On November 6, Obama won a narrow majority but lost 13% of his support from four years ago. So I ask: What stinking mandate?

Today [November 14, 2012] is a monumentally important day that is being treated as a fait accompli by the Beltway ruling class and its partners, the legacy media. This morning, the Congress is scheduled to select its leaders for the coming session. 


If all goes according to plan, Republicans will double down on stupid – ignoring the conservatives who gave them control of the House and reappointing the same leadership team that turned the triumph of 2010 into the disaster of 2012.

In the historic 2010 midterm elections, conservatives gave Republicans a chance to prove that they’d repented of their huge-spending nanny-state ways. It was not that conservatives were won over by a Republican establishment that, during the Bush years, had run up an astounding $5 trillion of debt while creating new entitlements and launching an ill-conceived experiment in sharia-democracy building. Instead, it was that we needed to stop Obama’s doubly expensive gallop to the left, to a post-American rejection of our liberty culture. In the short term, Republicans were the only game in town.

Over the long haul, however, there were two alternatives: Either (a) the Republican Party would prove that it had become an effective vehicle for advocating and using its power to begin putting into effect the dramatic change necessary to reverse – not just halt, reverse – the debt abyss and the metastasis of the central government; or (b) the Republican Party would prove that it was not up to this challenge, would substitute lame excuses (“We only control one-half of one-third of the government”) for steely spines, and would therefore demonstrate that conservatives would be better off abandoning the GOP and establishing a new vehicle.

We’ve now seen enough to draw a conclusion: the Republican Party says what it believes must be said to entice conservative votes at election time, but it is not remotely serious about implementing limited government policies 

 or dealing with the two central challenges of our age, existentially threatening deficit spending and Islamic supremacism.

Under the leadership of progressive-lite House Speaker John Boehner and his fellow professional Washington moderates in the GOP Senate leadership, congressional Republicans agreed to budgeting that internalized into its baselines Obama’s exorbitant stimulus spending. They signed off on a reckless extension of the government’s line of credit to an astounding $16.4 trillion, then cynically insulted our intelligence by attempting to obscure and deny their approval of it – and presently, they are laying the groundwork to raise this “debt ceiling” to a mind-boggling $19 trillion, the next stop on the road to $22 trillion and beyond.  

As Mark Steyn  observes, the federal government now borrows a staggering $188 billion million per hour, adding $1 trillion to the debt every nine months. Contrary to what the GOP tells you, none of this could happen without the approval of the Republican-controlled House. . . . . . . 

In constitutional law, the pertinent issue is never what percentage of total power is allocated to a branch. The question is: Which branch is given supremacy over the relevant subject matter. On the subject matter of taxing and spending – including the task of setting the parameters of the government’s authority to borrow and spend – Congress is supreme and the House has pride of place. It is certainly true that congressional Republicans cannot force President Obama to sign bills and cannot, given the number of Democrats in both chambers, expect to override presidential vetoes. Nevertheless, spending requires legislative authority that originates in the House. It is not a matter of executive diktat [sic ?]. 

President Obama would not have a dime to spend unless the House and the Senate agreed to give it to him. The government could not borrow more money for President Obama to spend unless the House and the Senate both authorized the borrowing.  It is not that Republicans are powerless to tackle our debt crisis. It is that they lack the will. . . . . .

The current crop of Republican leaders has shown no stomach for the fight. 

In fact, notwithstanding that President Obama lost a remarkable ten million votes from 2008 in his narrow reelection last week (i.e., 13 percent of his support), House Speaker John Boehner is treating him as if he has a mandate to continue his failed policies – as if the country and its representatives have no choice but to roll over on the immensely unpopular Obamacare law and concede on feeding Leviathan even more revenue and borrowing authority without deep cuts in spending (see Jeff Lord’s account, here); as if the country shares Boehner’s insouciance about the Islamist threat. . . . . . read the full 3 page article at PJ Media.