Mitch McConnell - Can He Survive?

Ann Coulter: Still Full of It

 By George Rasley, CHQ Editor

When Republican author and columnist Ann Coulter attacked the Senate Conservatives Fund and others who oppose Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell’s re-election as “shysters,” we said “Ann Coulter is full of it.”

Now, three weeks after Coulter first criticized conservative and liberty-leaning organizations, and their members, for opposing McConnell’s re-election she has doubled down on her defense of Senator McConnell, and in the process, upped the intensity of her attacks on those who oppose granting McConnell lifetime tenure in the Senate.

In a March 12 article on Townhall, Coulter posits that anyone who thinks Republican primary elections are the right place to begin the battle against Big Government is a member of a “right-wing mob” driven not by the facts of McConnell’s record, but by irrational “mob characteristics,” such as imperviousness to facts, slogans as arguments and acceptance of contradictions.

Coulter then lays out a set of facts that she claims validate her argument that Mitch McConnell is a “conservative” starting with McConnell’s opposition to the McCain-Feingold campaign finance “reform” law and including McConnell’s opposition to amnesty for illegal aliens and role in the passage of the 2011 Budget Control Act that led eventually to the reductions in spending forced by the sequester provisions in that law.

The problem with this defense of Mitch McConnell is that it is founded on the proposition that conservatism is a smorgasbord, and that by dropping by to pick up a meatball or two a candidate or elected official qualifies as a “conservative” and should therefore be immune to a primary challenge from the right.

In our view conservatism is a fully formed world view with constitutional limits on government to protect individual liberty, life and economic opportunity at its core. Treating conservatism as a smorgasbord from which legislators pick and choose as Coulter proposes reduces the conservative movement’s principles to a mere collection of this year’s bills and special interest demands, not a governing philosophy.

And more to the point of Coulter’s article on Townhall, she apparently missed the causes of the rise of the TEA Party movement that now supplies the on the ground horsepower driving the opposition to the re-election of Mitch McConnell and other big government establishment Republican Senators, such as Mississippi’s Thad Cochran.

The fact of the matter is the TEA Party movement is a rebellion against Big Government and in its opposition to Big Government it is as much a rebellion against the Republican establishment’s betrayal of conservative principles on the growth of government and spending during the Bush years as it is about Obama and Obamacare.

And Mitch McConnell and his record in the Senate are Exhibits A through Z 

in the case against the Capitol Hill Republican establishment and the inside-the-Beltway GOP leadership for 

betraying conservative principles  on spending and the growth of government.

Mitch McConnell has a record of pork-barreling and earmarking that has regularly put him near the top of lists of legislators supporting wasteful spending, such as the Citizens Against Government Waste Pig Book. CWGW referred to Mitch McConnell as one of the Senate’s “perennial porkers” long before he faced a 2014 primary challenge, and that’s a fact, not an argument by bumper sticker.

Mitch McConnell for voted for the TARP Wall Street bailout and he supported the $25 billion Bush version of the automobile manufacturers bailout saying it was “a sound way to go forward.” Yes, we know McConnell’s opponent may or may not have been supportive of TARP, but that is a strike against him if true, not a defense of McConnell.

As for Ann Coulter’s ridiculous proposition that because McConnell “tricked” Obama into supporting the sequester he can claim credit for cutting spending, let’s take a look at the coin McConnell traded for the now-abandoned sequester; Cut, Cap and Balance.

That’s right, while Ann Coulter may have forgotten, conveniently, that the goal of conservatives going into the 2011 debt ceiling debate was to force Obama to accept some version of Jim DeMint’s Cut, Cap and Balance legislation we haven’t forgotten or forgiven the betrayal.

We well remember that Mitch McConnell started the debate over Cut, Cap and Balance opposed to the legislation and in favor of giving President Barack Obama the authority to increase the debt ceiling unless Congress voted its disapproval.

McConnell did eventually sign on to a Cut, Cap and Balance bill, but there was never any serious effort made in the Senate on behalf of the bill and McConnell’s Budget Control Act not only raised the debt ceiling, it also gave Obama and the Democrats a free pass on the issue during the 2012 election.

What’s more, calling them “crippling” and “destructive” McConnell regularly criticized the sequestration spending cuts for which he is now trying to claim credit.

The fault line in today’s politics isn’t between Democrats and Republicans, it is between the proponents of Big Government in both political parties and those who favor putting the federal government back inside strict constitutional limits to reduce the spending and erosion of freedom that Big Government brings no matter which establishment political party holds sway in Washington.

Ann Coulter’s smorgasbord conservatism is a path to permanent minority status for the GOP because it blurs the lines between the parties and amounts to a grant of lifetime tenure to establishment Republican Senators like Mitch McConnell, Thad Cochran and other Big Government Republicans. 

The first battlefield in the fight against Big Government must be the Republican primary elections 

and anyone who doesn’t understand that, including Ann Coulter, is full of it.

 

It's the Primaries, Stupid!

 ConservativeHQ Endorses the Following Candidates:

U.S. Senate Republican Primary

• Sam Clovis: Iowa Senate
  Dan Sullivan: Alaska Senate
  Chris McDaniel: Mississippi Senate
  Ben Sasse: Nebraska Senate
•  

U.S. House of Representatives Republican Primary

• Bryan Smith: ID-2
  Dan Bongino: MD-6
  Frank Roche: NC-2
  Dave Brat: VA-7
  Alex Mooney: WV-2  

 

November is nine months away, and McConnell remains the favorite. 

But there are distressing signs for the Republican leader. 

The new poll found that 60 percent of Kentuckians disapprove of the powerful five-term incumbent,

compared to just 32 percent who approve of his performance in the Senate. 

That’s a shade worse than the ratings registered by President Barack Obama, 

who lost the state by 22 points in 2012. 

  http://time.com/5333/mitch-mcconnell-kentucky-senate-race-2014-poll-alison-lundergan-grimes/