Boehner Caves on Amnesty: March 3, 2015 is day that will live in infamy

“We were never going to win in Congress.”

That is the epitaph spoken by Speaker Boehner ally Representative Tom Cole on the collapse of House Leadership’s resolve to legislatively fight Executive Amnesty.

House and Senate Republicans who still care about the country, should throw off the illusion that they are in the majority, and start fighting like they are a minority caucus. This means using every means at their disposal to thwart Obama’s agenda and nominees.

It may also be the final nail in the coffin for the notion of co-equal branches of government, as President Obama has already announced that he is considering using unilateral executive actions to ban ammunition and raise corporate taxes, on top of his massive Internet regulation announced last week.

House and Senate Republicans who still care about the country, should throw off the illusion that they are in the majority, and start fighting like they are a minority caucus. This means using every means at their disposal to thwart Obama’s agenda and nominees.

Congress’ retreat into obscurity under Republican leadership has been rapid and pronounced, and the cave in on Executive Amnesty was inevitable the moment Republican leaders declared that any kind of government shutdown was unacceptable.  Everything since then has been merely delaying the inevitable.

One of the great ironies is that in the same article that Tom Cole provided consolation that one federal court judge had stopped Executive Amnesty as unconstitutional.  What Cole didn’t mention is that the Obama administration is arguing that the federal courts should not intervene because Congress is failing to use the power of the purse to defund the action.  A legitimate argument that Congress is assenting to the action based upon their decision to provide funds to carry it out.  Now, the collapse of opposition to funding will be all the more powerful and dissuade the Court – the least powerful of the three branches of government -- from intervening in a Constitutional fight that Congress itself surrendered on.

But we can learn something from Cole’s admission that they “never were going to win in Congress,” as it shows the callow nature of the Republican political animal.  Politicians who ran ad after ad hammering Obama’s unlawful Executive Amnesty prior to the election in a hope to gain or increase their political majority, never had any expectation that America’s vote in November actually mattered.

In fact, they had no intention of doing what they knew was necessary to win the issue.

During the lame duck session in November, the current leaders of Congress chose to carve out the battleground for the Executive Amnesty fight for late February with the focus upon Department of Homeland Security funding.

They did so over the objections of opponents to funding Executive Amnesty who urged a short-term funding bill for the entire government, to provide more leverage against the president in the fight.

Now, we know that Republican leadership never had a plan or even a desire to win.

We also know that Senator Harry Reid still runs the Senate and Congress as a whole, with the minority imposing their will on the majority in an unprecedented manner.

So, what can be done moving forward, since, unfortunately, the federal government is going to continue governing and expanding the size and scope of government along the way.

First off, House and Senate Republicans who still care about the country, should throw off the illusion that they are in the majority, and start fighting like they are a minority caucus. This means using every means at their disposal to thwart Obama’s agenda and nominees.

This means derailing the Speaker and Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s efforts to give President Obama fast track trade authority and preventing him from writing the rules for the world’s economy.

It means ending the Attorney General hopes of Loretta Lynch, who has made it clear that she will continue to use the Department of Justice as the legal henchmen for Obama’s destruction of the rule of law.

And it means taking down every rule that Speaker Boehner tries to put on the floor denying him the majority he needs to lead the House, and grinding the place to a standstill.

Cole’s big reveal that the entire anti-Executive Amnesty play in the House was nothing more than theatrics led by a leadership team that not only never had any strategy for victory, but through their actions showed that they never even wanted to win is such a breach of trust that there is no longer any reason to blindly allow them to set the floor agenda.

Unless drastic actions are taken, Cole has admitted that we are in Obama’s post-Constitutional world, where Congress has no real power.

After winning on the Executive Amnesty issue, there is no reason for Obama to not instruct the IRS to raise corporate tax rates. After all, who is going to stop him?

And as little banty roosters like Senator Lindsey Graham flap their arms and claim they have the votes to stop any Obama nuclear deal with Iran, it doesn’t matter, because Obama won’t follow the law anyway.  He already knows that Congress won’t stop him.

March 3, 2015, a day which will live in infamy.