As I watch the Sunday television political pundits, they say that Ohio Representative John Boehner, currently the House Majority Leader (pictured to the right), is set to ascend into the top position for Republicans in the House, with the only higher ranking Republican, Speaker Dennis Hastert, "taking the bullet" for the team," stepping away from Leadership. But apparently his fellow leader, Boehner, doesn’t feel that he has the same obligation.
Well, with every offense intended, Republicans lost Congress not because the Democrats suddenly discovered some sort of great plan for America – but because voters, and especially the Republican base, lost any faith in the Republican majorities in the United States Senate and in the House of Representatives.
The GOP need only look in the mirror, and wonder why it took so long for this shift in power to occur. Republicans have been literally AWOL on the battle against a growing federal bureaucracy. No, actually, it’s worse. Republicans have played a key role in the growth of the size and scope of federal spending, approving budget after budget with more and more spending. A GOP Congress that promised to "undo" decades of liberal dominance actual became the new liberals, under the banner of the Elephant.
Add to spending increases the proliferation of earmarking, the pork barrel projects, the idea that reducing spending should be replaced, instead, with ‘bringing home the bacon’ for individual districts – and you have the recipe for disaster. A complete disconnect between the conservative rhetoric of Republicans and the action they took. The War on Terror played a key role as those most at fault for the spending used it as a foil to distract attention from the drunken-spending approach to appropriating that has become the accepted culture on Capitol Hill – a symbol of the hubris of House Leadership who completely accepted a culture of big government, again, most evident through years of passing budgets and appropriations that made a mockery of the Republican Party platform.
**There is more – click the link**
November 13th, 2006 at 12:00 am
You are absolutely right on with your commentary Jon. Boehner is part of the problem – he spoke in lock-step with the stagnant Congress, where “stay the course” meant don’t do anything about pork, don’t do anything about excessive federal spending. Instead he tried lame scare tactics in national interviews, saying that we must elect the Republicans or we would be fighting the terrorists in every street in America. It was not a rational argument for most Americans,and they saw through it. If Congress were truly afraid of fighting terrorists in every street in America, they would have tried a little harder to secure the borders.