Whither the OPPOSITION party?

capitolWe’ve got a president operating well outside the boundaries of The Constitution — arbitrarily making changes to laws passed by the legislative branch.   If a Republican president had tried something similar, the howler monkeys on the left side of the aisle would be offering up off-the-chart decibel readings.  But the Republicans, the majority in the House and the opposition in the Senate, don’t have a whole lot to say about it.  They SHOULD be dragging him into court.

Time and again, BarryO and his team have offered up stopgap spending measures and debt ceiling increases.  The alleged conservative opposition party — instead of fighting – tells us they are holding their powder for bigger fights.  But that fight never comes.   We’ve had House GOP leaders actively fighting efforts to defund ObamaCare.  We’ve had the GOP leadership whipping for votes to support even more budget-busting stop-gap spending and debt ceiling increases.  The country gets no concessions from the statists.  We just get stuck with more debt, and more promises from our alleged conservative party to ”wait ’til next time.”  How much longer can we afford to wait?

The latest surrender has come on the eve of yet another debt ceiling increase:

Speaker John Boehner will bring a clean debt ceiling bill to the floor Wednesday, marking the end of an era in which House Republicans sought spending cuts and reforms in equal or greater amount to the increase in the debt ceiling.

President Obama and congressional Democrats had said they were opposed to even discussing spending cuts in the context of the debt ceiling. But Republicans couldn’t even come together with their own plan.

“It’s a recognition that we don’t have 218 votes. When you don’t have 218 votes, you have nothing,” Boehner said in a press conference.[…]

In Europe, when you can’t get votes to support your party’s agenda, you step down from your position.  You concede that you failed, and step aside for someone else to give it a try.  If these guys are not even going to fight for what they say they believe in, what is the use in voting Republican?  Why not just turn the whole gosh-darn thing over to the Democrats?

I like this son of South Carolina’s take on this latest surrender: 

 […] After storming out of the GOP’s debt ceiling meeting and pacing furiously 100 yards down a hallway deep the bowels of the Capitol, South Carolina Republican Rep. Jeff Duncan wheeled around to face a couple reporters that had managed to keep up with him.

“Why don’t you talk to my son?” Duncan asked, pointing angrily at his black iPhone. “Tell him about the debt that he’s going to pay. $17.3 trillion right now. This is him on the phone. He’s a Clemson student, I’d be glad for you to explain how he’s going to pay that back,” Duncan added, his voice full of sarcasm.

Duncan was irate about the plan Speaker John Boehner and the House GOP leadership team had just unveiled to raise the debt ceiling. Rather than use the must-pass vote to tackle rampant deficits, Boehner’s plan would actually increase spending now and theoretically “pay for” the new spending with more sequester cuts five election cycles from now.[…]