Former Young Gun Eric Cantor, once a member of the House leadership who was ousted by a right winger in a 2010 primary for allegedly going off the reservation (he actually didn’t), wrote an op-ed today about how the Republicans are letting the tail wag the dog:
Back in 2013, the expectation was that the Republican-controlled House of Representatives could force the Democratic-controlled Senate to pass — and compel President Barack Obama to sign — a repeal of his signature health-care initiative. This false narrative started with a few outside groups like Heritage Action and Tea Party Express arguing that the barrier to repealing Obamacare wasn’t the president; it was elected Republicans who were unwilling to fight hard enough. These groups purposely ramped up expectations, overpromising, even knowing that the end result would under-deliver.
At first, this was a political headache for me and my colleagues: Few elected Republicans wanted to spend much time or political capital refuting people who were part of the base. But then a small group of lawmakers in the House and the Senate, led by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), started telling the base what they longed to hear: that Republicans could indeed defund Obamacare simply by insisting on it as part of a larger annual government spending bill. These members, and indeed every other elected Republican, knew better, but very few were willing to say so. I had dozens of meetings with individual lawmakers, as well as group sessions, imploring my colleagues to take a different approach, because shutdowns don’t work. Often, these same members would leave the meetings and go on cable TV to talk about how leadership wasn’t fighting hard enough, and only they were. And the shutdown was born.
This pattern repeated itself at a new level around the 2020 election. “Stop the Steal” narratives about widespread fraud, albeit without evidence, sought to undermine the results. Bloggers and certain friendly radio and TV shows didn’t need to worry about providing defensible facts or being confronted with the truth. Soon, President Donald Trump was talking about how the election could be overturned and awarded to the “true” winner — him — if only a secretary of state . . . or a governor . . . or the judges he appointed . . . or congressional Republicans . . . or the vice president would fight like he wanted them to. It was ultimately all political posturing, and I honestly don’t know if the president believed the story or not — but many in the GOP base did. Two-thirds of voters who are Republican or lean Republican have been misled into thinking that there is solid evidence of widespread fraud in the election, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found this month.
To my fellow Republicans who hope that Trump’s departure from office will end this cycle, I would remind them that it started long before he descended the escalator in Trump Tower more than five years ago. And left unconfronted, it will continue long into the future.
He tries to say that Democrats are doing the same thing but that’s absurd. Right now they are in the majority and of course the various factions will be pressing for their agenda. That’s how it works. The proper analogy would be if they would have been going on TV during Donald Trump’s term and convincing Democratic voters that the tax cuts for millionaires could be stopped if only the Democrats fought harder. They didn’t do that because it was ridiculous. And anyway, most Democratic voters aren’t that stupid.
Cantor is right about the dynamic. The Republican Party has been going down that road for a long time and it just picked up speed when they elected a lying, conspiracy theorist, huckster to lead the party. And they aren’t slowing down, unfortunately.
Cantor paid a price for enabling this, mostly because of Fox and talk radio — particularly Laura Ingraham who basically engaged to demonstrate her clout. But he never really did much to stop it. Neither did the other young guns: Paul Ryan and the cowardly sycophant Kevin McCarthy. This is their baby too.