“Fumble!” How Republicans Lost the House
Turnovers.
On any given Sunday it is said that any NFL team can win or lose, and a team’s fortunes can hinge on a turnover, be it a loss of downs, an interception or a fumble. Timed right, such a turnover can and has cost an otherwise winning team loss, humiliation and perhaps a chance at post-season play. That’s football.
As with football, politics is on a game clock and time is quickly running out on Republicans in the House of Representatives. With roughly six weeks until Democrats take over the House, albeit for (at least) the next two years, Republican congressmen have a very small window to get things done…but will they?
Having failed to push through promised healthcare legislation (thanks to a last-minute thumbs down by the late (and ultimate) RINO in the U.S. Senate), having failed to deliver on President Trump’s request to build a wall on the border with Mexico, and having failed to complete an investigation into how members of the Obama administration colluded with the Hillary Clinton campaign to use a fake dossier to spy on members of the Trump campaign and launch a costly and pointless investigation into alleged Russian collusion, Republicans have effectively “fumbled” the House back to the Democrats. Essentially, they have handed the gavel back to whence it comes…back to the once and future Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).
With six weeks to gain some small sliver of dignity before surrendering their power, odds are that Republicans won’t even try to do so, and that timidity is precisely how they lost the House.
So afraid of what might happen in the Senate, where it is said that all good legislation meets its own demise, so afraid of being labeled the “party of intolerance,” the “party with no compassion,” or, Heaven forbid, “the party of Trump” by a media who will always and forever be against them, their lack of intestinal fortitude, as personified by outgoing Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) and three dozen other House Republicans who decided not to risk another run for their own seats, proved to be their own undoing.
Not that their failure to act on President Trump’s mandate didn’t have help from their fellow partisans in the Senate, where Republicans still maintain a small majority going into the new year. After all, House Republicans have not been able to make up their minds as to just who they are, and what they represent, since taking the reins from Nancy Pelosi eight years ago. The only real accomplishment that House Republicans can lay claim to in those eight years, is legislation passed in December of 2017 which lowered taxes across the board, simplified tax filings for a large majority of individual taxpayers, and brought an end to ObamaCare’s unpopular individual mandate. Ironically, ObamaCare was the only significant legislation passed under Democrat leadership in the four years preceding the Republican takeover in 2011, so it seems that legislative incompetence is a bi-partisan malady whose cure seems to be fleeting at best.
Major problems lingering for decades- immigration reform, the national debt, failure to achieve a balanced budget (or even any budget devoid of continuing resolution after continuing resolution), and the ticking time bombs of Social Security and Medicare insolvency- have remained unaddressed by both parties and both houses of Congress. Given the pending “subpoena canon” promised by Democrats to seek revenge on Trump’s election victory, the odds that any of the aforementioned issues will be addressed in the new Congress are somewhere between “slim” and “nil,” and “slim” just left town.
It is very tempting, for pundits and politicians alike, to blame the House loss on President Trump, but doing so doesn’t mean that it’s right. While Democrat apparatchiks can do what they will (and always seem to will), to overturn election results in Florida and other states, the real culprit in Republicans losing the House, is none other than Speaker Paul Ryan, whose spinelessness, fence-sitting and trying to be all things to all people are in the finest tradition of his Republican predecessors John Boehner (D-OH) and Denny Hastert (R-IL). Essentially, Republicans haven’t had true leadership in the House since the days of Newt Gingrich (R-GA) and his term as Speaker ended as the last century came to a close.
Twenty years, and (count ‘em) three Speakers later, they still just don’t seem to “get it.” All of which confirms the adage that, while Democrats don’t know how to act ethically when they lose an election, Republicans just as surely don’t know how to act competently when they win an election…and they have no one to blame but themselves.
-Drew Nickell, 14 November 2018
© 2018 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.
author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”
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