John McCain Plays Neville Chamberlain to Trump’s Winston Churchill

DB Daily Update ^ | David Blackmon 

Today’s Campaign Update (Because The Campaign Never Ends)
The Philadelphia Eagles won the franchise’s first Super Bowl, denying the New England Patriots what would have been their 6th NFL championship. Excited Eagles fans swarmed the streets of Philadelphia in celebration, setting fires, breaking windows and vandalizing businesses. So, it was just like they would have done had the Eagles lost.
In a last-ditch effort to finally completely destroy the Republican Party – something he tried but failed to do in his 2008 run for the presidency – RINO John McCain is planning to introduce a budget bill in the Senate that would include a fix for the DACA “kids” (average age: 26) but omit any funding for border security or other revisions to the nation’s open borders immigration system. Unsurprisingly, McCain’s co-sponsor is a (fellow?) Democrat, the execrable Senator Chris Coons of Delaware. Were the GOP to agree to pass such a bill in order to avoid letting the Democrats shut the government down at the end of this week, talk of a “blue wave” blowout in the midterm elections, which has gone away in recent weeks, would be revived, and for good reason.
Don’t kid yourselves: doing an amnesty for the DACA people while getting nothing real in return – which is what Sen. McCain refers to as “negotiating” – would kill the Republican Party dead. The GOP base vote would abandon the party just as it did in 2008, when all the RINOism led by McCain and Lindsey Graham led to the birth of the Tea Party movement.
Doing such a bill would be a classic case of unilateral surrender in the face of impending victory, something McCain has specialized in throughout his political career. The Republicans literally have Chuck Schumer and the Democrats completely over a barrel on this issue. The Democrats are just three weeks removed from being blamed for shutting down 14% of the federal government for the first time in history over the DACA issue, having suffered severe political damage with everyone except their most radical leftwing base for doing so. Threats coming from Schumer and San Fran Nan to repeat the same political hari kari at the end of this week are the very definition of political suicide.
Any thinking Republican would be doing his best Clint Eastwood impression and telling Schumer to “Go ahead, punk, make my day.” Instead, John McCain is doing his best Neville Chamberlain, swearing to his Republican colleagues that Schumer really is a great guy, and that unilateral surrender on their strongest issue will buy them full funding for the U.S. armed forces budget they want, and peace in our time. What a dope.
You never know what Senate Republicans might agree to do in situations like this – they regularly display all the intestinal fortitude of the Vichy French – but a horrible deal like this would have a very tough time getting through the House of Representatives, where real Republicans tend to dwell in large enough numbers to save the party from McCain’s worst impulses.
The intelligent strategy here is so obvious that even a trained monkey could grasp it: Submit a clean budget bill to fund the government through the end of the year and dare the Democrats to shut down the government again over the DACA issue, which does not really come to a head for another month. Let the Democrats shut it down for a week or so, and then offer the compromise President Trump offered in his State of the Union Address last week. When the Democrats reject that, change the Senate rules to finally end the filibuster rule, something the Democrats are going to do next time they have a senate majority anyway.
In other words, finally, at long last, take responsibility for governing the country. Stop letting the Democrats run up gigantic federal budget deficits by forcing the government to run on continuing resolutions rather than passing real budget bills, something they have done almost continuously for the last 12 years now.
McCain complains that all this “partisan gridlock” in congress is preventing full funding for the U.S. military, which is true, but his bill does nothing real to solve the problem. The only real way to end the gridlock in congress is to stop letting the minority in the U.S. Senate control the process. The unilateral surrender he proposes on immigration would only serve to embolden them.
McCain clearly relishes his role as the party’s Neville Chamberlain. Donald Trump, by showing the GOP how to win these government shutdown wars they’d never been able to win before, has become the party’s version of Winston Churchill, offering a clear path to ultimate victory if only they will hold firm and follow through.
Can they make themselves do it? Can they turn this week into their party’s finest hour? There’s no real reason to be optimistic on that score, but hey, stranger things have happened.
Just another day in Trump as Churchill America.
That is all.
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