MAKING BOEHNER'S BONES
Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
Thursday, 13 January 2011
As the Loughner Lefties at the New York Times realized they jumped the shark in blaming the Arizona Massacre on Sarah Palin and the Tea Party Right, they smoothly shifted their strategy yesterday (1/12).
In a transparent ploy to monkey wrench the 112th Congress' program to dismantle ObamaCare and other Dem disasters, the NYT is now claiming that Boehner & Co must "play a less partisan role," and not "allow the House to slide back into confrontational politics." Translation: Republicans need to surrender to the Democrats.
And Boehner's response? As Eliza Doolittle said to Professor Henry Higgins, "Not bloody likely!" Zero and the Dems (and the Enemedia) are going to get the shock of their lives when they learn what Boehner has planned for them.
Get ready for this, folks, for it's going to knock the polka dots off your undies. This is going to make Boehner's bones.
Remember how Reagan made his? On August 3, 1981, 13,000 air traffic controllers went on strike, shutting down 7,000 flights at the peak of the summer travel season. They demanded $10,000 a year salary increases and an extortionate array of increased benefits.
Reagan branded the strike illegal and gave them 48 hours to return to work or else he would fire them all. They controllers laughed at him for what they thought was a foolish bluff. Except for 2,000 who did return to work, joining 3,000 FAA supervisors and 900 military controllers. 80% of flights went back to normal.
48 hours later on August 5, Reagan fired all 11,000 striking controllers - and imposed a lifetime ban on rehiring them. Then he had the Federal Labor Relations Authority disband PATCO - the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization. Not only were the strikers permanently fired, their union ceased to exist.
That's how to make your bones in Washington. No one ever messed with Reagan again.
So how is John Boehner going to do it? Hold on to those undies now... he plans to get Zero to sign, not veto, a bill to repeal ObamaCare.
Yes, repeal, repeal the whole damn thing, Zero's pride and joy. Here's the strategy.
First, the fallback remains: defund it, refuse to appropriate any money to implement any of it. But to go for the jugular means repeal. Of course, any stand-alone repeal bill such as HR 2 passed by the House will be blocked in the Senate, or if passed faces a certain presidential veto that cannot possibly be overridden.
HR 2, the
"Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act," takes 36 words to eliminate 2,000 pages of ObamaCare legislation: "Effective as of the enactment of Public Law 111-148, such Act is repealed, and the provisions of law amended or repealed by such Act are restored or revived as if such Act had not been enacted."
It will be voted on and passed by the House next week. It is only a warning shot. For its destiny is not to be a stand-alone bill, but an amendment to two other bills.
These two bills form the sides of a vise in which Dem cojones are inextricably trapped. They are:
the CR (Continuing Resolution) to fund the government past March 4 when the current CR ends; and
the bill to raise the debt ceiling (call it the DR, the debt raise).
These bills are "must pass" bills - for if they don't pass, the government shuts down, no checks go out to pay for anybody or anything, and government debt gets defaulted on.
Thus the repeal strategy: HR 2 will be appended to the next CR and the DR by the House. That's step one. Step two is for McConnell and DeMint to block any passage of either in the Senate unless HR 2 is appended.
And to keep those Dem cojones in an ever-tightening vise, both the CR and DR will be very short term - say 60 days for the former and $100 billion instead of a trillion for the latter, maybe less. This forces the Dems to fight the battle for more spending over and over again.
Step three is where it gets really interesting. The "ghost of 1995" haunting the Pubs is Gingrich forcing just such a government shutdown back then, which Clinton won and the Gingrich Pubs disastrously lost.
To avoid this happening again, companion legislation will be introduced in the House specifying those "essential services" of the federal government that would continue to be paid for at current levels should a CR or DR not be passed.
Call it the Essential Services or ES Bill. It will include the standard popular goodies people demand and the Dems scaremonger with: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other payments to individuals (but not to government employees - they get nada).
There is an argument over how long or short the ES list of government functions should be. Yet there is little need for it to be overly-long if it is amendable at any time by a simple concurrent resolution.
That way, when the Dems find some cute starving children who will die because of the heartlessly inhuman Republicans' refusal to spend taxpayers' money to save them, the Pubs have the option to add the relevant program to the ES list if the public clamor (not the Dem's) is loud enough.
And of course, the ES list would have no "non-essential" services or programs like the EPA, or funding for any agency to write and implement any new regulations whatever.
With the ES Bill, the vise really starts to squeeze. How will Harry Reid explain he opposes the ES Bill and would rather have a full government shutdown instead; that he would rather keep ObamaCare on life support rather than have seniors get their Social Security checks or Medicare payments? How will Zero?
In other words, the ES Bill puts the onus, fault, blame, and responsibility for a government shutdown on the Dems - not on Boehner & Co. Both Boehner and McConnell believe that there are enough Senate Dems wanting to keep their seats in 2012 to vote for the ES Bill, and the HR 2-appended CR & DR bills.
Which means they will be on Zero's desk for his signature or veto. If he doesn't sign them, all government services stop, pretty much immediately, and the government starts defaulting on Treasury interest payments. If he only signs the ES Bill, the same thing happens save for continued funding only for "essential services."
Boehner is betting Zero will buckle and sign the HR 2-appended CR & DR bills. With that, ObamaCare ceases to exist as if it never happened.
If he vetoes them and just signs the ES bill, Boehner still wins. Government has been truncated to "essential services" at a stroke, and now the whole debate is what government programs are "essential" or not, with the Dems on the defensive in the debate. This is orders of magnitude better than defunding one program at a time.
And if he vetoes all three, shutting the government down just to save ObamaCare, he gets the full and total blame for the shutdown -- a shutdown that would leave vast swathes of government programs and agencies in ruins.
Once that happens, millions of Americans would discover two amazing things: that they can get along just fine without all these Federalie programs and agencies - and with the government out of the way, they have innumerable opportunities to get a job or start a business they didn't have with the government in the way.
Oh, yes - a shutdown of course disintegrates the implementation of any part of ObamaCare, so it's useless to resist, Mr. President, it's best to cut your losses and sign, not veto.
If Boehner pulls this off, it doesn't just make his bones - he will be the King of Washington DC. Zero will be castrated. President Eunuch. His only possible hope for 2012 will be to work with the House and Senate Republicans in creating an environment for solid economic recovery that he can take credit for.
So... the trillion dollar question is: does Boehner have the stones to make his bones?
Until this repeal strategy emerged, all the talk was about trading raising the debt ceiling for a bunch of budget cuts. That's peanuts compared to zeroing out ObamaCare, which will save hundreds of billions by that alone.
Further, individual budget cuts, Boehner is advised, will be far more of a political liability. Remember how Tim Coburn got wasted (even by Fox News!) for opposing the $4 billion entitlement given to the 9/11 "first responders" by the Lame Schmucks? That's just a hint, Boehner is being warned, of what's to come with attempts to cut the budget a bite at a time.
Far better, and far more likely of success, to go for the gold, run for the roses, make your bones doing what you were elected to do: Repeal, not just defund, ObamaCare. Repeal it in less than sixty days from now - by mid-March.
The final decision hasn't been made, but Boehner, Cantor and the House leadership are edging up to it. They need all the encouragement and backup they can get. Let's give it to them. Let's make our bones too.
http://www.tothepointnews.com/content/view/4372/2/
