You only get a certain number of swings when you are at bat. The Republican Party is at bat and badly missing the ball. That’s according to millions of people who just see the Party stepping in it most of the time. It is not enough to try and do the right thing; you must be perceived as successful, or your supporters lose confidence. We are at that point today.
History is a cruel mistress. Your successes last milliseconds, while your biggest mistakes wind up defining you. Republicans in the U.S. House created a circular firing squad over the issues of funding Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and the border. What at first looked like a chess player’s dream has turned into a nightmare that the inexperienced and tightly bound Speaker of the House seemingly has no way out of.
From Success to Scrutiny – GOP’s H.R. 2 Redux:-
People forget that Republicans passed H.R. 2 in 2023, where it died in the Senate. With the situation reversed and the press banging the drum loudly, Republicans have lost the public relations battle. I am not a fan of the Senate Immigration bill and agree that leaving Biden to interpret how immigration law played out was never going to work; conservatives don’t trust him. The Bill would have constrained any future president, and there were so many exceptions and interpretations that it was just a lousy piece of work. I blame Mitch McConnel for putting us in this vise and leaving it to partisan media and Democrats to explain why.
Republicans need to be careful what they wish for. No, I don’t believe that Trump is blocking a border solution; I just don’t think there’s a viable plan on the table yet. When a solution that is reasonable and stops the vast majority of migrants is proposed, the Democrats will block it. At the moment, we play into their hands.
Let me share with you a scenario that will damage the Republican Party tremendously, possibly permanently. It is foreseeable that a small group of House Republicans with a razor-thin majority can only obstruct and not lead an agenda that the opposition party opposes. I agree with the most hard-line Representatives that the border must be closed. It’s reasonable, doable, and essential. It’s also something the President’s hard left base is not going to allow, and Senate Republicans don’t see a way to make the President comply with closing the border or even tightly restricting it. That’s a fact.
Republican Isolationists Under Fire:-
We have another Achilles heel to deal with. A small isolationist wing in the Republican Party is willing to see Ukraine and Taiwan fall. Let’s concentrate on Ukraine for the moment. Whether you are for or against defending Ukraine, imagine what happens if Russia wins and takes over. Optics matter. Americans, no matter what they say, would find it abhorrent and hold Republicans accountable for the carnage that would follow. Worse than that, Europe would know we were an undependable partner and grow closer to Russia. If that were not bad enough, news stories, pictures, videos, and more would start to flood America, depicting the horror that a victorious Putin would unleash all over Ukraine. Pretty white women, adorable little children, killed, maimed, and raped, live and in color for months on end. There would be only a single villain in this tableau, the United States and, in particular, the Republicans, that allowed an easy-to-imagine massacre to happen on their watch.
I want to remind everyone that the day before Pearl Harbor, approximately 88% of Americans opposed fighting in Europe. That percentage flipped the day after. Watching the horrible retribution that Putin would unleash on Ukraine would be viewed with sickness and despair. Americans need someone to blame, and that blame would fall on Republicans in general. Mark my words. If we had a generation to recover, it would not be enough. But we don’t have a generation. The end is coming for us well before that.
There’s an even worse consequence that would be laid rightly at Republican’s feet. Having been successful in taking over Ukraine, Russia would be knocking on NATO’s door, and no one knows what Putin would do. Already, there is one Russian lover in NATO. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán consistently votes against NATO, most recently holding Sweden’s bid to join NATO until just a few days ago.
Understandably, people should feel concerned about their own country first. It has an emotional appeal that I can’t disagree with. However, in the scheme of things, we must play chess, not checkers. We must also be able to walk and chew bubblegum simultaneously. We live in a multi-polar world. We dare not drop any of those balls we must keep in the air; the stakes are too high.
At the end of the day, the reason we are a Constitutional Republic and not a country governed by mob rule is that the Founders were amazingly prothetic that the mob wouldn’t make tough, sometimes sacrificial calls. A small group of single-minded individuals in the House are effectively nothing more than obstructionists. No matter what their intent, without both the numbers and the leadership, they will fail, and both conservatives and Republicans risk losing not just the battle but the war.
Political Battle Brews – Citizenship Pathways in the Spotlight:-
Losing the war means political extinction. Left to their devices, Democrats will create pathways for ten million new citizens who will vote for even more benefits and goodies that they receive already. Think about that for a moment. Every card player knows a fundamental truth: you play the cards you were dealt. We have a bad hand at the moment.
Perhaps things will be different if and when Donald Trump reclaims the helm. But, until and unless that happens, we need to play the long game, and part of that is realizing the enormity of the consequences of making unforced errors. Abandoning a free country to Putin is a profound mistake. Yes, we need a strategy to win. Biden never intended to win in Ukraine. Why? I don’t know. After they got over the shock of seeing Russia’s butt kicked, American warfighters knew the Ukrainians could win. To do so, they need the kind of weapons and strategy that ups the risk to Putin. We have not done that so far.
Russia has been badly mauled to date. Putin scared Biden into restraining Ukraine, much as he is doing with Israel today. Read the unprecedented anti-Israel Schumer speech in the Senate from last week demanding President Netanyahu be replaced! I’ve never seen anything quite like this. People like Biden are never ‘all in.’ They leave themselves room to maneuver and back up if things don’t go the way they want or expect. All-out war can’t be fought that way. Ukraine, Israel, and perhaps later Taiwan fight for their right to exist. From my perspective, evil China and Russia will inevitably show up on our own doorstep one day if we cannot deter them today. Biden’s actions are the opposite of deterrence. We must learn our lesson now, or we’ll relearn it later at the price of a lot of American blood. It’s a choice, not an inevitability. There is a reason, most people say, that they are independent today. They don’t like our traditional parties anymore.
God Bless America.
Allan J. Feifer—Patriot
Author, Businessman, Thinker, and Strategist. Read more about Allan, his background, and his ideas to create a better tomorrow at www.1plus1equals2.com