House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., listens to remarks Friday, May 8, 2020, in the State Dining Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
You’ve been hearing big promises from GOP politicians since at least 2010, when they promised largely apolitical, non-partisan, Tea Party voters to follow through on the demands of the movement in exchange for supporting the Republican Party. The fulfillment of those promises has been lacking, to be generous. The GOP promised to end Obamacare. It failed. The GOP promised to cut spending. It failed. The list goes on. In his Contra Corner column, David Stockman suggests that voters shouldn’t expect much from the current GOP-led House of Representatives, writing:
Don’t expect much from the thin new GOP majority in the U.S. House—at least anything that will materially turn the ship of state from its headlong dash toward fiscal disaster. That because on the big issues that really count, the beltway lifers who dominate the GOP’s senior ranks and committee/subcommittee chairmanships are on the wrong side!
That starts with the Warfare State and its symbiosis with the Welfare State, intermediated by the log-rolling politicians of the bipartisan duopoly. The fact is, all of Washington’s abominable spending, borrowing and money-printing flows from that deadly coalition of convenience.
But today’s GOP is not about to sever this convenient nexus, and pivot in favor of nonintervention abroad and drastic curtailment of the Washington spending machine at home. This means, in turn, that the vastly bloated $850 billion defense budget, and the neocon foreign policy of global intervention and Forever Wars which it funds, will not likely shed a single dime of its current budgetary obesity.
That’s because the GOP national security leaders are raving neocon interventionists. The worst of these is Rep. Michael McCaul, who has now become chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Like the overwhelming share of the GOP rank and file on the Potomac, he’s never seen a US foreign intervention that he couldn’t embrace lock, stock and barrel.
Thus, he (and they) cheered on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the interventions in Libya, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Iran and assorted others; and now is especially whooping it up for proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and hot war with China, if Washington is given half the excuse.
Read more from Stockman here.
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