Leave it to the GOP in Congress to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory
Just like Wile E. Coyote, House Republicans this week donned helmets and roller skates, strapped a rocket from the Acme Corp. on their backs — and slammed headlong into a picture of a tunnel they had painted onto a rock face.
As the economy continues to boom, immigration is the one issue on which Republicans cannot lose — except that they just did. Or at the very least they gave Democrats an out, allowing them to show with evidence that Republicans don’t really care about immigration at all, they just want it as a useful campaign issue.
Republicans have controlled the House for two years now with nothing to show for it save for a series of video clips that make the Three Stooges look like a Roman Triumvirate.
With each punch of the tar baby, American voters are rolling their eyes and all but assuring that even if the GOP retakes the Senate (likely) and the presidency (plausible) that they will find their legislation stymied by a solidly Democratic House.
So the Republican House will go down as one more Trump-assisted suicide, one more example of how everyone who has ever hitched their wagon to the former president — from his highest White House executives to the hapless Jan. 6 rioters — winds up in a rumpled heap of flaming wreckage.
Generally, Congress has one rule for an election year: Don’t embarrass yourself. Govern leanly and efficiently, keep the engine running and whatever you do, don’t engage in any wild initiatives that will make the public nervous.
So what happens? Republicans demand an immigration bill that they assume the Democrats will never agree to, make Ukrainian and Israeli aid conditional on border funding for some reason and set it all off against the backdrop of impeaching President Biden’s immigration secretary, which will make Democrats own the border crisis while simultaneously doing the bidding of their pal Vladimir Putin, who does not want to see democracy thrive on the Russian border — all the while figuring to carve Israeli funding, which they do seem to want, out at the last minute and pass it through the House before Democrats knew what hit them.
What could go wrong?
What went wrong is that Senate Democrats and Republicans worked out a bipartisan immigration bill that incorporated most of conservatives’ most important conditions.
The notion that good government could break out in Washington seems never to have occurred to the House Speaker (if you haven’t learned his name, no worries, he’ll be gone soon enough), whose team was blindsided by good governance.
So on the same day, the House dutifully defeated their own immigration priorities, failed to pass articles of impeachment and blew up their own Israeli funding package.
House members, in normal times, might have passed the immigration bill that they themselves had demanded, participated in glowing bill-signing photo-ops and taken credit for a meaningful piece of legislation that would have given themselves something positive to run on in the fall.
But what’s good for the American people is not good for a deposed Donald Trump, a man who actively and openly roots against his country’s well-being in the interest of keeping himself out of prison.
Next, seeing their immigration bill stood no chance in the House, the knees of Senate Republicans weakened and they voted against what just 10 minutes prior they’d been toasting as the greatest border bill in 40 years.
“It’s been a total disaster,” Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said in reference to how GOP leaders handled the border bill. “Why would voters look at what goes on over here, this circus, and say we want more of this? … I don’t think the last three months could have been handled any worse than it has been handled from a leadership perspective.”
Josh Hawley — last seen sprinting away from his own Jan. 6 compadres — thinking you’re too feckless is like cotton candy thinking you’re too sticky.
How much Trump thinks beyond the current 24-hour news cycle is debatable, but the entire escapade shows how little he really cares about public policies, even his own. Whether the House is in the hands of Democrats or Republicans matters not at all, so long as he’s back in the Oval Office.
A Democratic House might even suit his purposes better because he’s happiest when he has an enemy. In the two years of his presidency that Republicans controlled Congress, his White House was adrift, unable to accomplish the thing that mattered to him most — erasing the health care plan that bore his predecessor’s name.
A small comfort maybe, but one in which to take heart: Whenever MAGA has been handed the keys to the car it has shown great propensity to back over itself.
Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.
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This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: GOP strategy backfires spectacularly in Congress
