When Speaker of the House John
Boehner said that conservative groups like the Club for Growth have been
“misleading their followers” and have “lost all credibility,” I didn’t pay much
attention to it. After all, members of Congress are constantly saying the Club
doesn’t matter — even though it’s belied by the facts: Since 2006 the Club’s
PAC has helped nearly 50 endorsed candidates get elected to Congress. Some of
the party’s brightest stars — senators Marco Rubio of Florida, Pat Toomey of
Pennsylvania, and Ted Cruz of Texas, congressmen Ron DeSantis of Florida and
Justin Amash of Michigan — were elected with strong Club-member support. There
is a broad consensus that the best Republican pickup opportunity among Senate
races in 2014 is the campaign of Arkansas’s Tom Cotton, who was strongly
supported by the Club’s PAC (in a competitive primary) in his 2012 run for
Congress.
So, when Speaker Boehner made those
remarks, I told the press, “I’m not sure what the
speaker’s point is other than he is frustrated, and frankly I’d be frustrated
too if I had his job . . . He couldn’t get enough
Republicans to do what Republicans say they’re for.” But after the House voted
this week to raise the debt limit by billions of dollars without even a dollar
of spending cuts, it’s time to consider whether the Republican-party leadership
stands for anything — other than retaining power for power’s sake.
It’s
instructive to look at the actual record of the GOP the last few years. In
2011, Republicans were dragged by leadership, kicking and screaming, into the
Budget Control Act (BCA). At the time, the Club opposed the bill, writing in our “Key Vote” alert to members
of Congress that “fiscal conservatives should have obvious concerns for the
lack of guaranteed future spending cuts.”
We were right.
After the so-called supercommittee failed, House Republicans spent the next two
years trying to figure out how to get rid of the sequester’s automatic spending
cuts.
Which brings us
to the Ryan–Murray budget, a partial repeal of the sequester. The agreement was
a function of the fact that many Republicans in the House simply never wanted
to cut spending or limit the size of government.
I served with
and respect Paul Ryan. I know the Ryan–Murray budget is not his ideal budget.
But that doesn’t make the deal any less of a joke. An analysis by the Senate Budget Committee
Republicans noted that 56 percent of the offsets for the reversal of the
sequester come in FY 2022 and FY 2023 — a decade from now.
Speaker Boehner
called that “deficit reduction.” I call
that a fraud and everyone with any common sense would agree with me. What kind
of message does it send to voters when Republican leadership is claiming that
you can offset increases in spending today with cuts in spending a decade from
now?
Almost
immediately thereafter, Republicans voted with the Democrats to pass a
perennially terrible piece of legislation, the Farm Bill. This orgy of spending
and pork basically constitutes bribing two discrete constituencies — those who
will always support more food-stamp spending and those who hail from
agricultural districts — to vote for something they would not otherwise. The
price is a trillion dollars in spending, 80 percent of which goes to the
out-of-control food-stamp program.
And if that
wasn’t enough, the House Republican leadership essentially lied to members of
Congress by telling them that they would split the agriculture and food-stamp
titles of the bill, for the first time in decades, only to re-combine them in
conference with Senate Democrats. The Club for Growth warned about this, writing in our Key Vote alert: “We highly
suspect that this whole [splitting] process is a ‘rope-a-dope’ exercise. We
think House leadership is splitting up the farm bill only as a means to get to
conference with the Senate where a bicameral backroom deal will reassemble the
commodity and food stamp titles, leaving us back where we started.” We were
right. But that is not the point. What kind of message does it send to voters
when the Republican party votes to spend a trillion dollars in one day?
I’ll tell you
what it tells them: It tells them the Republican party, by and large, doesn’t
really believe in much of anything other than maintaining its tenuous grip on
power. How else do you explain voting to raise the debt ceiling by billions of
dollars this week when Speaker John Boehner had literally called it the “Boehner principle” that “any debt limit
increase must be accompanied by spending cuts and reforms of a greater amount”?
This was after they tried to combine the debt-limit vote with the
elimination of one of the only true spending reforms in the Ryan–Murray budget
— nearly forcing fiscal conservatives to vote to add trillions to our debt or
oppose benefits for our military (they got rid of this reform in a separate
vote). What kind of message would that have sent?
Let’s review:
The Republicans voted for the sequester. Then they spent two years talking
about how they didn’t want the sequester. Then, they got rid of it, and
replaced it with the Ryan–Murray budget. Then, they got rid of some of the cuts
from the Ryan–Murray budget. At the same time, they went from wanting a
constitutional Balanced Budget Amendment in exchange for raising the debt
limit, to “dollar-for-dollar” cuts, to nothing.
And their
rationale for this essentially boils down to “we have to take the Senate,”
never mind the fact that regardless of the caucus counts, the Senate (and the
House) will still be populated by a bunch of RINOs who apparently have no real
interest in saving America from fiscal ruin.
So the Republican
leadership says the Club for Growth has been “misleading their followers” and
has “lost credibility”? That’s a bit ironic, coming from a big-spending,
debt-increasing, farm-subsidy enabling, entitlement-expanding party leadership
that has abandoned its principles . . . all in the name of
retaining their own power. And to what end?
— Chris
Chocola, a former congressman from Indiana, is the president of the Club for
Growth.
Source: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/371046/whos-lost-credibility-now-chris-chocola 2/13/14
Comments:
Club for Growth has one of the best legislative tracking and scoring
websites in the U.S. The scores elected officials receive are based on their
votes and run from 0 to 100. Georgia U.S. Senate candidate, Congressman Paul
Broun scores 100.
The other good scoring websites include: Heritage Action, New American
Freedom Index and Numbers USA. The best website for Georgia politicians is
electtherightcandidate.us. Many
Republicans will say they are Constitutional Conservatives, but how they
actually vote, gives you a number you can use to rank the candidates. Spending
some time looking up the scores for your representatives is imperative. We are
running out of time.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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