On Jan. 1, when the fiscal cliff bill reached the House, Speaker John Boehner should have held up all 48 pages of favors requested by the president on live television and called on the president to strip them from the bill."Time To Demand An End To Wasteful Federal Spending." By Betsy McCaughey, Investor's Business Daily, 1/8/13.
That he did not do.
To the same effect:
"Why the House GOP rejected the disaster relief bill." By Lawrence Auster, View from the Right, 1/7/13.
There's no fight in Republicans. McCain was a cipher who raised none of the obvious issues about Obama, his constitutional ineligibility being the main one and, oh, Obama's wanting to create a massive, unprecedented, unconstitutional federal civilian police force being another.
Romney had an intensity and energy about him but it wasn't an inner combativeness. He was hyper prepped for one particular debate and then reverted to type. A decent human being let it be said.
Did House Speaker Boehner make a coherent, short case for acting to avert the fiscal catastrophe looming over us? No. It was a completely missed opportunity to stake out Republican territory. Today, voters are none the wiser and Obama got to make the bogus take-away point of "fairness."
Absolutely agreed. I don't know what machinations Boehner thought he had to do with his own members of the house, but he SHOULD have gone on every talk show available to point out the pork in the bill.
ReplyDeleteThe republicans need to be pointing to the real cliff and draw a line in the sand. If they lose a few elections, ok. But health care costs, entitlements and defense spending as they are currently set CANNOT continue.
Considering that Boehner didn't have the grapes to put up any kind of credible fight with concerns to the whole fiscal cliff deal, what should have happened was for every single republican in congress to have simply voted "present". Instead they caved and Obama got most everything he wanted, particularly a bipartisan vote. Now the republicrats have given Obama what he wanted more than anything else...cover. When everything falls apart as it most surely will, he will be able to point to the republicans and smear them with the blame with the willing assistance of his lackeys in the media. Boehner has to be far and away the weakest Speaker in recent memory...and the republicans rewarded his complete lack of negotiating skills and understand of basic strategy with another term as Speaker. 46 dollars in additional revenue (taxes) for every 1 dollar in spending cuts is an absolute failure on the part of congressional republicans.
ReplyDeleteAnd I'm afraid that the most important thing about this debacle is that Obama and his minions have seen that the republicans will give them everything they want with only a token fight...kinda like the high school tramp in the back seat...she's saying no, but just pressing the issue a little is all it takes to get the panties thrown out the window...and WE'RE the ones who're gonna get screwed.