As a government shutdown looms, conservative dissatisfaction with the Republican leadership’s inability to tackle the debt, permanently defund Planned Parenthood, and mishandling of the Iran deal seems to have only grown in the past several days.
“Leadership has often said they are going to fight tooth and nail but then they lose their teeth, they lose their nails,” Rep. Dave Brat, the freshman Republican from Virginia who defeated House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the 2014 GOP primary, wrote in a Facebook post Friday.
“Giving up before we even start to fight isn’t the way we solve our nation’s most important problems,” wrote Brat.
Echoing House members of Freedom Caucus, Republican presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., blasted GOP leaders in Congress for abdicating their role and letting President Obama “grab more and more power.”
Republicans are “in charge in the House and the Senate, but the excuse you’re told every day is we don’t have enough votes, [because] we can’t get to 60 [votes] and so we can’t defund Planned Parenthood,” Paul said at a Michigan GOP conference Saturday.
“We have a passive Congress that has basically abdicated their role vis a vis the president,” Paul, who is seventh on the Washington Examiner‘s presidential power rankings, said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” Sunday.
Congress lets President Obama “grab more and more power” because it doesn’t pass any of the appropriations bills, said Paul. “It’s been 40 years since we’ve passed appropriations bills. That’s our job.”
“I think we’re missing … the bigger picture on everything — not just Planned Parenthood,” Paul said. “We borrow a million dollars a minute [and] if you do a continuing resolution, you’re acknowledging that the government’s broken but you’re going to continue spending money at a rate that is unsustainable.”
Paul recommended that Republicans in Congress adopt a new strategy.
“I think we need to flip the tables — everybody’s saying we have to have 60 votes to defund Planned Parenthood,” he said Sunday. “We should be saying the opposite; we need 60 votes to fund Planned Parenthood.”
“Let’s put hundreds, if not thousands, of restrictions on all the spending,” said Paul. “That’s how Congress should assert themselves.”
Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., called GOP efforts to remove funds for Planned Parenthood an “exercise in futility” last week because he said Republicans don’t have enough votes to send President Obama a veto-proof bill.
Disagreeing strongly with McConnell, Paul said his strategy would be to put forward spending bills and force the Democrats to either vote for them, shut down the government, or come to the table.
“Right now there’s no negotiation because [Republicans] just acknowledge ‘oh, we don’t have 60 votes to stop any funding,'” said Paul.
Outsiders are doing well in the Republican presidential race, said Paul, because “right now, the Republicans in Washington are doing nothing to reign in spending — on anything.”
“If I were in charge of Congress, I would put forward spending [bills] and I would say ‘this is what it is.’ And if Democrats don’t vote for it, then Democrats would be shutting down government,” said Paul.
Several members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus agreed with Paul in comments to the Washington Examiner. Brat called Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s decision to force the Democrats to take tough votes on the Iran deal, after it would make a difference to the outcome, the “surrender and play fight strategy.”
Like Paul, Brat, a member of the Budget Committee, blamed Republican leadership for failing to take the debt seriously and finish work currently stalled in the Appropriations Committee.
“Someone’s going to make that high level decision to jam us, probably do a continuing resolution and then an omnibus in December,” he said. “It’s going to be another budget disaster.”
For his part, Paul said he will never vote for a continuing resolution.
“I won’t for any continuing resolution — period,” said Paul. “I won’t vote for any of ’em. If you vote for a continuing resolution, you’re voting for the status quo.”
In comments to the Examiner, Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., called Paul’s plan “one part of a better approach.”
“Federal spending shouldn’t be on autopilot,” said Amash. “We should go line by line each year to fund only what is constitutional, necessary, and appropriate.”
While the votes may be available for a reshuffle of GOP leadership in the House, this won’t necessarily benefit “our party or regular Americans” unless there is a “totally new approach,” said Amash.
“As the elites see it, the American people are their subjects, and a benevolent privileged few—standing above the law—must watch over the rest of society,” Amash wrote for the American Conservative Thursday. “Unrestrained government invites corruption and cronyism. On the whole, government power always benefits the wealthy and well-connected at the expense of others… Wherever government power has proliferated, societies have become poorer, crueler, and less productive.”
Congress needs to focus “on preserving the role of the legislative branch in our constitutional republic,” Amash told the Examiner. “The will of a few people in congressional leadership, plus the president, should not dictate all outcomes.”
