Surrender Caucus Strikes Again in Pending Budget Fight

It defies logic that the elected leadership in the House and Senate for the Republican Party can be so lame.

Politico reports today that “House GOP leaders desperate to avoid shutdown.” This headline speaks volumes why presidential candidates like billionaire Donald Trump, Dr. Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina are doing so well in the polls. Republican voters have lost confidence in their own leadership and they don’t want to fall in behind traditional politicians.

Politico reports:

An explosive confrontation brewing between the House Republican leadership and conservatives over Planned Parenthood is threatening to shut down the government for the second time in three years. And House GOP leaders have yet to settle on a strategy to avert it.

The leaders in the House and Senate know that this Planned Parenthood issue is burning hot, yet they don’t have a strategy to avoid it.

They have come up with an idea that inside the beltway geeks love. It is the “Let’s Have Hearings and Study the Issue Strategy.” The easiest way to slow walk an issue and avoid a fight is to study it. They argue that a series of hearings would build an “overwhelming case” against the group. Hearings are a classic shiny object for politicians because they think they can use a hearing to avoid doing their real job – legislating.

Politico reports “desperate to avoid another closure, Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and his team would prefer to build bipartisan opposition to funding the group through a series of high-profile Congressional investigations. But, at this point, that seems unlikely to cut it with a bloc of House conservatives who have said they simply won’t vote for a large-scale spending plan that funds Planned Parenthood.”

The House Freedom Caucus and a handful of Tea Party-minded senators are expected to oppose the idea of funding Planned Parenthood while Congress holds toothless hearings that are set up for the sole purpose of avoiding a fight.

Over the next few weeks you are going to see a parade of Senate and House members of the surrender caucus – those who believe that the strategy of surrender is helpful, because if they don’t fight then they will be blameless when Republicans fail – say the following: “I have been rated one of the most pro-life members of Congress and I get an A+ rating from all pro-life groups. Nobody takes a back seat to me on pro-life issues, but…”. These squishy members will cry about a filibuster in the Senate and President Obama’s promised veto of any appropriations bill that does not fully fund Planned Parenthood. You can never win if you don’t fight. Pre-emptive surrender (#8 of the Rules for RINOs) is never a good strategy.

It defies logic that these so-called leaders are going to march right up to a government shutdown on September 30 and try to bully members into passing a continuing resolution that punts the tough funding decisions on Planned Parenthood to the end of the year. This leadership seems incapable of coming up with any strategy to defund Planned Parenthood, yet they will try to blame conservatives if the government shuts down because they never came up with a plan.

The broken promises of this leadership team are important. Why?

First, the leadership publicly promised regular order and a process where both chambers would take up individual appropriations bills and work to fine tune them to provide a better policy outcome for conservatives. At least that would have provided a way for conservatives to force vote after vote to defund Obamacare, Planned Parenthood, and Obama’s array of executive amnesties. Regular order never happened in the Senate.

Both GOP leaders promised t they were going to use the budget process to send a bill to fully repeal Obamacare that would avoid a senate filibuster because of the budget reconciliation special rules. That is not going to happen.

As I wrote in Human Events months ago when Supreme Court Justice John Roberts issued another Supreme Court decision saving Obamacare that said, in essence, “Congress is America’s last hope to repeal Obamacare.”

Take a look at the House Budget Committee’s one-pager where they promised that the congressionally passed budget “Repeals Obamacare.” The document’s first bullet point relating to health care swore that the budget “Repeals Obamacare in full – including all of its taxes, regulations and mandates.” The Senate Budget Committee posted a press release where they made a similar promise, that the budget “provides for Repeal of Obamacare to Start Over with Patient-Centered Reforms.” The House and Senate Budget Committees are set to break those promises.

The government is going to shut down over this issue and hearings are not going to save leadership from a fight. The idea that Republicans can run a strategy that consists of doing nothing and hoping that Democrats make a mistake and give away the next election doomed Romney and will doom the Republican presidential nominee next fall if these so-called leaders don’t change course quickly.

The time to dig in and fight is now. (Re-posted with permission, “Surrender Caucus Strikes Again in Pending Budget Fight” originally appeared HERE)

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