SHE SAID -- Conservatives Keep Losing to
Leadership. Can They Change the Game?
[...]
The problem for members of the tea party is that the
game
is rigged against them, as they are repeatedly outmaneuvered and
outsmarted procedurally. What they've found—and what Sen. Tom Cotton's
controversial letter to Iran this week has proven—is that they're much
better off taking the fight away from the House and Senate floors.
The vast majority of conservative firebrands have only been in Congress
for a few years; House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell have been here for decades. Every rule, every
parliamentary trick that conservatives could use to stick it to their
leadership, Boehner and McConnell have already thought of it and found
another legislative tool to stop them.
[...]Sarah
Mimms continued
HE SAID
Mimms is right that leadership is getting the better
of
these fights. But it isn’t just that leadership has a better command of
the rules. It’s not really as though if conservatives had more
procedural tricks up their sleeve they could have changed the outcome
of any of the recent fights. Leadership didn’t have a better knowledge
of the rules, they were the only people who were in position to pull
the trigger on the rules.
The reality
is this: conservatives lost every
meaningful fight for the next two years when they failed to oust Rep.
John Boehner and Sen. Mitch McConnell.
In other words, it isn’t that conservatives pulled the wrong plays.
It’s that the wrong people were in the wrong positions. No amount of
“experience” in the chamber is going to change the fact that as long as
Boehner and McConnell are pulling the levers, we are going to continue
to lose important fights. It’s nice to have a plan to get out in front
of fights from a PR perspective, as Cotton has done with the Iran
issue, but ultimately the corporate crony lapdogs are going to win all
the important fights until they are no longer in the position to win
them.
[...]
Leon H. Wolf continued
