FIRST This week’s leader is Senator Ted Cruz of Texas who insists that Republicans must honor the six-year pledge to repeal Obamacare.
Sen. Cruz said this week, “We’ve had three elections – 2010, 2014 and 2016 – that were referenda on repealing Obamacare, and we need to honor that promise.”
He could not be more right.
Ad nauseam, we have preached on this blog how the GOP has broken so many of the campaign promises they have used on the trail throughout the years in order to get elected. And right on cue in 2017, it looks more and more like the repeal of Obamacare will not happen anytime soon. Infighting and a lack of a clear vision on how to repeal and replace this monstrosity is once again at the forefront of GOP Capitol Hill chaos.
Only a handful of leaders in the U.S. Senate, such as Cruz, Mike Lee, Rand Paul, and some conservative members of the U.S. House, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio in particular, are serious about getting rid of Obamacare. Though not all of them agree on the exact process of the repeal (“repeal first, then replace” or as Sen. Paul insists, “repeal and replace at the same time”), the predictable bottom line is that the Republican Party as a whole is failing the American people once again.
They had nearly seven years to craft a plan to repeal and replace Obamacare. If the American people wanted it to remain in place, they would have voted for Hillary Clinton for president, voted out any number of the incumbents in the hotly contested senate Republican seats that were up for reelection this past fall, or voted to send the majority GOP House back into minority status. Other than a few House seats and a couple Senate seats, the Republicans held onto their majorities in both chambers without much of a fight.
Ted Cruz is absolutely right. The GOP must honor its pledge to us. For at some point, the powerful will become powerless, by the people who tire of broken promises.
The great state of Texas has only one U.S. Senator who is leading a constitutional conservative movement and it’s not Senator John Cornyn. Hint: see above.
Sen. Cornyn is an establishment operative from the model state for conservatism and Texans can and must do better in three years in the primary when he is up again for reelection.
Cornyn said this week that Texans would rate building a border wall with Mexico “very low.” But according to his senate colleague Ted Cruz, the wall will be built and that the border patrol has told the him that a wall “absolutely” helps them do their job.
Who is right? Cornyn or Cruz? For us an easy choice.
Target 2020: Senator John Cornyn of Texas.
Writing in The Wall Street Journal recently, liberal columnist William A. Galston fears that “the resistance”, the far-left progressive grassroots movement trying desperately, with the media’s help to be the left’s version of the Tea Party, could possibly doom the Democratic Party into becoming the minority “for a generation.” We could not agree more.
The 2018 elections will be pivotal for both parties.
On the Republican side, what’s at stake may be a sign of President Trump’s prospects for winning reelection. It is quite common as history suggests that the party representing the White House will lose big in the first midterm election of the new administration’s tenure. This has not always been the case, however, as the 2002 midterms proved. How the Republicans do in 2018 could quite possibly foreshadow President Trump’s chances for holding onto the White House in 2020.
The Democrats’ situation is quite dicey and far more interesting.
They must defend 25 of the 33 seats up for election in the U.S. Senate with 10 of those seats in states that Trump won in 2016.
Five of these senators represent states that Trump won decisively; West Virginia (won by 41.7%), North Dakota (35.8%), Montana (20.2%), Missouri (19.4%), and Indiana (19%).
The other five states at risk are ones that Trump flipped into the GOP column that Obama won in 2012; Ohio (8.1%), Florida (1.2%), Pennsylvania (0,7%), Wisconsin (0.7%), and Michigan (0.3%). The latter three had not been won by a Republican nominee since ’88 (Michigan and Pennsylvania) and ’84 (Wisconsin). A sign of a turning tide or an outlier? Winning these five states, although extremely close, was quite impressive for Mr. Trump.
How the senators from these 10 states vote on policies such as tax reform, immigration, Obamacare repeal (see above), as well as whether or not to confirm the president’s Supreme Court nominee Neal Gorsuch, may help forecast, however early, the chances for reelection in 2018 for these vulnerable Democrats.
“The resistance” will be closely watching those upcoming votes from the aforementioned senators to see whether or not they should consider pursuing primary challenges against them. If they vote for parts of President Trump’s agenda in order to help their reelection chances, the “resistance” warriors will begin the incumbent purging in the primaries. Perhaps those plans are already in motion. Regardless, the liberal purity test will be on full display in the coming months.
In fact, one of those 10 vulnerable 2018 senators, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, acknowledged on Thursday that she is likely to be a target for a primary challenge.
We can’t welcome this purge enough and encourage the liberal grassroots to find members within their rank to run in the primaries and hopefully defeat some if not all the current “moderate” incumbents.
Nothing says an even bigger majority for the Republican Party in the U.S. Senate than doubling down on the failed agenda that was on the ballot again in 2016 and ultimately defeated by all types of voters.
Please, plan the fundraisers. Cue the band.
Michael Moore as the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan??
Absolutely!
Final Former Republican House Minority Leader Robert “Bob” Michel died yesterday at the age of 93.
He was a little before our time but we will remember him for being the leader of the GOP in the U.S. House for 13 years from 1981 until his retirement in 1994, all in the minority.
When Republican House Whip Newt Gingrich and his band of young conservative firebrands stood outside the Capitol on September 27, 1994 to unveil the “Contract With America”, it marked a dramatic shift in both philosophy and tactics within the Republican Party. Out was complacency and congeniality. In was conservative ideas, principles, and reforms with contentious debate.
The Republicans would go on six weeks later to win 54 U.S. House seats and nine U.S. Senate seats and become the majority in the House for the first time in 40 years.
As for Bob Michel, he served 38 years total in the people’s House and never was a member of the majority party. Upon watching the 1994 victory unfold on election night but having already passed the torch to Newt Gingrich after announcing his retirement, he felt bittersweet knowing he would never be the Speaker of the House.
“There are times when I feel like a small boy who has dutifully eaten his spinach and broccoli but who leaves the dinner table before Mom brings in the strawberry shortcake”, he said.
As a side note, we will never forget the utter disgust that ABC’s Peter Jennings had for this historic uprising when he said during his radio commentary just one week after the election, “The voters had a temper tantrum.” And what a beautiful one indeed!
The problem with Bob Michel, politically of course, was a lack of vision and quite frankly, his disdain for partisanship. He despised the “Contract with America” which ironically was the blueprint for what could have made him Speaker.
The election of 1994 proved that conservative ideas and principles, when passionately articulated, always win at the ballot box. Americans want action, not complacency, and will mobilize for a cause or change. See the Obamacare rebuke in the 2010 midterm election.
Unfortunately, some of the members who took to the House floor in 1994, i.e. future House Speaker John Boehner, singing the praises of the “Contract With America” would years later get stale with their conservative bonafides and get sucked into the swamp and become part of the problem that exists even today.
Bob Michel symbolized what so many of us at Conservative First loathe about Washington D.C.; the go-along-to-get-along members of Congress who spend more time on the golf course with the opposition and trying to win favor with them than on the House floor passionately articulating a better set of ideals and principles.
We send our condolences to Bob Michel’s family, friends, and political colleagues and thank him for his service to our country.
