he said. “Time and time again, our constituents are telling us, ‘No, we don’t want federal mandating on school education. We want that left to the states.’ And yet somehow there are people who are making decisions up here who think that, ‘No, we just need to have just a little less federal control but not hand it over to the states.’”

Still, Mr. Cole said the Republican conference isn’t going to oust its leadership team.

“People really recognize that the problem is in the culture of the conference; it’s not with the leadership of the conference. So we have to work through this as a family and get to a point where we all — or at least 218 of us — are willing to work together,” he said. “If you can’t do that, you’re going to have a hard time accomplishing the things you said you wanted to do when you came here.”

The two Representatives quoted in the Washington Times, Tom Cole and John Fleming, think the differences between the House conservatives and the ‘leadership’ is just a family squabble. They are wrong! It is the difference between saving the nation as it should and must be, or allowing the country to continue its slide into tyranny and civil war. The House leadership are no friends of ours. They’re on the same side as the democrats and liberals that infest the nation’s capital.

 

 

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Friday Follies for October 4, 2013

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I feel vindicated. Earlier this week, I created a scenario for the creation of a new political party. Today, I saw the article below that appears to mirror those first steps I formulated on this post.

House and Senate conservatives have formed a caucus all their own, separate and apart from moderate Republicans and their own GOP leaders. Their meetings, held in person and over the phone, have helped the relatively small band of lawmakers maintain a united front and outsize influence in a budget debate that led to a government shutdown.

At the meetings, they have shared information and ideas, developed strategy and discussed how to frame the fight over Obamacare as part of a larger budget debate. They met in person most recently last Monday evening, according to Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa — just hours before the government shut down.

The private pow-wows have enabled conservative lawmakers to coalesce around some of the hallmark proposals of the government-funding fight, including the notion that they could fund government programs one at a time. — The Washington Examiner.

On Monday, I speculated that Congressional conservatives from both houses would form a caucus in defiance of the leadership of both parties. It appears now that my speculation was accurate.

***

The new conservative coalition of Senators and Representatives have clout, as Harry Reid found out this week. Reid was disappointed that Boehner reneged on a secret deal he had made with Reid. Reid thought Boehner would support funding Obamacare in the CR in return for some nebulous promises from Reid. But, when the time came for Boehner to betray his party and House members, he didn’t. The pressure from House and Senate conservatives was too great.

Harry Reid puts John Boehner and his speakership in the crosshairs

By STEVE CONTORNO | OCTOBER 3, 2013 AT 1:35 PM

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Thursday accused House Speaker John Boehner of reneging on a deal reached in September to fund government and said the Republican leader has put his political future ahead of the country.

Reid said that when he and Boehner met in early September, the Republican leader wanted a clean continuing resolution to fund government at $988 billion, or sequestration levels. The Nevada Democrat said Boehner then backed away from that agreement after conservatives in the GOP caucus flipped.

“We didn’t like it. But we negotiated, that was our compromise. The exact bill that he now refuses to let the House vote on, that was our negotiation,” Reid said. “I didn’t twist his arm. He twisted mine a little bit to get that number. Now he refuses to let his own party vote because he’s afraid to stand up to something he originally agreed to.”

On Wednesday, Reid offered Boehner an out by promising to negotiate a host of Republican objectives, like tax reform and the health care law, in a bicameral budget committee after the House passed a measure to fund government with no strings attached. Boehner immediately turned it down as a disingenuous proposal.

“I thought we had something he couldn’t refuse,” Reid said Thursday.

Reid’s Don Corlene tactics failed. Boo. Hoo.

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The IRS has been targeting selected conservatives for some time. Evangelist Franklin Graham, and conservative Christine O’Donnell are two from that list. Now, another conservative has been audited by the IRS, suddenly, after his famous speech before Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast, Dr. Ben Carson.

The long line of conservatives targeted by the IRS

By John Solomon and Ben Wolfgang, The Washington Times, Thursday, October 3, 2013

Tea party groups, Franklin Graham, Christine O’Donnell, a pro-marriage group. And now Dr. Ben Carson.

The list of conservatives targeted by the Internal Revenue Service for audits, tax-exempt reviews or tax privacy breaches keeps growing, raising fresh questions in Washington about whether a scandal the Obama administration has blamed on bureaucratic incompetence and coincidence may in fact involve something more nefarious.

The latest revelation came Thursday from Dr. Carson, the renowned neurosurgeon who told The Washington Times that he was targeted for an audit just months after he gave a speech in front of President Obama that challenged America’s leadership. The agency requested to review his real estate holdings and then conducted a full audit.

In the end, the IRS found no wrongdoing, Dr. Carson said, but it raised his suspicions about being singled out for his speech.

“I guess it could be a coincidence, but I never had been audited before and never really had any encounters with the IRS,” Dr. Carson said in an interview. “But it certainly would make one suspicious because we know now the IRS has been used for political purposes and therefore actions like this come under suspicion.”

The article continues at the website.

***

For weeks, since the last debt limit fight, Obama has threatened to take unilateral action to raise the debt limit citing Section 4 of the 14th Amendment as justification. He’s threatening to take action again to remove Congressional power of the purse.

If Congress Won’t Raise the Debt Ceiling, Obama Will Be Forced to Break the Law

Wouldn’t it be better to save the nation from default by invoking the Fourteenth Amendment, than to stand by and do nothing?

Back in 2011, I found myself writing (and writing and writing and writing and writing) about Section Four of the Fourteenth Amendment. Afterwards, it seemed like a bizarre interlude: The brief crisis about the debt ceiling surely would not repeat itself in our lifetimes. After all, President Obama was handily reelected, the Democrats held onto the Senate, and the Republicans must surely have learned their lesson.

Or not so much.

Regardless of how the current shutdown crisis ends, it seems there will be a second debt-ceiling crisis two weeks from now. And the questions are flying again: Is the debt-ceiling statute unconstitutional? Can Obama “invoke” Section Four of the Fourteenth Amendment and assert authority to breach the debt ceiling to pay “the public debt of the United States, authorized by law”? Or can one party, decisively defeated in a nationwide election and controlling only the lower house of the legislature, threaten the full faith and credit of the United states — and the health of the world economy — in pursuit of its short-term partisan advantage?

The world has heard enough from me on this subject, but three nuanced analyses are worth looking at. The first, by Henry J. Aaron of the Brookings Institution, notes that the debt-ceiling crisis threatens not just the president’s constitutional duty to make payments on the public debt but also the accompanying requirement that he spend money lawfully appropriated by Congress, either as part of a yearly budget or as part of statutes authorizing “entitlement” payments like Medicare or veterans’ benefits.

Failing to do any of these things would be a default on the president’s duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” The president may not be able to obey all three sources of law; if so, Aaron argues, he should make the payments and ignore the debt ceiling. “The debt ceiling is the fiscal equivalent of the human appendix — a law with no discoverable purpose,” he writes. “If Congress leaves the debt ceiling at a level inconsistent with duly enacted spending and tax laws, the president has no choice but to ignore it.”

Aaron’s argument echoes the elegant analysis last fall by law professors Neil Buchanan of George Washington University and Michael Dorf of Cornell. These two prominent scholars concluded that paying appropriated monies and interest on the debt represents the “least unconstitutional” option open to a president when Congress refuses to approve a debt-ceiling increase.

The writer above is a liberal, as you probably noticed. Like all liberals, he sees the Constitution as an impediment—unless it can be twisted to their advantage. Section 4 of the 14th Amendment gives the President NO POWER to unilaterally raise the debt, nor spend federal funds not authorized by Congress, specifically by the House of Representatives. To do so would eliminate the Balance of Powers in the Constitution; the balance deliberately designed to constrain the excesses of government.

If Obama and the congressional dems follow this path, it can only be corrected by counter-balancing force. I would much prefer we don’t go there!

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