by George Rasley
In CHQ Chairman Richard Viguerie’s book TAKEOVER, Mr. Viguerie observed that the only battles conservatives are guaranteed to lose is the ones we don’t fight.
And if for concrete proof of that dictum one only needs to look back at the first two years of the Donald Trump presidency: In the U.S. House of Representatives the Republican leadership under Speaker Paul Ryan went completely squishy on conservative policy after conservative policy, until President Trump stepped in to push them to fight, likewise in the Senate, until the fight to confirm Justice Kavanaugh put a backbone into Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and enough Republicans to get Kavanaugh through his hellish confirmation.
Justice Kavanaugh would never have been confirmed, nor would the tax cuts have passed the Senate, nor would Obamacare’s individual mandate have been repealed had Trump not been willing to fight.
However, to the Washington establishment, conservatives who fight for their principles and for the limited government policies that have revived the American economy are “divisive.”
Chris Wallace, interviewing President Trump for Fox News framed the issue this way:
I was in Saint Joseph, Missouri, this last week and I was talking to a lot of loyal Republicans. They love what you’ve done to the economy. They love the fact that you have basically put ISIS out of business. The one thing they say is, why do you have to be so divisive? Why don’t you do more to bring the country together?
And as the President explained to Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, fighting and confrontation were essential to getting anything done in the face of the Democrats’ “Resistance.” Said President Trump:
I think that if I was very different, I wouldn’t have gotten what we had to get, the biggest tax cuts in history, ANWR approved, got rid of the individual mandate, the most unpopular thing you could imagine, health care. I got rid of it. Everybody said it would be impossible to get rid of it. The regulations. I think if I was a more modified, more moderate in that sense I don’t think I would have done half of the things that I was able to get completed.
The President went on to explain to Wallace:
With that being said, other than you have to have a certain ability to fight back, and as you know people they take a strong stance on me both ways — love and hate. I would like to see it maybe a little bit more right down the middle but something that is important to me but a lot of times you can’t practice tone because you have people coming at you so hard that if you don’t fight back in a somewhat vigorous way you’re not going to win and we have to win. This country has to win. We have a lot of victories coming and if I go to low key were not going to have those victories.
And history demonstrates that President Trump is right; moderation by Republicans or compromise by conservatives simply moves the country toward the Left at a slightly slower pace, because the Left never compromises to the Right.
To the Left a “compromise” is to increase spending by 10 percent instead of 20 percent; even though the “cut” is merely a reduction in the projected growth of spending.
The same with revenues; the Left always opposes reducing taxes, even if the reduction results in an increase in revenues (as it has) because the goal of the Left isn’t generating revenue, it is controlling behavior through the tax code.
Soon after the Tea Party Congress was elected in 2010, Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein penned for The Washington Post, “Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem,” in which they claimed that the Tea Party–inspired Republican Party had “become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
The progressive Washington establishment and their Republican fellow travelers have been saying much the same thing, and worse, ever since Donald Trump won, so let us translate what the Leftist establishment really means: Donald Trump is making it more difficult for Democrats to reduce your liberty, freedom, and rights and grow the power of the federal government, and they want him to be nice and let them win.
