Pirate's Cove

Tom Tancredo has long been a Conservative stalwart, with a lifetime rate of 99% per the American Conservative Union for his 10 years in office. He writes over at Breitbart that he is leaving the GOP

In a panel discussion at the University of Colorado after the recent Republican debate, I was asked by a student why she should be a Republican. The question forced me to ask myself the same thing.

I gave the young woman the standard talking points–that Republicans believe in smaller government, individual rights, fiscal responsibility, and free enterprise. But as I drove home, her question–and my inability to respond with any level of real conviction–got me thinking: Does the Republican Party leadership fight for these values and principles today?

After much thought, I reluctantly concluded that the answer is “no.” The proudly socialist Democrats are full of passionate intensity, while the Republican leadership is full of pathetic excuses. After this week’s House GOP “budget deal,” which betrays nearly every promise made to grassroots conservatives since 2010, I have decided it is time to end my affiliation with the Republican Party.

This decision has been incubating over the past 17 years, years of watching the downward spiral of the Party of Lincoln and Reagan into the Party of Democrat Lite.

He notes that the GOP establishment was very much for immigration non-enforcement, and he was repeatedly abused by Speaker Tom Delay and Karl Rove, the latter telling him “never to darken the White House door again” over his opposition to Bush 43’s immigration policies.

He goes on to discuss the GOP’s historic gains in the House and Senate

Yet, despite these historic gains, nothing changed. The GOP neither advanced a conservative agenda nor checked the radical “transformative” agenda of Barack Obama. We got condescending lip service, and nothing more.

• Promises have been broken and principles abandoned, while millions of American families watched their dreams slip further and further out of reach.
• Republican congressional leaders maneuvered to deliver votes to fund President Obama’s unconstitutional amnesty order, and more recently, his unprecedented job-killing EPA rules.
• They have voted twice in four years to violate the very modest, bipartisan caps on spending put in place with the laughably-named “Budget Control Act” in 2011 — and now have abandoned the caps completely.
• They have voted to continue funding what is essentially a $500 million macabre earmark for abortion provider Planned Parenthood.
• They have voted to fund Obamacare, and despite promises, have never passed a complete repeal of the PPACA.
• No one has been held accountable for the outrageous IRS and VA scandals.
• And now, as icing on the poisoned cake, House Republicans have elected a Speaker who was not asked to renounce his commitment to open borders and amnesty, policies which will betray the values of 75% of the party and give Democrats a permanent electoral majority within a decade.

Even in foreign policy the Republican Party leadership has deceived those who elected them by engineering passage of the pathetic Corker/Cardin amendment – which greased the skids for President Obama’s flawed Iran deal to clear Congress without having to meet 67 vote threshold for ratification that the constitution requires for binding international treaties. No one will be surprised if they do the same thing with the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership.

When we get to the latest GOP sellout, the latest “budget deal”, which Tancredo mentioned at the beginning, the GOP had nowhere else to go. They’ve been conceding the highground to Obama and the Democrats since the GOP regained the House in 2011, much less their squishiness since Obama took office in 2009. They’ve failed to hold the line since they took over the Senate this year. This set them up for a situation where they couldn’t fight Obama, and, really, according to Tancredo, and what Conservatives have witnessed for this century, they didn’t want to fight.

There’s lots more in the piece, which should be read by all Conservatives to understand exactly what the GOP Establishment is doing, but he ends noting that he will now be an Independent, and will fight hard to get the best Conservative, Ted Cruz, elected president. Sadly, if Cruz wins, he would still have to deal with the Democrat Lite GOP Establishment, which seems to want to fight Conservatives more than Democrats.

Crossed at Right Wing News.