Tony Blankley pokes the Republican establishment again here, taking on the notion -- lately offered by the Wall Street Journal itself here -- that all the Republican House can do is frame the 2012 issues battle, and that they should not attempt any cuts to the deficit-driving entitlements of Medicare and Social Security.
He recommends that Republicans, to use Admiral Lord Nelson's phrase, "Go right at 'em." Nelson, you surely know, divided his smaller fleet and crossed the Spanish and French line to decisive effect at the Battle of Trafalgar, ensuring a victory that ushered in a century of naval supremacy for Britain.
Blankley, who was Newt Gingrich's Press Secretary -- something Newt needed like a second mouth -- reminds us of two critical things about that 104th Congress. First, that -- contrary to today's received wisdom -- Newt's House succeeded in governing from the Congress, passing welfare reform, six or seven of ten items in the Contract with America, and balancing the budget.
Second, Blankley reminds us that in 1995 Newt's House's every act was viewed by the nation through the distortion field of ABC, NBC, and CBS news, aka, the maintream media, who picked up their opinions every morning on their New York stoops and subway newsstands in the form of the then-dominant eminence grise of the New York Times. That is something we need not fear today, as the emergence of talk radio, Fox News, conservative blogging on the Internet, and the Wall Street Journal -- its ringing conservative voicebox transplanted into a full-service national newspaper by Rupert Murdock -- have reduced the Times to little more than a local liberal paper.
I do believe that those media changes will ensure that the electorate in 2011 and 2012 will remember the 2009 and 2010 overreach of the progressivist Obamarama. The failed stimulus and the grab for tyrannical power over all health care will not be forgotten, and the Tea Party anger will not subside quickly, even if the business cycle and the lame-duck tax act kick in and restore a modest growth. It is the primary job of the Republican House and, of course, all who view progressivism as a terribly misguided and mistaken philosophy and probably a terribly Machiavellian evil, to turn up the heat on the Democratic Senate and the President. Thus, the 112th Congress should be very aggressive at rolling back the progressivist agenda of stimulus spending, the new entitlement of ObamaCare, and business-strangling regulations. On this, I think Blankley and the Wall Street Journal agree.
Should Congressional Republicans move as aggressively against Social Security and Medicare? No strategist of either political stripe believes that Republicans can succeed at changing those programs holding only the House of Representatives. Nevertheless, I believe that they can and should begin serious hearings on how the growth of Medicare expenditures can be controlled. Those programs will never be sustainable until their growth is limited to inflation and the growth in population, or perhaps to the growth in the gross domestic product. The present mandated growth rate of Social Security expenditures -- basically the growth in the CPI plus the growth in the medicare eligible population -- is clearly unsustainable, and Medicare expenditures has grown far more rapidly than that because inflation in the health care sector has been far higher than that in the CPI.
If the Congressional Republicans do not show now that they are serious about controlling future entitlement spending, they will lose this opportunity to do so, and in the process turn economic libertarians back into non-voters, and independent voters back into Democrat voters.
Showing that they are serious does not mean succeeding at everything they try, but it does mean passing bills that reduce discretionary spending. Those bills should be unanimously supported by the Republicans in the Senate, and that should be enough to hold the Democrat Senate's feet to the fire and go a long way toward ensuring that Republicans capture the Senate and elect a Republican President in 2012.
The Republican House leadership certainly knows that it would be a foolish waste of hard-won Republican unity for a fractured Republican House to pass, by narrow majorities, major bills revising these programs; that would divide the Republican minority in the Senate as well.
Nelson? Oh, that. Well yes, he was mortally wounded by a French sniper at Trafalgar... but it got him a statue perched atop a column named for him in a London square named for the battle!
All Newt got was the mortal wound.
