Rush Limbaugh followed through on his interview with Chris Wallace, which he previewed on his Friday show.
His key point was that the Republican establishment secretly wants to pass immigration reform, and is using the “threat of the consequences of a government shutdown” as cover for why Republicans are not going to confront President Obama for the next two years.
Rush Limbaugh does not do television interviews, having been burned too many times. This may be an indication that he feels his radio show no longer has the clout it had back in the Newt Gingrich era, when he was the king maker. Nobody credits Rush with inspiring the 2014 Senate victory.
Now – here is the bad news. In 2016, there will be at least 34 seats up for reelection. 24 of those currently are held by Republicans. These were the seats won in 2010 and two special Elections. Even if Democrats who lost all 10 seats, that would still give Republicans only 64 votes – not enough to override a presidential veto.
Back in 2012, I pointed out that the US Senate was the “only race that really counted”, as a Republican president with a Democratic Senate would not be able to make significant changes. Having said that, George W. Bush blew his time in office – giving us Medicare part D, the GM Bsilout and laying the foundation for the police state that Obama now controls.
Republicans have the ball. If they are able to pass Paul Ryan’s budget and the related appropriation bills in the Senate, I would consider that a major victory. My expectation is at imposition of a real budget will find massive unauthorized spending for the past six years when everything was on autopilot – IF the Republicans want to find it.
Sadly I don’t expect much from the Republicans in the House or Senate. The party leaders (and much of the rank and file) seem to lack any intestinal fortitude. I hope that I am wrong and they start to grow some semblance of a backbone, but based on their track record during my lifetime, I expect the best we will see is reducing our speed by 5 mph as we drive over the fiscal cliff.
Overnight, I was reading from the Libertarian leaning Independent Institute web site
http://www.independent.org/
It more than any other reflects my opinions about the role of government. I found it looking for information about how FDR’s desire to protect China drew us into World War Two. The comments to that article were just plain creepy. People don’t like when the Disney version of history is unmasked.
These folks are not zealots like the folks from reason.com who seem obsessed with legalizing pot and gay marriage. Their focus is more in pulling the government back from this instinct for a centrally planned economy and government / big corporation cronyism.
One of the problems of this opinion is that “hands off” means just that. This means that immigration laws should not be used to limit immigration in order to protect “American Jobs” from competition from lower wage workers.
This was the article that led me there
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1930
One significant omission is the role Joe Kennedy played in trying to keep FDR from supporting England