Congressional Republicans need leaders with a plan and some guts

Congressional Republicans need leaders with a plan and some guts: Kevin O'Brien

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By Kevin OBrien, The Plain Dealer 
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on September 17, 2015 at 5:09 PM, updated September 17, 2015 at 6:47 PM

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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, left, and House Speaker John Boehner have had ample time to put together a strategy to blunt the Democrats' agenda. Somehow, they just haven't gotten around to it.J. Scott Applewhite, Associated Press 

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Every now and then, the law of averages catches up with Donald Trump. Amid all of his relentlessly self-promotional blather, he occasionally says something so incontestably true that there's simply no arguing about it.
Last week's gem was this: "We are led by very, very stupid people."
By "we," he meant the Republican Party, which, for the moment, he is claiming as his own. By "very, very stupid people," he meant the ones who work — a description that gives them more credit than they usually deserve — inside the building that served as the backdrop for The Donald's remarks: the United States Capitol.
"Led" was an even less-deserved compliment, since no one in the upper reaches of the House or Senate GOP hierarchy seems to have a goal, a plan, a principle or, for that matter, a clue.
Republicans in Congress were impotent during the first two years of President Barack Obama's administration, having control of neither the House nor the Senate. Just give us one house of Congress, they said — all fury and indignation — and we'll stop this runaway socialist train.
The voters, unhappy with having Obamacare shoved down their throats, promptly put a Republican majority in charge of the House of Representatives.
When Obama and the Democrats kept right on doing whatever they wanted to do, the Republicans offered the numerically plausible excuse that they couldn't stop them because the GOP controlled only one half of one third of the federal government. If only they had control of the Senate, they growled, they could stop Obama's excesses and pass some bills to show the country how the Republican vision was preferable.
Last year, the voters handed the Republicans the Senate. Obama has been laughing openly at Congress ever since, and the mockery couldn't be more deserved.
This Congress isn't Republican-controlled at all. It's controlled, to a tiny extent, by a Senate Democratic minority with a hair-trigger filibuster reflex. It's controlled, because it allows itself to be, by a president who has discovered that all it takes to make Congress irrelevant is to declare it so. But mainly, it's controlled by Republicans who are paralyzed by fear.
It has long been evident that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner lacked the courage of their convictions. In recent months, though, it has become increasingly clear that they lack convictions at all. Other than merely remaining in office, there seems to be nothing that they really want to do.
Neither cowardice nor sloth, however, explains why McConnell and Boehner seem incapable of learning from their mistakes.
Having shown neither the aptitude nor the interest in doing anything to resist any element of Obama's agenda, they have now retreated the extra mile by handing the Democrats their favorite cudgel: the threat of a government shutdown.
This time, the issue is the funding of Planned Parenthood — an entity that, by its own generous math, counts the destruction of human lives as "only" 3 percent of its business. Which is like saying the officially sanctioned murder of imprisoned noncombatants comprised only a small percentage of the Nazi war effort.
Some Republicans in Congress have put forward proposals to end federal funding for Planned Parenthood. At the leadership level, the cowardice (we're not going to make people mad at us by shutting down the government over this) and the sloth (besides, Obama will just veto it, anyway) kicked in almost immediately.
The defunding should happen. No organization that deals in the sale of human baby parts ought to receive a cent of public money. But it won't, because the Republicans' master tacticians in Congress have maneuvered themselves, quite unnecessarily, into a tight corner.
By failing to follow through on their promise to operate according to "regular order" — sending specific appropriations bills to the president for signature in time to ensure the uninterrupted funding of the federal government's various departments — congressional Republicans have made it possible for the Democrats to play the shutdown card.
Senate Democrats say they'll filibuster the appropriations bills, guaranteeing that the clock will run out on the appropriations process, so the only option will be what has become standard in recent years: a massive omnibus spending bill that funds everything at current levels and contains goodness knows what else. (Such a move by Republicans would have been called obstructionism when the Democrats controlled Congress, but now elicits not a peep from the mainstream media.)
Three things need to happen as soon as they can be managed.
Do away with the filibuster. It's already dead; Harry Reid killed it when he was Senate majority leader. The Republicans' attempt to revive it for this session was a quixotic gesture. It will be gone again the moment the Democrats regain the majority.
Proceed by regular order. With the filibuster out of the way, the Republican majority should write the appropriations bills to include and exclude whatever they see fit, pass them and send them to Obama. If he vetoes some or all of them, that's his right; that's how the system was designed to work. If Obama prefers to shut down parts of the government rather than accede to Congress' spending priorities, that's for him to justify. If a continuing resolution has to be passed to keep the government functioning until the appropriations bills become law, it should be for the shortest possible duration.
Elect new congressional leadership. McConnell and Boehner have had their day, have done nothing with it and can articulate no credible strategy to turn Republican ideas into laws or to block Democratic ideas from implementation, either as laws or as unlawful executive edicts.
The Democrats, by contrast, have goals, plans and a set of leaders ruthless enough to achieve them.
The only thing the Democrats lack is an organized, credible opposition in Congress.
That needs to be remedied before it's too late.
O'Brien is The Plain Dealer's deputy editorial page editor