The #GOP and the #SOTU

Posted on January 29, 2014 Updated on January 29, 2014

Dear GOP,

In his State of the Union speech, Obama has promised to use his executive office to make changes.  Your first instinct is to call him a dictator and fight him on this.  I would advise against this for a couple of reasons.  First, you can only fight him in two ways.  Pass a law over riding his executive order, (good luck with that) or take him to court.  Unless he steps wildly outside his federal purview,  you’ll lose.  Badly, publicly, and embarrassingly. Very much like every last one of your recent court battles.  But I doubt you’ll do this.  Your second go-to option is to call him names for media attention and to be randomly inflammatory.  Again, I advise against this.  Because the country is going to call your bluff.  You don’t want the president taking action, but you yourselves won’t, or can’t.  So the hypocrisy here is a little intolerable.  The more you fight, the more blatant your hypocrisy will become.  Eventually you’ll start saying or doing something on camera you’ll regret and here comes the mid term elections.  Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me if Obama’s long term game was to provoke you into exactly this sort of scenario.

Here’s the other problem and this is more global than specific.  It’s your persistent inability to formulate a coherent, actionable legislative agenda.  You keep saying you’ll repeal and replace, but you’re horrifically vague on the replacement aspect.  Same with taxes and spending.  You say  you want to cut taxes AND balance the budget by cutting spending, and yet you never say which taxes, by how much, for whom, and which spending programs are being cut.  On almost every  legislative policy agenda, you run into the exact same problem of vague useless plans.  I say this only because, while your welcome to criticize the President for his actions, its your inaction on every substantive issue in  the country that is he’s going to hit you with in the fall.

There’s another reason you need to be careful.  Obama hasn’t issued all that many executive orders especially relative to recent Republicans.  You run into more overt hypocrisy if you call him out on executive privilege.  So calling him out for exercising power he’s both entitled and obligated to use in order to solve problems that you won’t touch isn’t going to end well for you but your welcome to try.