THE SIGNIFICANCE OF A House majority lies in the role the Constitution assigns to this chamber. The founders were concerned about the chief executive they had created and the possibility that an unscrupulous occupant of the White House might attempt to make himself a new monarch. They were concerned that, like Obama, he might spurn the legislative powers of Congress and rule by executive order. As Andrew McCarthy explained in an article for National Review, the Constitution entrusted the House with two checks on an executive tyranny.1 The first lay in the power of the purse, which the House could use to block any expansion of executive power by denying the president the means to achieve it. They could defund his unconstitutional programs and remove the means to execute his extralegal designs. The second check was impeachment, available when the president proved so lawless as to require removal.
But when Obama acted illegally, legislating changes in Obamacare from the executive branch and granting amnesty to illegal aliens that he himself conceded were unauthorized, the majorities elected by Republican voters failed to employ either of the constitutional checks to stop him. During the 2014 campaign, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell assured Republicans that their elected representatives would use the congressional purse to block the Obama agenda: “In the spending bill we will be pushing back against this bureaucracy by doing what’s called placing riders in the bill. No money can be spent to do this or to do that [without congressional approval]. We’re going to go after them on health care, on financial services, on the Environmental Protection Agency, across the board. All across the federal government, we’re going to go after it.”2
But then, as McCarthy notes, the Republicans won the election, “and they agree[d] to pay for everything they campaigned against—Obamacare, immigration lawlessness, a Justice Department that practices racial discrimination in law-enforcement while using extortionate lawsuits to federalize the nation’s police, an IRS used as a weapon against conservative activists, an EPA decreeing economy-strangling regulations Congress has refused to enact, and so on. Moreover, they pass[ed] sleight-of-hand legislation to duck confrontations with Obama on the debt ceiling and the Iran deal—pieces of theater designed to dismantle the Constitution’s brakes but to allow them to pose as opposing that which their legislation actually enables.”3 The result of the Republicans’ cowardice was the breakdown of the constitutional system, the disenfranchisement of Republican voters, the establishment of an executive tyranny, and the continuing corruption of government institutions like the IRS and the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security. The result was a government growing ever more abusive and intrusive, able to expand its powers over a people whose will it could disregard without consequence.
The fecklessness of their leaders produced enough frustration and rage in the Republican ranks to produce the candidacy of an outsider, an American patriot distressed by the state of corruption and decline into which his country had fallen. Donald Trump’s blunt exposure of the rigged nature of the system, his willingness to disregard the politically correct constraints on public discourse, and his readiness to relentlessly attack the culprits struck a profound chord with record numbers of Republicans reacting to years of frustration and disappointment. The passions Trump aroused in the electorate sparked a revolt in the Republican Party and allowed him, as a political novice, to defeat 16 seasoned and tested rivals in the Republican primaries.
The failure of the Republican House to use its power to check Obama’s lawlessness and prevent his ever-expanding intrusions into the lives of Americans is easily understood. Republicans were afraid of being called “obstructionists” by the Democratic political machine and its media extensions. They were afraid of being stigmatized as “heartless” or “racist” or “xenophobic” when Democrats picked items out of the omnibus budget bill that provided aid to minorities or the poor or children. They were impotent because they did not have a political response to these Democratic attacks—nothing that would neutralize the powerful emotional appeal to voters from pleas on behalf of society’s defenseless and vulnerable. This gaping deficit in the conservative arsenal is manifest every time a Republican squares off with a Democrat, goes on the defensive, and then folds in the face of an overwhelming assault.4