Congress has adopted a 2016 federal budget that makes it official: The Republican Party and the Democrat Party have merged. In the name of stability and progress, Republican leaders have agreed with Democrats to put big government on autopilot — with no change in the programmed destination, full-blown socialism. On December 18, at Speaker Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) urging, 150 House Republicans voted to double down on the politics of surrender.
Yesterday, we thought we had two parties, Republicans and Democrats, but now we see that we have only one, the Repubocrat Party, the party of No Shame.
- In the upcoming 2016 election, you can vote for the candidate of your choice, and it won’t matter. Government growth is on autopilot and the expansion of an imperial federal government will continue, whether we elect Democrats or Republicans.
- Republicans will talk about smaller government, but no one is fooled: they won’t actually DO anything about it.
- Republicans will talk about border security, sanctuary cities, and five million visa overstays, but they won’t DO anything to alter the status quo.
- Republicans will talk about reining in an out-of-control EPA, but they won’t pass any funding controls to change EPA behavior.
The Repubocrats’ federal budget abandons every promise made to Republican voters. Against criticism, they chant, “Obama made me do it!” while cowardly refusing to send Obama any bill worthy of his disdain.
Folks, the zombies are not on television, they are in Washington, D.C., and they meet at the Capitol Hill Club and call themselves “Realists.” They are now celebrating their singular 2015 accomplishment: they avoided a government shutdown! Instead, they chose a shoot down: they have killed the spirit of accountability and hollowed out the meaning of representative government.
The Republican majority in the House and Senate chose to surrender control of the budget to the Obama White House, producing a gargantuan spending plan that makes Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) smile.
The $1.1 trillion Obama-Ryan budget will result in another deficit of over $400 billion dollars, with expenditures and grant programs for every special interest group lined up at the federal trough.
- The 2009-page bill was unveiled at 2:00 AM on Wednesday morning and then adopted by roll call vote only two days later. How many members read it? THAT kind of cynical chicanery was supposed to end.
- It continues almost all of the subsidies and slush funds of the prior budget, like the 30% solar energy investment tax credit, tax breaks for race horses and film productions, while dropping over150 restrictions on spending that were in the House-passed budget resolution.
- Dropped from the bill at White House insistence was the ban on funding of Planned Parenthood, a prohibition of EPA’s unconstitutional expansion of carbon emission rules never authorized by Congress, and a rollback of Obama’s takeover of local zoning under an illegal expansion of the Fair Housing Act.
- Not a single one of Obama’s several unconstitutional executive actions was defunded.
- The bill expands the number of low-wage workers brought into the country as guest workers, guest workers who never go home because no one is enforcing the visa expiration dates.
- The bill also expands the number of Muslim immigrants and refugees to nearly 300,000 annually.
- It allows DHS to tap into a $1.6 billion “refugee resettlement” pot to house and then “resettle” the tens of thousands of “Unaccompanied Children” crossing our southwest border.
They brag about a 2-year delay in the “Cadillac tax” on employer-sponsored health care plans, when it should have been repealed outright, not delayed. And, of course, there is no rollback of Obamacare itself. That will have to wait …and wait …and wait.
If you listen carefully and decode the Beltway rhetoric, the apology offered by Republican leaders amounts to a confessional:
- Fulfilling commitments to K-street lobbyists is more important than keeping promises to the voters who elected us. Voters have preferences, but lobbyists have checkbooks. If you expect us to repeal slush funds and illegal regulatory mandates for the sake of principle, you’re living in a different world.
Folks, talk of a third political party is passé. America doesn’t need a third-party, it needs a second party, one with a pulse and a backbone. A brain would be nice, too.
Rush Limbaugh got it dead right when he said after the new budget was unveiled, “We don’t even need a Republican Party if they’re gonna do this. Just disband the Republican party.”
It has become painfully obvious that the only thing that will change the Republican Party’s direction is the forced retirement of a few dozen “party leaders” — beginning, yes, with Speaker Paul Ryan. The GOP establishment didn’t learn the lesson with Eric Cantor’s defeat in 2014, so in 2016, we need to “go big.” Purge the leadership or disband the thing and build something new from scratch.
Paul Ryan wants his weekends free? Fine, let’s give him all 365 days free.
Ryan says, quite literally, “I inherited a mess; next year will be different. Trust me on that.” Sure, “trust me,” and I have a bridge in the Mohave Desert you can have at a bargain price.
As for myself, I left the GOP two months ago and am now an independent. But, to paraphrase our elected dictator, I have a phone and a pen and a political action committee, “TEAM AMERICA PAC.” I will try to raise a million dollars to help take out some of the 150 Republicans who betrayed our country by rubber stamping a plan for accelerating our slide into socialism, bankruptcy and chaos.
There is work to be done. Conservatives and constitutionalists must find and support good candidates to replace the current congressional leadership — in Republican primaries where that is possible, or as independent challengers where necessary.
To those who warn that this will lead to loss of the House majority, there is an easy answer. What difference does it make?
We can do better; we must do better. Living on hypocrisy is not a healthy diet for patriots.
Tom Tancredo is the founder of the Rocky Mountain Foundation and founder and co-chairman of Team America PAC.
Tom represented Colorado’s sixth congressional district in the United States House of Representatives from 1999 to 2009, and he is a former presidential candidate.
He is the author of In Mortal Danger: The Battle for America’s Border and Security.
