More Committees! More Staffers! More Embarrassing Republican Losses!

If you’ve read my post my post on the plight of conservatism this morning, this news story ought to look pretty familiar. You can file it under all three problems I wrote about, all at the same time.

After a week of tension and recriminations following a special election loss in Mississippi, House Minority Leader John A. Boehner and NRCC Chairman Tom Cole will unveil a series of changes Wednesday aimed at quelling criticism and positioning their party for November’s elections.

Here are the “changes”.

1) Tom Cole’s going to add a new high-level staff member who is really cozy with Boehner and a couple other Republican members of Congress.
2) The pair will empanel a brand new shiny committee to “guide” the NRCC (which, by the way is already a committee) and will “…monitor operations and help coordinate fundraising and other campaign activities”.

There. That’s the “series of changes” that the Republican leadership has concocted. Doesn’t that just make you all warm and excited about voting in November? Can’t you just smell the sweet, sweet savor of success wafting from that warm pile of changes?

I sure can. At the rate they’re going, they’ll be able to hold their 2010 Republican Caucus meetings at a corner booth in an Applebee’s with a seat or two to spare.

That’s only part of it, though. They also held a big meeting where most of the members apparently shot out a whole bunch of winning ideas like passing new regulations aimed at “consumers and families”, cracking down on online predators, and government college savings accounts.

Nothing says “Republicans” like brand new regulations and making people use the government as a bank instead of, well, an actual bank. Remember that corner booth at Applebee’s? They won’t need the one in the corner. A regular booth will fit them all just fine.

Only one guy in this entire article had the word “principle” attached to anything he said – Jeb Hensarling. One of his biggest ideas, an earmark moratorium, has been shot down twice already which leads me to believe that smaller government doesn’t exactly seem to be a guiding principle of the Republican party in Congress these days.

Ugh. It’s awfully hard to rally behind a party whose bedrock principles seem to involve forming more committees and hiring more highly-paid staffers.

Other Posts of Interest:

• Let’s Hunt Us Some RINOs! And John Boehner, too.
• Arlen Specter is What’s Wrong with the Republican Party.
• Reviving Conservatism, Part I: What Happened?

Tags: 2008 Election, Conservatism, Republicans

Category: The 2008 Horse Race, The Republican Minority