The roar of progressive cheering on social media is deafening in the wake of the GOP’s failure to pass the American Health Care Act (AHCA). Hillary Clinton tweeted, “today was a victory for all Americans.”
Neera Tanden of the Center for American Progress tweeted, “I’m thrilled that this unconscionable attack on Planned Parenthood is dead right now.”
Friday was a great day to be part of the American left. What a coup for Democrats to score a huge legislative victory when they’re the minority party in both houses. How on Earth did they do it? Was it brilliant strategy? Was it top-notch fundraising? Was it powerful rhetoric?
Nope. They didn’t have to do anything. The House Freedom Caucus — supposedly the most conservative members of the House of Representatives — handed them victory on a silver platter!
Who would ever have guessed that the saviors of Planned Parenthood would be 31 Ted Cruz disciples?
They sound conservative, they act conservative, and they represent conservative districts, but the House Freedom Caucus is an enemy of conservatism.
{mosads}The only thing they ever accomplish is ousting Speakers. Breitbart is already reporting on a movement in the House to oust Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). That movement reportedly includes at least two members of the Freedom Caucus.
But basic logic dictates that Freedom Caucus members would be calling for the head of the Speaker, no matter who it was. They’re searching for a Speaker who can pass legislation through the House with only 31 votes, and nobody — no matter how much conservative street cred he or she is rocking — can accomplish that.
The 31 men who make up the Freedom Caucus only make up 7 percent of the House of Representatives, but they expect to get 100 percent of their way on everything. When they don’t, they pick up their ball and stomp their feet all the way home — even if it means the rest of us get stuck with ObamaCare.
They don’t seem to care that not every Republican is from a heavily gerrymandered district that makes losing a seat impossible. They don’t seem to care that Republicans chose Donald Trump in the presidential primary over Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas), which was an unambiguous mandate for pragmatic government.
All they seem to care about is digging their ideological heels into the dirt and grandstanding. If they cared about making America more conservative, they would have passed the AHCA.
These 31 representatives are useless to conservatives because having conservative ideas isn’t worth anything if those ideas don’t translate into legislation that can pass through Congress. They’re uncompromising ideologues whose tantrums never end. They’re conservative Obamas: unwilling to compromise, unwilling to listen, unwilling to accept partial victory.
If the goal is to make sure Mark Levin doesn’t scream at over the airwaves, they’re doing great. If the goal is to make America more conservative, they’re blowing it big time.
Fact: The AHCA would have defunded Planned Parenthood.
Fact: The AHCA would have reduced deficits by over $300 billion over the next decade. Fact: The AHCA paved the financial path for conservative tax reform.
Now that these billions of dollars weren’t freed up by the AHCA thanks to the oh-so-conservative Freedom Caucus, Trump’s tax reform agenda has been weakened right out of the gate.
Not to mention the fact that the upcoming tax reform may not give the Freedom Caucus everything they want.
What will caucus members do if that happens? Kill the bill and leave us all with the status quo?
If that’s their idea of conservatism, they can keep it.
If Trump, a non-ideologue, is forced to work with Democrats on the healthcare issue, you can bet there won’t be any defunding of Planned Parenthood. You can bet any bill won’t cut deficits by hundreds of billions. And you can bet it won’t include much that the Freedom Caucus likes.
But that would be fine with them, because it will give them something to grandstand against. It’ll give them something to spew divisive rhetoric at.
That’s what their brand is built on, and that’s what keeps them in office.
Some conservative pundits will trash anyone who knocks the Freedom Caucus as a RINO (Republican In Name Only), a moderate or a traitor to the conservative cause, but the opposite is true. A true conservative can easily see that the Freedom Caucus’s intransigence makes America more liberal.
Just look at what liberal ideological purism did to Democrats: They’ve been voted out of government at every level.
Eventually, that’s exactly what the tyranny of the Freedom Caucus will do to Republicans. They demand all-or-nothing allegiance to their own ideas and instead of moderately conservative laws, we wind up with the Obama-status-quo albatross around our necks.
I have news for the Freedom Caucus: “true conservatives” don’t hand victories to Planned Parenthood, block gigantic deficit cuts or hamper tax reform.
But that’s exactly what you all have done.
When 7 percent of House members believe that every piece of legislation should bend to their will, they are what’s wrong with our political system. They are the lack of pragmatism that causes gridlock. They are the inaction that halts conservative progress.
Most importantly, they are the ideological purism that Republicans rejected when they chose Trump in the primaries and the American people rejected when we chose Trump in the general election.
If the Freedom Caucus doesn’t start making decisions that roll back Obama’s America, March 24, 2017 will be the date pundits point to after the 2018 election when they’re explaining how Democrats took back the House and Senate.
Eddie Zipperer is an assistant professor of political science at Georgia Military College. His work has appeared in The Baltimore Sun, Las Vegas Review-Journal, Fox Nation and RealClearPolitics. Follow him on Twitter @eddiezipperer.
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