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UPDATE JANUARY 12! Erick Erickson on “A Mitch-erable Failure -McConnell either misled or can’t lead” here. ED:  It appears that half (twelve) of the Republicans voting supported the Land Grab and Anti-Energy Bill by voting for cloture, and half (twelve) voted against supporting the measure by opposing cloture.
UPDATE JANUARY 11! The U. S. Senate this afternoon agreed to cloture here on the Land Grab and Anti-Energy Bill here. Yesterday Amanda Carpenter reported “Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R.-Ky.) is urging his fellow Republicans to just skip the vote, as a means of opposing the bill and drawing attention to the fact it’s been more than 120 days since Reid allowed a GOP amendment to be accepted on the floor.” Sixty favorable votes were needed; sixty-six favorable votes were cast.  Twelve Republicans voted for cloture.  The Senate Republican leadership failed to make opposing this dangerous measure a required party vote. Scroll down to revisit Erick Erickson’s original case against Senate Republican Leader McConnell.  We suggest it is time for the conservative grass-roots nationally to ask for a public accounting from the Kentucky senator for his leadership failures before we get thoroughly rolled in that chamber.  Click here for details from Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn on this most questionable measure which just got a green light (in the first Senate record vote of the 111th Congress) to move ahead toward Senate approval. * * * * * * * * * *

Do Republican Leaders Learn Nothing and Forget Nothing?

Like the Bourbon kings of France, the Republican leadership of the two houses of Congress more and more frequently seems neither to learn anything nor forget anything — especially about their conservative members who don’t toe the big-government line.

Today National Review on Line (NRO)’s David Freddoso reports here –

“NRO has learned that the House Republican Steering Committee will appoint Rep. Jeff Flake (R., Ariz.) to the Government Reform and Oversight Committee, not to the Appropriations Committee, where some conservatives have hoped he’d land. A House Leadership aide tells NRO that the appointment came after Flake requested it in December. Flake realized there was little chance of him being placed on Appropriations, where, as an anti-earmark crusader, he would have been something of a bull in a china shop.” (Underscoring Forum’s.)

The “2007 Club for Growth RePORK Card” here details Mr. Flake’s efforts in the House to try to pass many anti-pork amendments.  Readers are invited to review this lamentable tale of spending, and to tally, by way of local contrast, Virginia Republican appropriator Frank Wolf’s votes on the 50 anti-pork amendments listed.

One might ask how many more seats do the House Republican barons need to lose before a Jeff Flake will be allowed on the appropriations panel?

Meanwhile other conservative voices bewail what they view as senator Mitch McConnell’s missteps as Republican Senate leader in the new Congress, and particularly with what some see as his abdication on the “Land Grab Bill” slated for a vote this Sunday afternoon. 

Richard Morrison and Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute in the CEI post “Senate Land Grab Bill Would Lower Energy Production|Congress Ignoring Real Priorities While Expanding Government Power” here declare –

“’The Bingaman-Reid bill is full of bad provisions, but the worst are the ones that would prohibit oil and natural gas production on more than a million acres of federal land,’” said Myron Ebell, Director of Energy Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. ‘Tens of millions of acres of federal lands in the West have already been withdrawn from mineral and energy production. The new Congress should be opening some of these areas, which would help increase domestic energy production and lower prices. Instead, faced with declining natural gas production and potential shortages in the near future, the first bill that Majority Leader Harry Reid wants the Senate to consider would take 1.2 million acres in Wyoming with high natural gas potential out of production.’”

But where is the good Mr. McConnell in combatting this measure?  Is he Horatius at the Bridge holding back the governmentalist hordes? 

No, emphatically, he is not, nor is he the masked man on his horse Silver bringing law and order to an unruly legislative arena, charges Red State’s Erick Erickson in a salty and obviously exasperated post yesterday here –

“Example 1: McConnell has today allowed Harry Reid to move forward with the Lands Bill despite Tom Coburn’s hold on it.
Example 2: McConnell will not fight for hunters rights on public land with regard to the Lands Bill.
Example 3: McConnell will not even show up on Sunday to vote on the Lands Bill.
Example 4: McConnell is not fighting Reid on throwing Coburn off the Judicial Committee and is already planning on caving to Reid’s demands to seriously cut the number of Republican Senators on Committees — an action that will significantly impact conservative senators.
Example 5: McConnell privately told Republican senators this week that he will not publicly fight Barack Obama’s economic agenda.
Example 6: Senate Bills 1-10 are traditionally reserved for the majority leader to throw ’sense of the Senate’ red meat resolutions to their base.  Senate Bills 11-20 are traditionally reserved for the minority leader to do the same for the minority’s base. Reid filled SB 1-10 on the first day.  McConnell has not even filled SB 12-20.  In the last congress, he never got around to filling 11-20 until near the end of the session.
Example 7: McConnell, in public, has said he’ll go along with Barack Obama’s stimulus package. ‘Given the deficit numbers, it really ought not to be a $1 trillion spending bill.’ So apparently $999 billion is okay. ABC News notes, “McConnell said that Republicans have consulted with economists ‘who would be considered more conservative,’ and, ‘Each of them agreed with the president, the incoming president, that we need to do a stimulus.’” When did Brookings Institute economists become conservative?!
Example 8: The White House tells me no member of Congress fought harder against the President’s Executive Order banning earmarks than Mitch McConnell.
Example 9: The day the amnesty bill died last summer, the very same day, McConnell and Reid tried to rush through a unanimous consent to push the ethics bill to conference, even though it was clear that Senator DeMint had a standing objection of it going to conference because Reid was indicating he wanted to use the conference to strip DeMint’s earmark reforms.
Example 10: Reid now files cloture immediately when he brings a bill to the floor, when the GOP used to be allowed days of debate before cloture. Reid has demanded to pick and choose GOP amendments, limiting the GOP to usually 3 or fewer votes on GOP amendments, and nearly every time he demands either a Democratic amendment side by side or demands changes to the GOP amendment. None of this could happen without McConnell allowing it to. At any point, McConnell could stand up and say he will not give unanimous consent to anything and the Senate will come to a standstill if Reid doesn’t stop trying to run the Senate like the House. Instead, McConnell has sought ‘bipartisan accomplishments’ and has refused to fight for GOP rights on amendments. Every now and then he takes a small stand, but backs down after a few days or one cloture vote.
Example 11: The GOP was enraged about ACORN getting funds in the bailout, but McConnell did absolutely nothing to stop it. And its not like anyone in GOP was unaware that ACORN was a corrupt, radical liberal organization. The House GOP leaders and conservative Senators had to push to block ACORN.
Example 12: And this one is the irony: McConnell was so confident he could get the courts to kill campaign finance reform, he declined to filibuster it, despite having enough votes to sustain a filibuster.”

And the rarely tongue-tied Michelle Malkin reports here –

“Oh, no. Not again. I need to wear a safety helmet to cover the Republican incompetents trying to muster up a response to the Obama Generational Theft Act of 2009.

Mitch McConnell, if you are not going to be able to stop this disaster, please just shut up. Reader Mitch F. e-mails that McConnell’s just given us another head-banging moment (the first one from this week is here):

Mitch McConnell was just on Fox already indicating that all but 2 states are going to get bailed out by the feds. But don’t worry, the money will be spent ‘judiciously’ according to McConnell, as it has with the other stimulus plans the feds have implemented so far. He actually said that.”

FLASH THIS AFTERNOON HERE! “Mitch McConnell Pays Attention. Engages For Us. Please call and tell him thank you,”announces Erick Erickson –

“I never like being mean to guys on our side. So I’m glad I can now, this afternoon, write in praise of MItch McConnell. Senate sources tell me McConnell is paying attention and is now running a back channel action to disrupt Reid on Sunday. Basically, McConnell has gone from not being in the Senate on Sunday to encouraging other Republicans to skip out too, which will actually disrupt Reid’s efforts to get to sixty votes. I’m told this turn by McConnell as well as outside groups on the left and right coming out, just might be able to throw a serious monkey wrench in Harry Reid’s plans. So let’s say thank you now to Mitch McConnell for listening. His number is 202-224-2541. So often times we call and complain, we really should encourage each other to also call and say thank you for listening and helping.”

With Paul Weyrich gone, who today is strong enough, disinterested enough (without lobbying conflicts),  with sufficient credibility to rally the national conservative organizations - from fiscal to values to defense voices — to bring sense to the Republican Congressional leadership?  Which one of the candidates for chairman of the Republican National Committee is best suited to talk turkey to senator Mitch McConnell and House Republican leader John Boehner?  Indeed, which of the candidates will even see that would be one of his roles?

 

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