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What Republicans have to do now

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The Republicans won yesterday's election because they promised to fight against the overblown spending of the Democrats and the Obama Administration, and because the public disapprove of the greatly increased spending and deficits. The Republicans did not win due to any particular loyalty to the Republican Party, and if the Republicans in Congress don't actually deliver what the voters want them to deliver, the odds are that their time in the majority will be short-lived.

The Republicans must also sit down and figure out how to prioritize, based on what they can and cannot do with the power they have. While most voters disapprove of ObaminableCare, the Republicans, no matter how much they might want to repeal it, can't repeal it. That would require legislation which would have to pass the Senate, and even if it did that, get past a certain presidential veto.

But they can refuse to fund it! They can simply choose not to pass any of the appropriations to implement ObaminableCare, and neither the Democrats in the Senate nor the White House can compel them to pass it.

The House Republicans should not waste time tilting at windmills. I don't really think that anyone is seriously trying to impeach President Obama, regardless of what some people might think. And wasting their time on a zillion subpoenas or useless congressional investigations would be just that: wasting their time. The voters have given the GOP a chance, just two-and-four short years after giving Republicans two major electoral b*tch-slaps, and the lesson is clear: the voters' patience is not high, and if the Republicans don't do the jobs that the voters elected them to do, they'll be out on their butts again. Time wasted on stuff that they can't do is time taken away from what they can do. The Republicans can keep the Democrats from passing any new social legislation, but until they win the Senate and the White House, don't have the power to reverse the bovine feces that has already been passed. And if they don't do what they can do, there's little chance that the 2012 elections will give them the Senate and the White House.

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There is only one constitutional restriction in this, the provision in Article I, Section 8, which says that the Congress has the power "To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years." Such restriction implies that the Framers believed that Congress could appropriate for other things for periods longer than two years.
The Republicans in the state legislature could stand to do this as well.

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Editor of Common Sense Political Thought, mostly Republican (but not always), mostly conservative (but again, not always), always interesting.
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