BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
Originally published in The Hill
Uncertainty is the one thing that seems certain in the world today. We are in an age of transition, sparked by changing social mores and unstoppable technological progress.
Where it will end, nobody knows.
Uncertainty breeds instability. And instability breeds insecurity.
Both political parties are embroiled in insecurity. Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
Despite being more philosophically in tune than ever before in its history, the Republican Party is theoretically in a civil war. The GOP used to have a prominent pro-choice wing, a prominent environmentalist wing, a prominent civil rights wing, a wing that wanted to raise taxes and wing that wanted to broadly increase spending, but those days are long over.
Since Ronald Reagan gained the White House, the GOP has been built on three sturdy legs of the stool. First, there was a libertarian, pro-growth, pro-low tax cut economic conservative leg. Then, there was a values-based, pro-family, anti-abortion socially conservative leg. Third, there was the military industrial, pro-defense, neo-conservative leg. Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
I have never heard anything more pathetic in my life.
Jason Johnson, the brains behind the Ted Cruz operation, inked a column in Red State, blaming the Republican Establishment for Ken Cuccinelli’s loss in Virginia.
This is the same guy who advised Ted Cruz (I assume, since he is the brains in the Cruz Operation) that urging House and Senate Republicans to shut down the government would be a smart political strategy. Continue reading
BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON
You’re a RINO!
No! You are!
I am not! You’re a big ugly RINO! And your mother dresses you funny!
RINO stands for Republican In Name Only. I got called a RINO because I hung out with “moderates.” It used to be a slam against Republicans who didn’t toe the conservative orthodox line.
I helped former New York Rep. Amo Houghton start the Republican Main Street Partnership, an organization he founded and funded to expand the influence of Republicans (and he hoped, ultimately, Democrats, too), who occupied the center of the political spectrum. Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
I want to focus on the good news.
The good news is that Barry Black, the Senate Chaplain, has come out of this entire mess as the only clear winner. His sermons have been on point, passionate, realistic and deeply spiritual. And he is now a rock star (as much as a Senate Chaplain can become a rock star).
The good news is that the government is finally open again.
The good news is that we didn’t default on our debts.
The good news is that the stock market largely ignored what was happening in Washington, figuring that we would figure it out. They were right. Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
So, why did John Boehner make one last effort to get the House Republicans to vote on one final unified offer yesterday?
On its face, the Speaker’s Hail Mary Pass seemed risky.
The Senate was close to reaching a final agreement, which Boehner’s announcement seemingly scotched. The clock was ticking towards the final countdown until financial Armageddon. The stock market was getting nervous. The ratings agencies were none-too pleased and getting increasingly agitated with the Washington shenanigans. Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
Passing a debt limit extension is hard.
The Democrats like to talk about how the Republicans should pass a clean debt extension. And then they like to run campaign ads against Republicans who vote for a clean debt extension.
Denny Rehberg, the Republican Congressman who ran for the Senate seat in Montana, found that out the hard way. So did George Allen, who ran against Tim Kaine.
Democrats ran ads hitting both Allen and Rehberg for voting to extend the debt limit, just as their President was beating up Republicans for not voting to extend the debt limit.
Hypocrisy runs so deep with the Democrats in Washington that they aren’t even self-conscious about it. Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
At my gym, they put little inspirational quotes up on the wall to get you to work out harder (that’s the theory, at least).
“Lead, follow, or get out of the way,” was last Tuesday’s quote, attributed to the Marine’s handbook, which was a revelation to me. I always thought that Lee Iacocca was the man who first said that memorable phrase when he was trying to fix Chrysler.
This quote must haunt Congressional Republicans on both sides of the Capitol dome.
In the House, the followers aren’t following the Leaders. In the Senate, the Leaders aren’t following the followers. Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
So, amid the myriad of scandals that currently occupy DC elite, the House of Representatives worked late into the night to vote once again to repeal Obamacare.
The press played this as another partisan attempt to poke at the President, a waste of time, a waste of effort, a waste of money. The bill wasn’t going to go anywhere in the Senate, so why would House Republicans do this for the 37th time?
I think there are several good reasons.
First, this is a revenue bill, and should the Senate want to go to conference on a revenue bill, this gives them a vehicle to do that. Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
“These guys are like the Hatfields and McCoys. That’s why they can’t get anything done in Congress.”
My cab driver pretty much nailed it on the head. Relations between the Democrats and the Republicans in Congress have taken on all of the characteristics of that famous family feud.
The Hatfield-McCoy feud started out when a McCoy came home from the Civil War as a Union soldier, angering a group of Hatfields, who had formed a pro-Confederacy vigilante group called the “Logan wildcats.” They promptly murdered him. Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
Sens. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) were the highest-profile stars of the Tea Party Class of 2010. They successfully scared two centrists out of the Republican Party before a primary vote was even cast, and were held out as examples of conservative leadership, dedicated to stopping President Obama at all costs.
Less than three years later, they no longer seem to be so extreme. Instead of being content to vote “no” and go home, they are in the middle of the various Senate gangs. Toomey is working with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) to enact Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
Greg Walden condemns an unpopular proposal in the President’s budget and gets attacked by the right-wing.
What is up with that?
Walden is the popular, smart, hard-working head of the National Congressional Campaign Committee. His job is to elect Republicans, or more precisely make certain that Republicans stay in control of the House.
He attacked the Obama budget for its inclusion of a proposal to recalibrate Social Security’s cost of living adjustments to be more in line with actual Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
On Dec. 5, 1933, right after dinner bells rang across the country, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a proclamation that ended Prohibition and solidified the vast majority of Catholic votes for the Democratic Party for 40 years.
The first time Catholics voted overwhelmingly Democratic was in 1884, when a spokesman for a group of New York preachers, a guy named Samuel Burchard, condemned Grover Cleveland for being from a party that represented “rum, Romanism and rebellion.” That little statement energized German and Irish Catholics to swing the vote against James Blaine, giving a close election to Cleveland. Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
The soup is not quite simmering, yet some conservatives are too anxious to serve it to the American people.
The soup is Obamacare, and for some activists, House Republicans are not being aggressive enough to serve its repeal.
Patience, my friends, patience. Obamacare will be repealed, slowly, but surely.
Congressional Republicans have voted about a million times to repeal the clunky law, to little effect. But those repeal votes have been premature. Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
Probably the best thing for Republicans would be for the Supreme Court to rule that gay marriage is legal and let us all move on, but I don’t think that is going to happen. The media is completely focused on the goings on at the nation’s highest court, as if there is nothing else in the world that matters. And that means I have to give my two cents worth.
It used to be that the prospect of gay marriage was a sure political winner for the GOP. Karl Rove worked with different groups to get referendums on various state ballots to help drive the Christian right to the polls, the theory being that if Christians went to the polls, they would vote for George Bush. Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
This should give a sense of how politically far afield the conservative movement has gone.
The CPAC convention has invited Richard Fisher, the head of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank and big-time Democrat, to address the group while going out of its way to make sure that everybody knew that Bob McDonnell and Chris Christie, the two most popular Republican governors in the country, have not been invited.
Fisher has been invited because he agrees with Bernie Sanders that the U.S. government should somehow break up America’s largest banks.
McDonnell and Christie have been dis-invited because they governed in such a way as to make them the most popular Republican governors in the country. Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
In 1995, at Xerox Document University, Newt Gingrich and John Kasich convinced the revolutionary class of 1994 and reluctant old-timers to work together to produce the first balanced budget in a generation.
Kasich’s budget included a pro-growth tax reform agenda and some painful cuts to some entitlement programs, chiefly Medicare and Medicaid.
Republicans passed that first balanced budget, and through some luck and some unforeseen economic growth, the budget magically balanced three years later. Continue reading
BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com
America Held Hostage: Sequester Day 11
Although it hasn’t made much news, what with the world missing a Pope, the Senate missing an on-the-floor bathroom, Venezuela missing a President, and President Hamid Karzai missing a press conference with Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel; but President Barack Obama has missed the deadline for producing a budget document for the United States.
It’s not as if the whole government spending thing hasn’t been a big deal in Washington. You might have been following along as Republicans and Continue reading
BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com
America Held Hostage: Sequester Day 8
It didn’t snow in DC on Wednesday so I spent the entire afternoon watching Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) filibustering the nomination of John Brennan to be the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Sen. Paul’s issue wasn’t with Brennan; it was with the refusal of President Barack Obama to describe his position on using drones to kill people generally, and Americans in particular, on U.S. soil. Continue reading
BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
Don’t tell the Tea Party, but the tag team of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are currently mopping the floor with Barack Obama.
The president convincingly won a second term in November, but since that time, the congressional Republican leadership has outfoxed, outmaneuvered and plain out-strategized him on just about every issue. Continue reading