Erick Erickson was fairly succinct when he found out that John Boehner was going to fund the Department of Homeland Security through the end of the fiscal year without having any strings attached to the funding.
I told y’all he was lying when he puffed his chest and said he’d stop the President. He had no intention of doing so. And now Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) will ensure President Obama’s executive amnesty is funded.
He will, like so many other Republican leaders, hide behind a court to fight for him. Coward.
All afternoon I have been trying to find a good analogy for this. My first thought was the Black Knight from Monty Python and The Holy Grail: “Running away, eh? You yellow bastards! Come back here and take what’s coming to ya! I’ll bite your legs off!”
Somehow, this didn’t quite capture the insane futility of Sir Erick and his Round Table of the conservative Freedom Caucus. After all, Erickson isn’t yelling at the Democrats. He’s yelling at Sir John the Not-Quite-So-Brave-As-Sir-Mitch.
Or is it the other way around?
I don’t know. Who can tell with these miscreants?
Maybe the better analogy is the Japanese soldier who, stranded on some remote Pacific island, refuses to believe that the Emperor couldn’t have prevailed if he had just fought on a little longer. Maybe he doesn’t believe that the Emperor has surrendered at all.
No wait, Erickson knows full well that the Republicans surrendered. He predicted it all along.
Where is the analogy I seek?
Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), a close ally of Boehner’s, made the motion Tuesday to use an obscure House rule to bring the Senate-passed funding bill to a House vote…
…Simpson blasted the conservatives’ strategy as a path destined to fail. He pointed out the DHS funding bill doesn’t contain money for processing the executive actions in the first place, since those are funded by fees.
“What it will lead to is a closedown of the Department of Homeland Security. And that is not a victory. That is dangerous,” Simpson said…
Rep. Simpson was perhaps constrained by the rules of the House or he might have said what he actually meant, which was, “You people are out of your goddamned minds!”
Instead, we got this, “I will fight with anyone, and I will stand on their side, as long as they can show me a path to potential victory.”
Simpson is no kamikaze.
There was no path to victory for the Republicans, and every sane person knew this from the moment that the Knights demanded a hostage. But we all had to go through the motions of accommodating the lunatics. We all had to pretend that the votes they forced and the delays they caused were part of a real fight between two parties where the outcome was in some doubt. After all, it was theoretically possible that Mike Tyson could have had a coronary in the 30 seconds it took him to knock out Michael Spinks.
The Knights didn’t even have that kind of chance of winning.
In the end, what can you say about the Republicans’ performance here?
They smelt of elderberries.
They didn’t win, but does anyone think they will pay the price.
Oh, and the clean CR funds DHS at the prior year fiscal levels, which means in real terms a cut.
I agree; they probably won’t pay a price. Partly because the media is so myopic around sensational stories that they won’t report anything substantive. Partly because the vast majority of people don’t give a damn about substance. And partly because there’s a deep racial rift at the heart of our society that’s driving politics and has been for the last 40 years (at least). It’s even more accurate to say this rift goes back to the founding of our nation and before. The oligarchs have figured out how to manipulate their storm troops. It works. They will continue to pull the strings on all the important legislation that drives income inequality until something changes and they can’t anymore. And it’s very hard to know when that will be.
What can I say about the Republican performance??? Due to their hubris, they unwittingly fell victim to the killer rabbit at the cave of Caerbannog.
I believe Erick the Hysterick is always addressing the fearful old folks who write checks. They love a good Dolchstoss story, it gives them the chills.
Did they lose anything?
(And I’m not sure that individual congressmembers didn’t win by doing this; raise funds, raise awareness. I suspect that focusing on the issue itself is as myopic as we think they are.)
So Republican air travelers can still get groped by TSA until the end of the fiscal year.
What will the Tea Party do next? Hold a gun to the head of the national security state?
John Boehner was definitely on those waterskis. The moterboat revved up to full speed. For a the-writers-ran-out-of-ideas stunt.
Somewhere buried in the brule creme of DHS there are some real functions that serve the protection of security. For all their feigned budget-bulldog-ism, the Republicans are totally incapable of finding that core of actual bureaucratic function.
In 1964, Joseph S. Clark wrote Congress: the Sapless Branch. He hadn’t seen anything.
We all know the wingnuts are a bunch of rubes. All the guys in power know it. The Koch brothers know it. The only ones who don’t know are they themselves, and they don’t want to know.
Like the old joke about how if you don’t know who the mark is, you’re the mark.
These guys are children. I mean, literally, they are acting like 8th graders.
They have no interest in accepting anything less than the totality of their desires, no empathy with anyone who believes even one iota away from what they have declared to be a line in the sand, no conception of the idea that some things are more important than others.
They (Erickson et al) show an unholy glee at the trials and tribulations of their elders and “leaders”. I remember well Dukakis’s campaign (and Eugene’s, and Hearnes, and Davis, and Baker, and …). We cringed, cried, and soldiered on. These guys make bad jokes, shout out character assassination and order Indian takeout … in that order.
They are not politically savvy in ANY sense of the word. Who do they think will replace Boehner? Got news for you Eric, the thing most feared by purveyors of bulk commodities? The customer making a dreaded market search for a replacement. And today’s conservatism is most definitely a bulk commodity.
No guarantee that the replacement for these guys is going to be R … or even demonstrably conservative.
All the subtlety of a kindergarten sand box.
Perhaps if we got the House GOP a shrubbery?
Ni!