By Rick Manning
Anonymous and some not so anonymous Republican Senators attempted to bury their fellow Republican Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee for having the audacity to force Senate floor votes on the constitutionality of President Obama’s executive amnesty.
Due to outgoing Democrat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s intransigence, the Senate was kept in session on Saturday for the votes, upsetting those Senators who had made other weekend plans.
The big lie told by piqued Republicans is that Reid somehow would have closed up shop and gone home for the year if not for Cruz and Lee, but now he was ramming a bunch of appointees through the Senate.
On Fox News, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer told viewers, “What it did do is it gave Harry Reid the ultimate opening to use procedural tricks that today have given us the surgeon general who believes that gun control is a health issue. So that’s his achievement thus far. We’re going to have a couple other of those as Harry Reid gets new appointees who otherwise would not have been nominated or approved into office as a result of the Cruz maneuver.”
There’s only one problem. It’s wrong. It was going to happen anyway.
When Reid kept the Senate in session on both Monday and Tuesday, the lie fell apart given that the Senate still planned to pass a tax extenders bill before they mercifully went away. In the interim, Reid used the time to confirm an anti-gun Surgeon General whose public health credentials seem limited to screeds against gun ownership and leading the very small group of physicians who supported Obamacare.
Of course by the time the truth that Reid always intended to keep the Senate working this week regardless of what happened over the weekend, mainstream reporters had moved on to the next D.C. drama without regard to how badly they got played in what can only be described as a hit and run knifing of the dynamic duo of liberty by some embittered Senate Republicans..
In other news that sinks the hearts of D.C. conservatives, it was announced late Wednesday that Senator Mike Enzi will become chairman of the Senate Budget Committee over Jeff Sessions who distinguished himself as the ranking member. This lends further credence to the sentiment that the old guard Republican leadership holds a real animus against those who are willing to stand and fight.
Sessions is most noted for heroically taking on the amnesty issue from his perch on Judiciary Committee, but as the ranking member on Budget, he had been one of the few aggressive Republican Senators with real power.
Senator Enzi is a fine man with solid conservative credentials, but for those looking for real leadership in the battle to save our nation from fiscal ruin, he has been oddly silent in spite of his position on the Budget Committee.
For the sake of our nation’s fiscal future, one can pray that the Senate doesn’t squander this opportunity to draw a bright line distinction between a limited government vision for the federal government, and that of the Democrats.
With Senator Sessions, we knew what we were getting, let’s hope that Mr. Enzi is just a more low-key version.
Rick Manning is the vice president of public policy and communications of Americans for Limited Government.
