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Weekly
Standard...
A
Time for Choosing
By William Kristol
7/27/11
To
govern is to choose. To vote is to
choose. To vote against John Boehner on the House floor this week in
the
biggest showdown of the current Congress is to choose to vote with
Nancy
Pelosi. To vote against Boehner is to choose to support Barack Obama.
It is to
choose to increase the chances that worse legislation than Boehner’s
passes.
And it is to choose to increase the chances that Obama emerges from
this
showdown politically stronger. So when the Heritage Action Fund and the
Club
for Growth, and Senators Vitter, Paul, et al., choose to urge House
Republicans
to join the Democrats to defeat Boehner, they’re choosing to side with
Barack
Obama.
Unfair!—these
fine groups and senators
will say. We’re not siding with Obama. We just want Boehner to do more,
to go
further.
Very
well, then. Can the pro-Obama
right explain how defeat for Boehner on the House floor would redound
to
conservatives’ benefit, to their ability to do more and to go further?
They
can’t. Read their statements
(here, here, and here). They don’t even pretend to explain how
defeating
Boehner would produce a better policy or political result for
conservatives—in
the near or medium or long term. Because they can’t explain how defeat
will
produce victory. Defeat will produce ... defeat. There is no path to a
better
conservative outcome that follows from Boehner going down on the House
floor
this week.
This
isn’t some bad bipartisan
establishment deal of the sort conservatives have sometimes opposed in
the
past. Then conservatives were opposing Democrats as well as
Republicans, and
could plausibly explain why doing so was in conservative interests.
Now,
Heritage Action and the Club for Growth are siding with and
strengthening
Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. They’re working to
produce a
policy and political defeat for John Boehner and Eric Cantor and Paul
Ryan and
the Republican majority in the House. This isn’t principled
conservatism. This
is self-indulgence masquerading as principle, sectarianism masquerading
as
conservatism.
Don’t
get me wrong. The Boehner bill
isn’t great. But it does check Obama’s spending for the remainder of
his first
term. And it lays the groundwork for denying him a second. Success for
Boehner
now—whatever mistakes he and others have made in recent weeks and
months—makes
more likely the defeat of Obama in 2012. This in turn will make
possible the
repeal of Obamacare and fundamental conservative budget and policy
reforms with
a new president in 2013.
When
wavering House Republicans think
the current situation through, they won’t choose to join the pro-Obama
right.
They’ll choose to stand with John Boehner against Barack Obama. Because
victory
over Obama is no vice. And losing to Obama is no virtue.
Read
it at the Weekly Standard
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