IN BUDGET FIGHTS AND in votes over Obamacare and other legislative programs, Democrats accuse Republicans of being obstructionists. The tactic works, intimidating them sufficiently to make them relent and allow the Democrats to prevail. Republicans back off because they fear the negative reviews in the Democrat-dominated press and a loss of support from the voting public when the Democrats begin accusing them of taking away programs that benefit women, minorities, and the poor. In the short run—and in the absence of a counterattack—Republicans may suffer from saying no, but in surrendering these battles over and over, they lose the war.
Andrew McCarthy has provided a sobering thought exercise for Republicans who think a submarine mentality is the way to win the political war:
To illustrate the emptiness of arguments by apologists for the Republican Congress, one need only ask what would happen if the roles were reversed. What if a Republican president tried to rein in entitlement spending? What if he unilaterally announced that, in an exercise of “prosecutorial discretion,” tax evasion laws would not be enforced to collect corporate taxes above ten percent of income? What if his IRS targeted progressive activists and his Justice Department stonewalled congressional investigations—including one involving a case in which an inane law-enforcement tactic (e.g., gun-walking) got a federal agent killed? We needn’t tarry long on this. A Democratic Congress would throw down the gauntlet and risk a government shutdown in order to force the president to back down. A Democratic Congress would not hesitate to impeach the IRS commissioner and the attorney general; and it would relish impeaching the president himself—calculating that even if Democrats lost, they would leave the president battered and impotent.1
Republican voters elected a Republican Congress with record majorities in the House to say no to the Obama agenda. When Republicans caved to the Democratic juggernaut, they lost their most important asset—their base—and they left Obama unscathed. McCarthy continues: “Democrats do not tell their supporters, ‘The president has veto power and Republicans have the numbers to block us, so don’t expect us to accomplish anything.’ Democrats know you move public opinion by fighting, even if you lose battles along the way. A movement has to move. And since they and the mainstream media are part of the same movement, they do not doubt their ability ultimately to turn public opinion in their favor.”2
It’s not capitulation in a particular battle that costs Republicans support from their own ranks; it’s the capitulations over time that encourage their opponents and weaken their support. It’s the message that the failure to say no—and to say it over and over—communicates.
Democrats and the media care more about the advancement of their cause than Republicans care about preserving the Constitution. Democrats used every trick in the book to enact Obamacare, knowing it was immensely unpopular and would become even more unpopular as it gradually failed. They were willing to sacrifice themselves to short-term political damage in order to secure the long-term achievement of government-controlled healthcare. They understood that once Obamacare was on the books, the trajectory toward a single-payer system would be in place, and Republicans—for all their saber-rattling—would not defund it. Any future “fixes” would occur under Obamacare’s assumptions about the government’s preeminent regulatory role. The left is willing to take its hits on something so crucial to its cause.3
Because of their conviction that these battles are crucial to their “societal transformation,” Democrats have made themselves masters of obstruction. For a hundred and more years, the Senate used its “advise and consent” role in ratifying Supreme Court nominations to pass only on a nominee’s judicial qualifications, expertise in the law, and judicial character and temperament. But once the Democrats became a sufficiently left-wing party in the 1980s, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee came prepared to blow up the proceedings to prevent the appointment of a justice who did not share their ideological views. A landmark case in this development was the aborted nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the court, who became a target of vilification and character assassination unprecedented in the annals of these nominations. The attack on Bork became a precedent for Democrats opposed to Republican nominees. The high-tech lynching of Clarence Thomas on the basis of an unproven private conversation he was alleged to have had with a Yale-educated civil rights lawyer 10 years in the past was so vicious and damaging that he was almost rejected, eventually gaining the nomination by a mere four votes. By contrast, when a rank ideologue of the left, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was nominated by President Clinton, she was walked through the Senate by Republican Orrin Hatch and was approved by 94 out of 100 Senate votes.
When only one side is obstructing, the scales inevitably tip in its favor. If Republicans care about the Constitution, they have to find the courage to say no or lose their constituencies and ultimately their cause. They have to say no to the anticonstitutional views of Supreme Court nominees such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor and to un-Constitutional executive orders by presidents like Barack Obama, and that means they have to be prepared to obstruct them by any constitutional means necessary. Nor should they be cowed by a corrupt anti-Republican press. No candidate was ever vilified more by the media than Donald Trump, and he won.