Kurt Schlichter says conservatives are now woke and recognize that a lot of Republicans have a standard operating procedure of double-crossing us.

“Oh, George W. Bush was a true conservative!” Good guy, yes, but he brought us two unwon wars (only one of necessity) and “compassionate conservatism.” Of course, “compassion” always means that normal people get another rock in their ruck. Then there was John McCain, who lied to our faces on Obamacare’s repeal so more Senate hacks wouldn’t have to go on record doing so. And last, and arguably least, there’s Mitt Romney, Mr. Thank-You-Candy-May-I-Have-Another, who never misses a chance to virtue signal for the benefit of the same people who said he gave someone cancer. Oh, and their bright idea for 2016? Jeb! He was an act of love upon us normals all right.

See, we’re done. We’re woke and feeling about you hacks just like you feel about us. Think about that. The clock is ticking. Look at Jeff Flake. At this point, I don’t even care if his opponent, somewhere down the road, will have to deny being a witch. In fact, his primary opponent could get up at the first debate in a sweatshirt reading “PROUD HOGWARTS GRAD,” wave a wand, announce without irony that “The sorting hat assigned me to Hufflepuff!” and I’d still send her money. Because even if she was crazy (and she’s not – she seems like a very nice lady who actually believes in conservative stuff ), she would still be a million times better than that back-stabbing, braying doofus she’s running against. Heck, she’s already crushing the Arizona squish into utter squishiness in the polls – think of what she could do with some spells.

The GOP establishment will never learn, partly from denial and partly because a lot of its members are kind of dumb. For example, that smarmy dope Paul Ryan, when he isn’t trying to make sure foreigners are treated better than Americans, is still pushing the moronic “You could do your taxes on a postcard!” hack cliché when, of course, everyone knows that all those extra pages are filled with the deductions that make people who work pay less. I’ll toss my taxes to my accountant and keep my home mortgage, charitable, and state tax deductions instead of losing them so big GOP donors can pocket some more dough – thanks though, Passive Paul! Postcard taxes – sheesh, 1996 called and it wants its total defeat back.

Look normals, we’re in for the long haul here – hopefully not one that ends violently for our divided country, which it absolutely could. Those are the stakes, and that is why we can’t just walk away from this game. We can’t hide and wait it out. We either get in there and win or we lose everything. Step One was getting woke. Step Two was electing Trump. Step Three is regulating the Republicans. Slowly and surely, we’re going to need to purge these punks from our team.

RTWT

The Establishment GOP elected George W. Bush who threw away our political advantage and elected Obama. The Establishment GOP nominated John McCain and Mitt Romney who couldn’t beat Obama. We have them the White House and both houses of Congress and they still wouldn’t kill Obamacare.

What choice do we have? We have to go with the Alt-Right over them.

Brent Bozell predicts that voters before very much longer are going to do something about Republican incumbents in Congress who fail to deliver on campaign promises.

Every Republican candidate’s stock speech sounds the same, the thunderous roar about a government out of control, federal spending out of control (insert charts and graphs and why, if you stack hundred dollar bills, they will reach the edge of the universe), federal taxes out of control (insert comparisons to socialist countries), the federal bureaucracy out of control (insert metaphors about chains, yokes, and the like), the family shattered with federal funding of abortion a crime against humanity (watch for it — there! The heart-wrenching sob), and our military is emasculated.

Two more items were added to the menu, courtesy of Obama. Obamacare Will Be Repealed! and Illegal Immigration Will Not Stand!

In 2009, the Democrats controlled everything, partly due to the Republicans’ cowardice on Capitol Hill, and in part because of some of the most inept candidates and campaigns America has seen in years. The Obama folks could have played it safe but went for socialist gold, using the power of the legislative and the executive branches (and later the judiciary, thank you Justice Roberts) to advance their agenda.

That included federal spending on a level unmatched in human history resulting ultimately in a $19 trillion in debt we simply cannot pay, and with so many tens of trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities that “infinity” is not far behind. One seventh of the economy was confiscated by the federal government with the passage of Obamacare. Our national borders were declared open and discussions over our national sovereignty closed. And to top it off, the Democrats all but declared themselves above the law.

The GOP harrumphed that this would not stand, by God! If only… if only America would vote them into the majority.

In 2009, the Tea Party was born. The Grand Old Party was rejuvenated. Happy days were here again.

Just one year later, the Republicans captured the House, and with that, the power of the purse. They now had the authority to stop the insane spending on so many obnoxious and wholly unnecessary ventures. They could end Obamacare simply by not funding it.

Instead, under the “leadership” of John Boehner, it did absolutely nothing. Why, if only we had the Senate! Then we could take on the President!

So in 2014, after spending hundreds of millions of campaign dollars running hundreds of thousands of television and radio ads pledging to end illegal immigration while repealing Obamacare “root and branch” (author: Mitch McConnell), they were given control of the Senate.

And within a month McConnell re-authorized both, along with every single other thing Harry Reid and Obama wanted for yet another year.

But that’s because we can’t do what we promised until we have the Presidency! The excuse was as predictable as summer heat in the Sahara.

In 2016, they were given that too.

They were given everything.

In January of this year, they formally controlled both houses of Congress and the executive branch. Every single thing they’d ever promised was now possible.

They now had the power to enact every single spending cut they’d ever solemnly pledged. All those wasteful programs designed to fill the liberal sandbox — PBS, NPR, Planned Parenthood, NEH and the rest of the alphabet soup; all the hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate welfare to multi-billion-dollar corporations; all of the hundreds of billions of dollars directed toward leftist social engineering — poof! All of it could come to an end with a stroke of a pen.

They now had the power to restore fiscal tax sanity too. Remember the flat tax? The fair tax? Slashing the highest corporate taxes in the world? Giving you a tax break? All of it could be done with a snap of the fingers.

Repeal Obamacare? Check. End illegal immigration? Check. Build the wall? Check.

Crush the Deep State? Done, by God, done!

There was not a damn thing the Democrats could do to stop them from draining the swamp.

Except the Republican leadership didn’t mean it. With the exception of the Freedom Caucus in the House, and literally a handful in the Senate, the rank-and-file didn’t either. Not one word of it.

The opportunity arose for the vote to repeal Obamacare, and after huffing and puffing, and huffing and puffing some more, the dust settled and socialized health care remains the law of the land, perhaps permanently.

The opportunity arose for tax reform, to enact the cuts America desperately needs. It was never a matter of if, it was a matter of how much. It is now mid-August and nothing, absolutely nothing has been accomplished — even attempted!

And now we face the final test: the debt ceiling. Will we or won’t we stop the spending madness? Will the Republicans enact the cuts they’ve promised, or will they now be the ones to kick the can, piling evermore trillions of dollars of debt on their own grandchildren?

By every indication that’s precisely what they plan to do. The signal has come from President Trump, from Speaker Ryan, and from Majority Leader McConnell. The debt ceiling will be raised and no fiscal sanity will be restored.

There is no difference between Republicans and Democrats. Put them together. They are the swamp.

A FB friend writes:

Out of 16 candidates in the primary, the disaffected Republican electorate cast a little over 3 million votes for Trump, abetted by 12 million democrats voting in open GOP primaries and sent Trump to the convention with majority of the delegates. The GOP shouldn’t have prevented a floor fight, but they did and we now are expected to vote for a democrat on the GOP ticket in the presidential election.

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Another friend adds:

Utah has voted Republican since 1964. Trump has been ahead in Texas by about six points and at one stage, by just two. Romney took it by 16. Similar polls are found in other historically red states like Georgia, South Carolina, and Arizona which has been reliably Republican since Ike and has voted Democrat just once in the last 16 presidential elections. People who regularly vote GOP are abandoning the party in droves. And this didn’t start after the Tic Tac tape. In aircraft crashes this is what is called ‘Controlled Flight Into Terrain’. The only thing surprising about all of this is the near-delusional denial by some.

Althouse commenter Meade said, 10/8/16, 10:32 AM:

Trump grabbed an unsuspecting GOP by its pussy. GOP just let him do it. Except for the #NeverTrump-ers, who had too much self respect along with the fact that they had no pussies for Trump to grab.

Mona Charen does not mince any words concerning Donald Trump and his GOP enablers.

Martha Bayles reminds us in the Claremont Review of Books of two barrels — one contains sewage, the other wine. If you pour a cup of wine into the sewage, it’s still sewage. But if you pour a cup of sewage into the wine, it is no longer wine but sewage.

Trump is a pathogen. A man who heedlessly promotes conspiracy theories (vaccines cause autism, Obama was born in Kenya, Bush lied us into war in Iraq, Rafael Cruz was caught up in the JFK assassination), is either not fully sane or at least indifferent to the demoralizing effect that such lies have on our social cohesion. A man whose confidence is so shaky that he must attest to his own intelligence, malign even the most insignificant critic, scapegoat minorities, and threaten the free press is to be pitied, maybe, but not trusted with power. He is very, very comfortable stoking mobs and threatening violence. His warning that there would be riots in Cleveland if he failed to get the nomination — to cite just one of the thousands of ways he has transgressed basic norms this year — ought to cite just one of the thousands of ways he has transgressed basic norms this year — ought to have been enough to activate the antibodies of a healthy electorate.

Every single Republican with influence, from the local sheriff to the speaker of the House, at every stage of this process, should have stood up on his hind legs and denounced this fraud (where are his tax returns, again?), condemned his ugly methods, and scorned his flood of lies. Every Republican should have lined up for Judge Curiel. Chris Christie’s endorsement was the first tablespoon of sewage. Jeff Sessions’s was the second. The list of defilers is too long to itemize now. RIP GOP.

Read the whole thing.

Ben Shapiro has some choice words about what the Republican Party has done.

The irony of Donald Trump’s nomination for president of the United States is that the same establishment that he supposedly opposes has been praying for a candidate of his ilk for decades: a social leftist, a secular materialist, a big government activist. In other words, the establishment has drooled about nominating a Democrat for years.

They finally did it.

Trump’s new Republican Party has nothing to do with the Constitution or conservatism – he mentioned the Constitution one time this week, conservatism zero times, freedom one time, liberty zero times, the unborn zero times, God zero times, and himself some 83 times. As he said, America is broken and “I alone can fix it.”

Trump promises to fix your problems; Hillary promises to fix your problems. Freedom means fixing your own damn problems. It’s their job to get government out of your way.

Or at least that used to be the conservative line.

No longer, in Trumpservative America.

Read the whole thing.

Mike Pence

Mike Pence was excellent last night. I had not really been familiar with him. Who knows every one-time Republican congressman? I don’t live in Indiana. So I was pleasantly surprised.

I’m not very happy with Newt Gingrich for selling out to Trump, but I could not suppress my personal preference for Gingrich as the Vice Presidential choice. Newt obviously has no real integrity, but he speaks well and delivers clear and cogent conservative ideas. Although Newt was in good form last night, I thought Pence, who followed him, actually outdid Newt as a performer, and I was able to understand, for the first time, exactly why Trump went with Pence.

Trump is not terribly intelligent and is intellectually lazy and self-indulgent, but he is not totally brain dead. If you watched episodes of “The Apprentice,” you’d find that Trump typically made what looked like the appropriate decision, he fired the contestant you and the rest of the audience thought deserved to be fired… most of the time. It is true that, occasionally, The Donald slipped into Third World Tyrant mode and arbitrarily decreed “Off With His Head!” capriciously, but by-and-large Trump’s choices made sense.

In the case of Pence, he clearly chose wisely. Pence speaks intelligently with self-deprecatory humor and projects Midwestern decency all over the place. If Trump wins, and then goes off cutting ribbons, banging White House interns, and playing golf with celebrities all day, leaving the Vice President to run domestic and foreign policy as has been predicted, things may actually work out pretty well.

If Trump wins, and then rapidly dies in office, it could be downright splendid.

However, I was reflecting on these happy thoughts, and I began to have a powerful feeling of déjà vu. Where had I had the same kind of thoughts before? I wondered. And it didn’t take very long, even at my age, to remember: every bloody election since 1988, in fact.

What is happening this year is really just another replay of the same deal we’ve been getting for more than a generation, for 38 years actually.

The winner of the GOP primaries is always some kind of less-than-really-principled-conservative, a Country Club Republican (George H.W. Bush), a moderate (Bob Dole), a compassionate conservative (George W. Bush), a consistent sell-out and democrat ally in the Senate (John McCain), a moderate Republican creator of Romneycare (Mitt Romney) and he always gets a hard-core, dyed-in-the-wool real conservative running mate (Dan Quayle, Jack Kemp, Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, Paul Ryan), in order to induce the GOP’s conservative base to come on board and support the ticket. Now it’s utterly non-conservative Donald Trump with Dudley-Do-Right conservative Mike Pence.

I kind of feel like I’ve been-here-done-that before, time and time again. You know the definition of insanity, don’t you? Doing the same thing, over and over again, and expecting a different result.

The Hay Ride called it a dumpster fire, rather than a convention.

Arkansas Congressman Steve Womack as presiding officer just called voice votes his own way, and rammed through Convention Rules denying eleven states on the record as asking for a roll call vote due process. The convention floor erupted in anger, and the Iowa and Colorado delegations walked out.

Former Senator Gordon Humphrey of New Hampshire said:

I sought to be recognized to raise a point of parliamentary inquiry and was immediately drowned out by people I would refer to as brownshirts in my surroundings. … You just saw the second most important item of business rushed through in a split second with no opportunity for debate, no opportunity for questions, no opportunity for points of order and no roll call vote although nine states under the rules requested a roll call vote, demanded a roll call vote, and should have been accorded that. So this was pretty shocking and shameful, I’ve seen a lot of, but this is not a meeting of the Republican National Committee. This is a meeting of brownshirts.

Totalitarianism was accompanied by unusual informality and carefully-assumed folksiness.

The informal speakers started off with Duck Dynasty’s hirsute Willie Robertson, wearing a patriotic American flag headband (!), with an open-collared pink polo shirt.

Marcus Luttrell survived Afghanistan, but apparently no necktie he owned did. He, too, addressed the convention with his collar wide open.

Former CIA Security Contractors from Benghazi John Tiegan and Mark Geist set some kind of new record for convention informality: neither wore a necktie, both addressed the convention wearing blue jeans, Tiegan’s jacket was patterned in some newfangled oil-stained camo and failed to cover a gold-and-silver belt buckle the size of a paperback book. Where are these guys’ former Marine Corps Drill Instructors when you need them?

The band later segued abruptly from “Brown-Eyed Girl” to “We Are the Champions” as Trump himself appeared suddenly silhouetted in smoke (having apparently arrived from his office in the Infernal Regions) to introduce his heavily-accented Croatian wife, Melania (who is, surprisingly, actually supporting him).

Melania proceeded to deliver a not-very-interesting speech, plagiarized in part, it turned out, from Michelle Obama (!).

Rudolph Giuliani, however, demonstrated that he, at least, really can deliver a barn-burner of a speech, in which he praised Donald Trump’s big heart and portrayed The Donald as a publicity-averse do-gooder. You could hear jaws dropping all over America.

I suppose the partisan rhetoric and hokum wasn’t that much worse than that at any other convention, but over everything hung the air of astonishment and the gloomy recognition that these people, this Republican Party, this GOP establishment had so readily, and so completely, sold out to an unprincipled, unethical demagogue peddling a bunch of unconservative snake-oil largely in complete contradiction to everything the Republican Party has theoretically stood for since 1980 at least, if not 1964.

I guess it all proves that those low-information Alt-Right peckerwoods were right, and we Movement Conservative intellectuals were wrong: the GOP establishment really is comprised of a bunch of total whores and opportunists.

I’m changing my voter registration to Independent today.

1876 Republican Convention in Cincinnati

At the Hill, Curley Haugland and Sean Parnell explain both the history and the law.

As the Republican National Convention prepares to kick off next week in Cleveland, there is a lot of confusion and controversy over the question of whether delegates to the convention are “bound” to vote for any particular candidate as a result of primary or caucus results, or state party directions.

The controversy stems from the fact that a large number of delegates believe they cannot in good conscience vote for presumed nominee Donald Trump, while the confusion stems from either a misunderstanding of the history and rules of the Republican National Convention, or more recently a blizzard of misinformation and misdirection coming from those who wish delegates were bound

Here are the facts about delegates to the Republican National Convention and efforts to bind their vote according to primary results or instructions from their state party.

Republican delegates to the national convention have always been unbound by national party rules, with the single exception. The issue was decisively settled in 1876 when delegates voted 395 to 353 to uphold past rulings stating that delegates could not be bound to vote against their conscience. Following the vote, the chairman of the convention summarized the party’s position by saying “[I]t is he right of every individual member thereof to vote his individual sentiments.”

In the following convention in 1880, rules committee chair James A. Garfield, who wound up winning the nomination himself on the 36th ballot and the White House that fall, wrote what is today Rule 37(b) of the temporary rules of the convention. This rule was enacted specifically to provide a mechanism that would ensure every delegate was unbound and free to vote their conscience, and it gave every delegate the right to challenge his delegation’s announced vote on the floor of the convention and have his vote recorded as he wished.

In rejecting the binding of delegates, both the 1876 and 1880 conventions were embracing what had been the understanding of previous conventions dating back to 1856, the first Republican National Convention. At both 1860 and 1868 conventions, some delegations arrived with instructions or recommendations from their state conventions on which candidate to vote for, and at both conventions the right of delegates to ignore those directions and vote their consciences was upheld.

The Republican National Convention has also historically rejected the idea that state laws could bind delegates any more than state party rules or directions could. The very first time delegates were supposedly bound by state law was at the 1912 convention.

Both the Illinois and Oregon delegations announced that state law dictated how they were to vote, but that some delegates did not want to vote as ordered. In the same way the Republican convention had always rejected any sort of binding, those delegates were allowed to vote according to their consciences and ignore state law. The Oregon delegation made similar announcements in 1916 and 1920, and each time delegates were allowed to ignore state law and vote their consciences.

Although some claim it is “illegal” for delegates to defy state laws instructing them how to vote, the U.S. Supreme Court held in two cases nearly forty years ago that state laws could not trump national party rules. Part of their reasoning was that political parties must be free from government control, particularly in matters as important as who the party’s nominee would be, delegate selection, and how delegates could vote.

A careful reading of the rules passed by the 2012 Republican National Convention proves this to be the common understanding and practice of the party. Rules 14 and 16, which govern the election and selection of delegates to the convention, include several references to the fact that the national convention is free to ignore state law, including two occasions where rules begin with the phrase “No state law shall be observed…”

And Rule 16(b)(1) stipulates that state party rules take precedence over state laws governing the election and selection of delegates, and that national party rules take precedence over both. So clearly the national party does not accept that state laws can supersede either state or national party rules.

The only time delegates have been bound by primary results or anything else was in 1976, when the campaign of President Gerald Ford pushed through a rule requiring votes from nineteen states with laws purporting to bind delegates be announced and recorded as if those laws were valid. It was widely understood at the time those laws were unconstitutional as a result of a recent Supreme Court ruling, but the rule was sufficient to bind delegates’ votes for the first time in Republican National Convention history. …

In short, the history of the Republican National Convention proves that delegates have always, with the exception of 1976, been free to vote their conscience, and the rule that has protected this right over the last 136 years remains part of the temporary rules of the 2016 convention. The U.S. Supreme Court’s rulings on the issue also make clear that delegates are free to ignore state laws purporting to bind them, and the one national party rule purporting to bind delegates expires at the start of the convention.

These facts make clear that all delegates are completely unbound and free to vote their conscience on any and all matters that come before them, including the first ballot to decide the party’s nominee for president. No rule change is needed to unbind delegates, so long as the party stands by its 160-year history (aside from the blemish of 1976) protecting this important right.

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The Washington Post reported that a federal judge in Richmond ruled on Monday that Virginia can’t require Republican National Convention delegates to back Donald Trump.

U.S. District Judge Robert Payne said the Virginia state law requiring delegates who oppose Mr. Trump to vote for him next week at the party’s convention creates “a severe burden” on First Amendment rights.

But Judge Payne explicitly avoided weighing in on whether Republican National Committee rules requiring convention delegates to follow the results of their states as dictated by state and national party rules. Judge Payne said he “lacks jurisdiction to adjudicate” the broader unbinding question.

The Republican Party’s rules explicitly state that they take precedent over state laws and state party rules.

Judge Payne’s ruling has no impact on the rules of the GOP convention, which will be determined by the convention’s Rules Committee when it begins meeting Thursday.