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We’re Going to Need More Vito and Less Tom in the New Congress

Jimmie | December 22, 2010 | Comments (1)

Let’s face it, conservatives, Barack Obama and Harry Reid cleaned our clocks. We scored the biggest electoral win for any party since at least the end of World War II, a win so big that even the President was forced to remark on it. Our message — Washington is too damned big and too damned expensive — was now mainstream. People were talking about it and, mot importantly demanding that their elected officials fix the mess, pronto. The visible part of the electoral iceberg, the Tea Parties, put more people into Congress faster than any grassroots national movement in history. We had political momentum the likes of which none of us have ever seen in our lives and we were all set to kick some big government butt.

Then came the lame duck session. In one month, the President and the Senate Majority Leader exposed all our weaknesses, exploited our divisions, ran rings around us in the media, and trumped out historic election with an equally impressive lame duck session.

How did they rattle off a 4-2 record on bills that, without question, continue the relentless expansion of the federal government, reduce the amount of freedom you have, and blow even bigger holes in our deficit? I’m convinced it’s because we do not, in the words of Michael Corleone, have “a wartime consigliere” running the GOP Senate.

Yep, folks, I’m talking about Mitch McConnell.

Make no mistake here. I have no doubt that Senator McConnell is a good man who truly wants our government to be much smaller, much less expensive, and far more responsive. He is an expert negotiator, perhaps the best we’ve had in his position in a very long time.

But he hasn’t been a fighter and that is a big problem.

Before I go on, let me summarize December’s lame duck session in terms of bills won and lost (at least as mainstream conservatives would consider them). In the cases of the bills lost, I’ve given my best estimate on what each of them will cost us in new government spending. I didn’t include the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” for a variety of reasons, the largest of which is that it didn’t have a measurable fiscal or regulatory impact.

Wins:

The Omnibus Spending Bill
The DREAM Act

Losses:

The tax deal (Price tag: about $280 billion of “stimulus spending”).
Child Nutrition Bill (Price tag: $4.5 billion)
The Food Modernization Act, passed by unanimous consent (Price tag: About $1.7 billion, plus 225 pages of new regulations).
9/11 First Responders pork bill (Price tag: $4.2 billion).
START Treaty

There has been plenty of debate about the inevitability of these bills passage, but there is one things about each of them that is true. None of them was guaranteed passage. The Democrats did not have enough votes on their side on any of these bills to break a moderately-determined filibuster. Every one of these fights was winnable, if we’re willing to define a win as “delay the final vote until the new Congress takes over in January” (and we should be, because a vote not taken is as good as an actual defeat).

Of course, a filibuster would require that all the Republicans stand together, as they did on the Omnibus Bill. Ace rightly points out that “RiNOs” were responsible for most of the losses, but I don’t see that as a valid excuse. We will always have “RiNO” Republicans, no matter how many elections we conservatives win. The trick to ensuring that the “RiNOs” don’t trample you is to make sure you have leverage over them and that you use that leverage at every opportunity. That requires a certain willingness to punish strays that McConnell simply does not have.

How do you keep a “RiNO” in line? It’s easy; you hit them where it hurts the most, their personal base of power. Lisa Murkowski wants plum committee assignments, so you make darned sure she knows that those assignments are contingent on voting the right way during the lame duck session. Might George Voinovich and Bob Bennett want to embark on new careers as lobbyists? You make it crystal clear that unless they toe the line for one more month, you will make them persona non grata among Senate Republicans for as long as you have the influence to do so.

Now, McConnell would have to play every angle for a month and twist arms very hard, but that is his job. Our problem is, he’s not an arm-twister and he never will be.

In January, a new Congress will take over and McConnell will find himself the leader of a larger minority. The battles in front of him — Obamacare repeal, budget reduction, Social Security and Medicare reform — will make this lame duck session seem like a relaxing month on a warm Tahiti beach. We’re going to need a Vito Corleone for the next couple of years, not a Tom Hagen. If Mitch McConnell can’t be the former, he should step aside and get behind someone who will be.