He Said That? 12/13/14

We can put a toe tag on the notion that the Republican’s sweeping victory last month is going to change anything at all in Washington. From John Hayward, at humanevents.com:

Wonderful. Let’s have a big round of applause for the GOP Establishment, ladies and gentlemen! They managed to throw away the most remarkable electoral victory in a generation in only one month, maneuvering themselves into a position where the losers who got crushed will be making demands to win their support for a bill that effectively ratifies their will through half of their sojourn in electoral exile.

There was no reason to give the defeated Democrats anything except a stop-gap bill to fund the government through January, at which point the incoming Republican majorities should have exercised control over everything. If the Democrats don’t like that deal, let them shut down the government in a fit of pique, and tell voters how they party they just threw out of power should be allowed to control their lives for an extra year. Not only would that be smart politics – giving the Republicans more fiscal leverage to stand up for America against Obama’s amnesty, instead of just funding for the Department of Homeland Security – but it would represent more sensible and responsible government. All of this multi-trillion-dollar monstrosity is linked together; all of it should be on the table; the flab should be liposuctioned out of every agency at once in a comprehensive plan for fiscal sanity and increased American liberty.

The Republicans seem to think there are only two strategies: go along to get along with Washington’s permanent establishment of lobbyists, media, and bureaucrats, or threaten to shut down the government or not pay its bills, including its debt. There is a third way.

If the Republican leadership was smart, they’d be looping events such as Jonathan Gruber’s disastrous House testimony into a big-picture assault on arrogant, wasteful government, and reminding the hard-working, rules-obeying American taxpayer how much contempt Democrats hold them in. A proper budget debate right after the holidays would be a great way to do that. The Democrats fear nothing more than a sharp Republican Party playing that kind of hardball and appealing directly to the working middle class, which is so comprehensively betrayed by the Democrat philosophy of rewarding its big contributors and powerful special interests at the expense of everyone else. There’s a lot of junk in this “cromnibus” spending bill that could be used to buttress such a case, such as a juicy payoff to outgoing Majority Leader Harry Reid’s casino backers… but then, in order for Republican leaders to make hay over such corruption, they’d have to give up their pork and payoffs, and they don’t want that.

But let’s face it, the Republicans are just as much the party of government as the Democrats, they just reward a slightly different group of campaign contributors.

The only reliable bipartisanship in Washington is the agreement between both parties to serve and protect the permanent system of regulators, appropriators, lobbyists, and Big Media, which have fused together into a single organism with a shared bloodstream, through which well-connected individuals and flow from lobby organizations, to bureaucratic appointments, to media sinecures with ease. Look at the resume of a Beltway power player, and you’ll have a hard time telling the difference between elected officials, the agencies they nominally control, the special interests they serve, and the media that’s supposed to keep them all honest. The same person can work for all of those entities in the span of a decade. The only thing they really cooperate on is the care and feeding of the Cromnibus, the misshapen thing that feeds them all through its multitude of teats.

For the rest of Mr. Hayward’s excellent commentary: http://humanevents.com/2014/12/10/cromnibus-a-winter-festival-of-unrestrained-spending/