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Tags: obama | spending | taxes | omnibus
OPINION

Why Has GOP Caved on Obama's Spending Demands?

Michael McDaniel By Wednesday, 23 December 2015 11:28 AM EST Current | Bio | Archive

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives and then the Senate following suit last week passed an omnibus budget bill that looks something like what Democrats and their lobbyists wrote.

This is mind-numbing considering that the Republican majority in the House consists of 246 members, to the Democrats who have 188, yet they passed a bill chock full of Obama goodies such as funding for Planned Parenthood, Syrian refugees, illegal immigrant resettlement, and the climate agreement in Paris.

Equally the Republican-dominated Senate which is made up of 54 GOP members and 44 Democrats fell in line and gave the president much of what he asked for.

It gets better. The GOP won large majorities in Congress in the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections. In 2010 the House GOP gained 64 seats bringing in a new majority of 242 to 193. The GOP won six seats in the Senate making gains on the Democrats allowing them only a 51-47 advantage.

The midterm voters spoke again with a roar in 2014 and increased the divide in favor of the GOP in the House and gave control of the Senate to the Republicans.

Not only that, according to Politifact.com, since Obama took office in 2009 Democrats have lost a total of 910 seats across the nation’s state legislative bodies and Republicans now hold 56 percent of the nation’s 7,383 legislative seats.

In large part when anyone looks at the "blue-red" political map through any lens, what you see is the blue, (Democrat) relegated to the northeast part of the country and the West Coast, (with a few states like Minnesota, Michigan, and New Mexico thrown in the mix). Otherwise, the rest of American is red. So it’s settled that the GOP controls Congress and the purse strings.

So riddle me this: How does one reconcile these historic gains by the GOP under a failed Democrat president, who at every turn has chosen far-left ideological demagoguery, (that’s a big phrase for adhering to leftist and socialistic high ideals instead of pragmatic governing), continue to own the GOP like a house pet?

There is little doubt with such examples as Obamacare, climate change, illegal immigration, and the onslaught of executive orders that challenge constitutionality, that this president has and is governing against the will of the people. And yet, that’s not all.

Consider the president’s approval ratings; according to Gallup.com the president hasn’t even cracked the 50 percent range on his job approval rating since April 29, 2013. The average for presidential job approval since 1938 is 53 percent. Obama’s average job approval rating across the length of his presidency is 47 percent.

If Obama worked in the private sector, he wouldn’t have made his second year of employment. In fact, many companies use a 5-point scale with terms such as high performer, exceeds expectations, meets expectations, below expectations, does not meet expectations’ to grade the performance of their employees.

In a nutshell, if an employee gets below expectations in two successive performance appraisals, he or she is toast. Obama has virtually lived ‘below expectations’ for the lion share of his presidency, yet you still have the remarkable and unexplainable anomaly of the GOP living as the Obama doormat.

It’s not as if the GOP has unwittingly been backed into a corner with Obama and the Democrats outsmarting them with the equivalency of a Bobby Fischer chess game. Obama has beaten the GOP, despite abject evidence to the contrary, and it comes down to this simple deduction; the GOP leadership exemplifies cowardice.

Michael McDaniel is a political commentator who has been covering election politics in Iowa for over a decade. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.


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MichaelMcDaniel
The Republican-controlled House of Representatives and then the Senate following suit last week passed an omnibus budget bill that looks something like what Democrats and their lobbyists wrote.
obama, spending, taxes, omnibus
612
2015-28-23
Wednesday, 23 December 2015 11:28 AM
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