American Conservative Union. Club for Growth. Eagle Forum. Family Research Council. Right to Life. Americans for Tax Reform.
In spite of what those scorecards showed, in the end when it really mattered Coburn is in cut and run mode.
Unfortunately those groups are beltway oriented fundraising groups who have to pretend that your contributions are making conservatism happen in Washington. Otherwise you don’t send them more of your dough.
I guess the mask covering the political machine of the GOPe is coming off big time.
As you pointed out, Coburn is a very reliable conservative vote. I think he tries to be polite and respectful to other people, including Democrats. He doesn’t seem to understand that Democrats are tearing apart our civil society by the way they use government to browbeat opposition. I cannot be nice, for example, to people who want to fundamentally transform America into a socialistic state. Regardless, I don’t think Coburn deserves the treatment he’s getting here. Again, he’s a dependable conservative who truly wants to cut government.
Or more to the point, his actual voting record on issues that conservatives care about.
I would like to see the senators block Reid’s plan, just to make Reid give them an up-or-down vote on the house plan.
On the other hand, I think it is absurd to claim that he and others are not conservative based on their opinion of the outcome of this strategy.
If I believed that in the end, Obama and the democrats would drop Obamacare in order to fund the rest of the government, I would be more critical. But I do not. I see no change in hell Obama would ever sign a bill that didn’t fund Obamacare. He’d shut the government down. Maybe the democrats would VOTE for one in the end, to give them political cover (although remember they WIN ELECTIONS by appealing to their liberal base who would rather shut down then defund, just as we say we would rather shut down than fund).
But Obama is not up for re-election. And he has shown he doesn’t mind destroying the country and blaming others. And in a shutdown, he has signaled that the ONE THING that will get funded is Obamacare, while he will certainly use the shutdown to further destroy our military capability. His use of “emergency funding” will likely break the law, nobody will have the standing to sue, and even if we could it would take too long, and his funding priorities won’t match ours.
And in the end, enough republicans from marginal districts WOULD join the democrats in the house, and the bill they passed wouldn’t be just funding Obamacare, it would have a wishlist of democratic special interest money, and we’d be powerless to stop it. In the end, Obamacare would be funded, AND the sequester would be gone, and there’d be new program spending, and more deficits.
Now, that is just a prediction. You can certainly believe it could turn out differently, but reading just what is written in these threads, it is clear nobody on the conservative side believes the average republican has the guts to push this to the end game where we’d stand strong, and Obama would decide the pain to his side was greater than the pain of giving up Obamacare.
And you know the worst thing? If we ACTUALLY WON, with all the pain, suffering, the hit to the economy — the bill ONLY FUNDS through December. Obama would blame the entire economic mess on the shutdown. Enough people would believe him that however bad the economy was, republicans would NOT be able to use it in 2014. And Obamacare might have less money for 2 months, but then in December it all happens again, and I don’t think it turns out any better.
So yes, I believe there are smart conservatives who can see beyond the “Hey, look, we can TAKE HIS QUEEN”, and see that 5 moves later, we will be check-mated.
The problem is, the “hey, we just won’t give them money”, is such a simple sound bite that people forget it is just a sound bite, and start thinking it is actually a solution.
Suppose we passed a CR for each appropriations. From our side, it looks like we are doing clean CRs just like they ask, and the senate would obviously pass them. But no — Reid would take a CR that funded just the military budget, he’d get it through cloture (who could resist?), and then he’d do an amendment adding in Obamacare money, and pass it.
Whatever we sent to him, he’d always do the same trick. Our bills would either all get bottled up in cloture votes, or come back with Obamacare money.
IF we were signalling that there was some compromise middle ground, I could see the democrats figuring it would be worth it, and we’d win some concessions. But if you tell the other side “Hey, we are going to kill you”, well they really have no reason to not simply say “we’ll kill you first”.
Anyway, I don’t want to stop the hatefest. I know there are smart freepers who can think this through and understand. I know there are some who don’t care about elections, and would like to see the party burned to the ground fighting for this one hill they can’t win or hold. I’m not going to tell you otherwise. Call your senators. Fight for what you want.
But I reject the notion that smart conservatives are forbidden to have a different picture of the outcome, and to vote based on what they see as the end point. If Coburn thinks that the final budget will be more conservative if he votes FOR cloture, that is a rational vote, even if it doesn’t end Obamacare.