What Republicans Should Do Now

Well, the shutdown is over. Life is finally beginning to get back to normal – at least sort of. Parents with children are getting ready for Halloween. The Bengals are winning! Tourists are reappearing in Washington, and everything’s open.

Speaking of Washington, there’s a movement to change the name of the Washington Redskins. With all the controversy, the protests, and the finger-pointing, they’ve decided to change the name, to just – the Redskins. Get it? I’m not sure if it’s politically correct, but someone emailed that one to me the other day, and I thought my faithful blog readers might appreciate it.

Okay, back to my post-shutdown analysis. If the polls are correct (and I assume they probably are) Republicans in the House took it on the chin, at least politically. The public overall blames Republicans over Democrats in Congress, and over President Obama, for anything they didn’t like about the shutdown.

This is despite the fact that Republicans in the House, in my opinion, bent over backwards to make reasonable offers to not shut the government down in the first place, and then to reopen it once it was shut down. Republicans initially said we’d fund everything in the government BUT Obamacare. This gradually evolved into, we’ll fund everything in the government in return for a one year DELAY of Obamacare; and then to a one year delay of only the MANDATE on INDIVIDUALS (just as Obama had unilaterally, and probably illegally, done for big corporations and for his union allies.)

When all of these offers were rejected by Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and Barack Obama, Republicans offered to fund everything in the government, plus Obamacare, if the Democrats would merely agree that all Members of Congress and our staffs, and the President and his Cabinet, would all be required to participate in Obamacare. Even this perfectly reasonable offer was met with the same stiff-arm.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that virtually all of the mainstream press completely ignored all of these Republican offers, and persisted with the storyline that unyielding, unreasonable, radical tea party Republicans had shut down the government, and were ready to take America over the fiscal cliff and into default.

Of course we all know the rest of the story. After the Senate overwhelmingly voted to raise the debt ceiling and reopen the government, an open vote was allowed in the House, and 38% of Republicans and all the Democrats voted in the affirmative, and that was that. (I was not in the 38%.)

A few thoughts. Having been through the previous government shutdowns in my first term in Congress (1995 and 1996), I was quite concerned that our strategy was flawed. In fact, here’s what I wrote in my blog back on August 7th, almost two months before the beginning of the recent shutdown:

“…let’s be realistic. Most in the press will blame Republicans and not President Obama, and Republicans will, in all likelihood, cave, and will therefore have accomplished very little. Thus we have to be smart about this.”

Most would argue that we weren’t very smart about this. Even if we were right on the merits.

So what should we do from here? First of all, banish any thoughts of another shutdown in January or February, when the debt ceiling and the CR (continued funding for the government) will come up again. Back in ’95 and ’96, not only was there a government shutdown, but there was a second one. Let’s not repeat that mistake. When you’re in a hole, stop digging.

Next, never forget that we were right on the merits. Obamacare is a total disaster for the American people. The rollout of Obamacare has been a train wreck. Neither the Obama bureaucracy nor the Obamacare website is close to being ready for prime time. (The irony is Republicans would actually have been doing the Obama Administration a favor if we had been successful in delaying Obamacare for a year.)

And now that the Obamacare disaster is unfolding before the eyes of the American people, let’s not get in the way. Republicans should avoid making mistakes or doing stupid things to draw the press’s attention away from the Obamacare debacle.

Republicans should also take every opportunity to keep up the fight against excessive Washington spending. For example, the Democrats are determined to do away with the sequester, which is one of the few things that has actually restrained spending in recent years. In fact, it has been so successful that real spending has actually gone down in the two years since the sequester kicked in. This is the first time this has happened since the Korean War. We must absolutely not give this up. (There are those behind the scenes, both Democrats and Republicans, who are angling to do just that.)

In the interest of time, I’ll leave it there for the time being. But let me mention just one more thing. Yesterday, Brad Wenstrup and I had the tremendous privilege of meeting with an Honor Flight of mostly Korean War and World War II veterans, at the Korean War Memorial. I’ve had the great honor to welcome quite a few Honor Flights to Washington over the years. These folks are true American heroes. God bless our veterans and those military personnel currently serving our nation. And as always, may God bless the United States of America.

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