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Desperate Times?
I often feel that the basic disagreement between Status Quo Conservatives and the more radical Tear-it-Down conservatives is between those who think the government is basically doing a good job — with perhaps some adjustments needed at the fringes (think of Speaker Paul Ryan’s budget plans) — and those who see a $20 trillion debt bomb and growing government tyranny and are desperately seeking a fix. I am in the second camp. Moreover, I think we all can agree that Congress, for one reason or another, does not lead the nation. Nevertheless, there certainly are good people in both the House and Senate who would follow a president who was willing to take the heat for proposing and executing on a radically constitutionalist platform.
Which brings me to why Senator Ted Cruz has always been on my shortlist. Any anti-status quo leader has to be able to take the heat and stay in the kitchen: this is precisely what Cruz did in the Senate. People hated and ridiculed him, and he kept at it, without getting defensive or losing his cool. I can only imagine what it is like to be in that position and not taking it personally.
We are, indeed, in desperate times. Sooner or later, the other economic shoe will drop. We can still (sort of) get ahead of it. And we surely will need a president who is willing to do what needs doing, while not leaving the path of a constitutionalist, limited government.
Published in General
First you need to get individual appropriation bills to the floor of the Senate, that is what the Democrats prevented.
I’m going to get some hate when I point out that Paul Ryan’s budget plans contain spending cuts an order of magnitude greater than anything Cruz has ever presented. Cruz proposes eliminating a number of departments whose combined budgets are minuscule. Ryan has proposed actual entitlement reform.
At times I cannot understand how you guys are determining who is really conservative and who isn’t.
Ryan proposes Trillions in cuts: Status Quo manager
Cruz proposes Billions in cuts: Principled conservative
Hear, hear.
Real reform is going to be painful to some and maybe all, even worse it will be unsexy. Ryan seems willing to dive into details that don’t make headlines and therefore don’t advance his personal status. If you sincerely want true reform someone must do it. Instead he gets lambasted by his own constituency. That’s not exactly motivating for others to pick up the baton.
And, as Ramesh Ponnuru writes, Congress also needs to get its mojo back.
Ted Cruz has always BEEN my short list. (Of course, “always” being defined as since his first sentence on the televised debate with Mr. Dewhurst in 2012.)
The problem for some of us is that we don’t believe them anymore. Proposals, and even many votes, are all too often just orchestrated parts of the larger charade.
I never believe Mr. McConnell and his ilk. Many times I want to believe the Mr. Ryan’s of the beltway. I tend to believe Mr. Cruz.
From the House Budget Committee FY 2015 House Budget published April 2014; Paul Ryan Chairman:
Federal Outlays in Trillions:
2015: 3.664
2016: 3.676
2017: 3.787
2018: 3.927
2019: 4.134
2020: 4.334
2021: 4.516
2022: 4.733
2023: 4.865
2024: 4.995
Cruz: soft on Muslim immigrants, wildly expansive on legal immigrants, questionable (see Bush days) on illegal immigrants, and clueless on trade.
A Cruz nomination will mean a campaign dominated by shrill warnings of supposed rollbacks abortion and same-sex marriage. Cruz won’t get a word in edgewise and loses badly.
Who does Jeff Sessions endorse? Cruz or Trump?
Bueller? Bueller?
Must everyone who supports Cruz disdain Ryan?
If Ryan is so adept at trimming expenditures, how is one to understand the recent move, when he emerged from negotiations with Pelosi to push through in almost no time the omnibus spending bill, a bill which gave the Obama administration virtually everything it wanted to fund? A move and a bill praised by Pelosi and Reid? Looked to me as if Ryan, in his first big test as Speaker, got rolled.
Now that Cruz is our only shot at a sane nominee, I’m all in for Cruz. The thing is, it does not do us any good to nominate the really radical choice if what it means is that we turn the presidency back over to the Democrats.
I asked this on another thread, and the question is still rattling around in my head: Would our country be better or worse off if we had nominated someone more electable than Goldwater in 1964? Obviously, Goldwater’s nomination paved the way for the Reagan revolution of 1980, but in the meantime an awful lot of damage had been done to the country, much of it by Lyndon Johnson (Great Society, anyone?), and much of it irreversible.
I hope we are not at exactly that juncture again, but the fear of many of us who have warmed to Cruz only late is that we are making the 1964 choice of the unelectable true believer all over again, only at a time that is even more critical for our nation and the world.
In Ryan’s defense the omnibus was negotiated on Boehner’s watch and the budget limits agreed to before Ryan’s term.
He has quite the mess on his hands right now trying to put that genie back in the bottle.
Not at all.
But he is often held up by those who find Cruz lacking as some type of exemplar of how the GOP in Congress should conduct themselves. So when the contrast is deliberately made in the course of discussion criticism of Ryan’s flaws becomes inevitable.
Possibly, Ryan is an exemplar, and possibly Ryan could further his own goals better if more of the folks Ryan had to work with were a little more on the “Cruz-ish” side of things. Brent says Ryan “has quite the mess on his hands”, and Fritz complained that Ryan “got rolled”. Those complaint make it sound as if Ryan’s Ryan-ness might be more effective if the others Ryan had to work with were more open to the direction of reform Ryan wishes to take.
Guys who complain Ryan’s reforms won’t go far enough are at least open to reforming things in Ryan’s direction. Though they might make a fuss about Ryan’s reforms being “insufficient”, I’d trust guys like that to ultimately support the kind of reforms Ryan wants more than I’d trust those whose worry is that Ryan’s reforms are already “too extreme”.
Too much of the antagonism toward Boehner (completely justified in my opinion) has been transferred toward Ryan. Boehner made a political calculation that risking a shutdown in a presidential election year would be suicidal. It was a horrible decision. But it was his, not Ryan’s. Ryan also seems to be preparing to make the conservative case for the election. Which is a helluvalot more than you can say for Trump.
Ryan embodies the conservative split and that combined with his post make him a lightning rod.
If conservative means preserving the existing extra Constitutional government and managing it differently/growing it slower than Democrats then Ryan is the man.
If conservative means returning to our Constitutionally limited roots and reverence for 10A, he isn’t the man.
I cannot say which definition is correct.
The tension is from when Ryan and his supporters want credit for being the latter while championing the former and that is intellectually dishonest.
The problem is that the constituency for ripping the whole edifice down all at once is near zero. It may be that we could get close to that at some point, but we can’t get there in one fell swoop, and any conservative message that suggests that we should is doomed to failure.
I think you may be confusing the end goal with the process.
We absolutely have a mess on our hands. On some level, we have to bring the American people along for the necessary reforms to get passed and stick. That’s why Ryan pounds away on the need for a big national debate. We need to put ideas before the American people, and focus attention on them long enough to be debated, not just thrown out for a news cycle.
We have to (forgive the really bad historical reference) re-educate large segments of the American people who don’t understand why our Constitutional limits, checks & balances, etc., aren’t arbitrary, but completely necessary. Not by packing them into rooms and playing James Madison over & over, but by putting forward ideas in the public square, frequently and consistently, that comport with a Constitutional view of government and its’ proper role. We have to change the electorate’s mind in order for the reforms to make sense to them.
Otherwise, we’re pushing an agenda that the people aren’t on board with & it sounds just like special interest politics (in their ears). Like it or not, the people do (eventually) get their way in a representative republic.
Meanwhile, we throw as much sand in the gears of the administrative abuses of the Obama Admin as we possibly can.
I disagree. The HFC is much more close to your characterization of ripping the edifice down at once. The rest of the Republican caucus are an ineffectual minority without them.
I fail to see how that is near zero.
Additionally, this group is largely responsible for the Republican Congressional majority and Boehner and now Ryan’s opportunity with the gavel.
There is no evidence Ryan and his constituency are interested in eliminating anything. They wish to manage it better/more efficiently, but under no circumstances eliminate any of it.
That doesn’t make him a bad guy or poor leader that he wants to conserve/preserve the existing federal government configuration. My only beef is with him and his supporters that claim otherwise in absence of any evidence.
Ricochet member Martel had an excellent post on pragmatists back in August. I think he’s right that there really are two types of pragmatists, some who agree with us more radical folks on first principles (and hence ultimate goals) and some who don’t. I had hoped Ryan was ( and remains) the first kind, though I suspect those of the first kind risk becoming the second kind through demoralization if there aren’t others willing to give the first principles moral support.
When we have a minority paying the income tax and corrosive programs like food stamps with more people receiving than live in many 1st world nations I don’t think there is a measured pragmatic way to change that calculus.
Add up all of the non Medicare and Social Security federal transfer payments and there is no mathematical way there is a majority of recipients to give up their benefits.
We can’t or will not raise taxes across a sufficient number of people to fund these programs and if we do we kill an already ailing economy that is saddled with more federal debt than GDP.
Everyone wants a high fiber, low fat, high protein, chocolate chip cookie that cures cancer and clears up acne. There is a better chance of baking that cookie than getting out of the great society mess we’ve made without some hardship.
The only way out I see is starve the resources. No more debt limit raises ever and withhold funding. We won the elections in 2010 and 2014 to do so.
I am unconditionally in iWe’s camp. We don’t need measured pragmatic adjustments. If we don’t take the medicine now on our terms the currency market will feed it to us on theirs and I am confident our solution is better than theirs.
In terms of how to do it, here is my simple proposal:
Pass a Freedom Bill: allow any two entities to contractually agree to any transaction, and explicitly waive all regulatory or other government recourse save for the contract itself.
You sell it as being pro-Freedom – or even, to drive people nuts, “Pro-Choice.”
Voila! Individuals and companies and doctors and institutions will slowly start “opting out” – freely offering goods and services of all kinds, with no government oversight.
This does not assault the government: it flanks it.
A President Cruz could lead such a proposal, and a Republican Congress could pass it. It would restore freedom to Americans.
Over time, such a Freedom Act would not only destroy Obamacare and most regulations (such as the FDA), but it would also reduce the entitlement burden, because we could structure it so those who choose to opt out forego entitlements.
More and more Americans would discover that it is more rewarding to work and earn freely, than to rely on the government teat.
What evidence do you have anything more than a tiny portion of Republican voters in 2010 or 2014 were in favor of the type of immediate cuts in discretionary spending or tax increases would necessarily result from refusing to raise the debt limit?
The missing piece with the non-pragmatic crowd seems to be how you implement an admittedly non-pragmatic policy in a representative republic. How many House seats do you figure the GOP would have lost in 2012 if they had immediately ended Pell Grants, closed national parks, stopped highway repairs in the middle of ongoing projects, ended meat inspections, …? How long would it have taken Democrats in Jan 2013 to reverse all that and more?
There are days when I really wish I had more than one “Like.”
This is why I just posted an expansion of my ideas: There are VERY saleable solutions that would appeal to those of us who want real solutions, without losing elections for those who never want to back something that is unpopular.
I don’t know because my comment didn’t propose those things with the possible exception of Pell grants which given the campus conduct of late are probably losing support on a daily basis.
I am happy to address your question if you will take the time to read the comment rather than attributing your statist agenda to me.
Klaatu, I think we can implement much, if not all of it by not raising the debt ceiling.
If we want an enormous extra Constitutional government, fine, make sure everyone has to write a check for it rather than minority and those yet born.
I think that will change the discussion dramatically in our favor.
Your ideas are great but I’m not sure they satisfy the urge for immediacy such as, No more debt limit raises ever and withhold funding.
I read your comment. What exactly do you believe would be the effect of refusing to raise the debt ceiling? If I understand the process, the federal government would have sufficient tax receipts to pay entitlement benefits, interest on the existing debt, some military salaries, and little else. Am I wrong?