Well, that does it. Or, if you prefer, “it’s the final straw.” Or, “that’s the icing on the cake.” Or, if you listened to the late “Dandy” Don Meredith of Monday Night Football fame all those
decades ago, “Turn out the lights, the party’s over.”
We’ve all been in situations where a breaking point was reached, and just one more piece of bad news would send us over the edge into a dark place. Angst has a way of building over time and it wouldn’t take a whole lot to do, just as Meredith fondly crooned, “turn out the lights” and exit the proverbial room.
Many conservatives and Republicans have struggled with the concept over the course of the past, well, thirty-plus years after Ronald Reagan left office. Liberty-loving, fiscally responsible, budget balancing, culture preserving, unborn life supporting, border protecting, law enforcing and traditional value defending governance has not always been the mantra of the Grand Old Party. We all know Republicans talk a good game during campaign season, promising to do this or that or to cut a particularly unpopular program (Obamacare?) or swear a semi-holy oath (to the extent that politicians are capable of doing such things) to uphold the Hyde Amendment to their last breath.
And then, almost in an instant, they collectively forget about all that stuff in favor of getting along with Democrats and acting “bipartisan” and swinging deals that they know are wrong so as to look good to so-called independent voters or moderate thinkers or fence sitters. The recently propounded infrastructure bill is the latest example. It contains a token few true infrastructure related items, but many (most?) observers, including former president Donald Trump, see it as a sellout to the nth degree.
Some particularly disgruntled conservatives even claimed to have experienced a “that does it” moment over the senate GOP’s duplicity. In a piece titled, “After Infrastructure Surrender, Republicans Deserve to Lose”, Philip Klein wrote at National Review:
“Republicans have helped put President Biden several steps closer to passing his top legislative priority in voting multiple times to advance an unnecessary and costly infrastructure bill that will pave the way for Democrats to pass their multi-trillion dollar social agenda. This is a pathetic surrender that has been built on a mountain of lies.
“Republicans who voted for this monstrosity claimed that the infrastructure bill they negotiated would be fully paid for. It isn’t. They claimed it would narrowly focus on traditional infrastructure such as fixing roads and bridges. It doesn’t. They claimed it would help convince moderate Democrats to abandon Biden’s larger bill. It won’t...
“This is a reckless and irresponsible action from a policy perspective and malpractice from a political perspective. If Republicans lose big time in 2022, they have nobody but themselves to blame.”
When my children were younger, I sometimes told them there was a thing called the “Cauldron of bull-crap,” which is a big pot with hot water filled nearly to the top. The more bull-crap that was added to the pot, the closer the cauldron would come to spilling over. Once it did, the water would overflow and there was no putting it back into the pot. It sounds like Klein has reached the boiling point on his own cauldron of bull-crap. And he’s right, Republicans have given him plenty of reasons to get a little (or a lot) fiery.
As if the provisions of the infrastructure bill itself weren’t bad enough, the real tragedy is that its passage -- if indeed it does eventually become law -- paves the way for Democrats to do what they always do, push through a much larger stand-alone budget resolution bill to fund their wildest socialist fantasies by any means necessary. Liberals were rather brazen about it, too, telling everyone in America that they would first get the infrastructure done on a “bipartisan” basis and then go straight past the smiling spineless Republicans to do their dirty work requiring only Democrat votes.
No secrets here. Yet the Republicans fell for it. Or it certainly looks like they did. They could only be pretending to go along with this infrastructure farce in order to tie the bigger monstrosity to Democrats and then force Joe Biden’s party to own a raising of the debt ceiling to realize any of it. This could be the thinking, but if so, it’s bad strategy and a big risk.
Because Democrats don’t care about public appearances and ballooning debt, and neither do the party’s core voters. As long as senile Joe and Nancy Pelosi and Chucky Schumer keep talking about “climate change” and “systemic racism” and scaring people to death over COVID-19, their base doesn’t pay attention to anything else. Everything is a crisis in a Democrat’s world and the easily swayed federal dollar craving entitled class just want their checks.
We all recognize it’s about power and payoffs to the Democrat special interests. I’ve asked it before and I’ll ask it again: why is liberty and self-determination such a hard sell? Money doesn’t grow on trees, but to liberals, it must originate in the treasury somewhere. Printing dollars that aren’t worth much more than the paper they’re stamped on is a scary prospect.
But for Klein to say that the GOP deserves to lose in 2022 is a tad premature. It doesn’t take much of an imagination to envision what Democrats would come up with if they had the numbers in Congress to do anything they wanted. Talk about a nightmare scenario. There’s nothing to indicate that once they succeeded in pounding this group of Republicans into the dust that they’ll turn out the lights and go home satisfied, tipsy and giddy.
No, they’ll say the best is yet to come, and they’ll do so arrogantly and forthrightly. As bad as things are today, America has not yet reached rock bottom. Republicans still have control over a majority of the state governorships and state legislatures. If conservatives get so discouraged at the wishy-washy capitulating national leadership, we might lose those too. Would we rather have stellar conservative freedom fighter Ron DeSantis as Florida’s governor or the principle-free Rep. Charlie Crist or ultra-liberal Nikki Fried (DeSantis’s likely 2022 opponent(s))?
It’s hardly time to give up, no matter how ticked we may be -- again -- at the feckless Republican congressional leadership and the consistently awful group of RINOs in the senate that rise up and grab defeat from the jaws of victory seemingly every time. There are 18 of ‘em, and the entire collection deserve close scrutiny when their next primary comes around. Some are up next year. They’ve got to be at the top of everyone’s list to knock off.
The gutless wonders are the ones who deserve to lose, not the 32 Republican senators who voted against cloture. These are the people who’re fighting the good fight and keeping the promises they made to the people.
Every time this happens -- declaring “that’s it” when something frustrates us -- there are suggestions to start a third party or simply stay home and let the system devour itself. Neither are attractive possibilities. Democrats aren’t the ones who move to voluntarily fold when they’re dealt a losing hand. No, they get together and rally behind the most radical among them and vow to fight even harder to subjugate the opposition.
There’s currently an idea circulating in the House of Representatives among conservatives to strip certain Democrats of their committee assignments if the GOP regains the majority after next year’s midterm elections. This means that ultra-liberals such as the gun-grabbing Eric Swalwell and Muslim-terrorist coddling and Israel-bashing Ilhan Omar will receive the same treatment that Democrat leaders gave Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene a few months ago.
In other words, there are signs that Republicans might finally be developing a little “fight” in their normally placid ranks. Donald Trump certainly won’t remain silent when the GOP leadership goes soft (as it always does) and the tens of millions of MAGA conservatives are itching to take the battle to the Democrats on their home turf. Some Republicans do deserve to lose, but let’s make it at the state and local primary level.
It's always hard to take a setback and think “that’s it, I’ve had enough” or decide to disengage from politics and let the politicians have at each other. Such an attitude might work for some who feel they haven’t got anything left to give, but there’s still many conservatives out there who want to save the greatest country in history. Which side do you agree with?
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