Thread by @usacsmret

McConnell and the Iron Triangle vs. Trump and the Voters bit.ly/2G77Fdl

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell aligned with the NeverTrump faction of Republican senators Thursday to introduce and pass a resolution to “rebuke” President Trump. The president’s offenses? Trump dared to win the Republican nomination in 2016

Instead of supporting the Republican and independent voters who knowingly nominated and elected a man committed to foreign policy change, McConnell is sticking stubbornly to the foreign policy approach that failed America and the world.

The battle lines of the Republican civil war are drawn: Kentuckian McConnell, in league with Mitt Romney of Utah, assailed the president’s order to bring American troops home from Afghanistan as “precipitous.”

Kentucky’s junior and more popular Republican senator, Rand Paul, meanwhile retorted: “It is ludicrous to call withdrawal after 17 years ‘precipitous.’”

Trump has expressed skepticism about reports from the national intelligence agencies. They are supposed to work for the president, but McConnell is more comfortable if the president is subservient to them.

That arrangement perpetuates the Iron Triangle of which McConnell is, as Bill Kristol might put it, a bulwark. The Iron Triangle is the combination of Congress, the permanent federal bureaucracy, and special-interest groups, including the ideologically leftist mainstream media.

The struggle between Trump and the woefully large number of pre-Trump Republicans is not really about the true constitutional separation of powers. McConnell and crew are not standing up for the rightful power of the legislative branch; they are shilling for the Iron Triangle.

Freshmen senators seem to find out early how to win the good graces of the liberal media and the permanent bureaucracy. Barely four weeks into their tenure, every new GOP senator voted against the president and for the swamp

Meanwhile, Blackburn, Braun, Hawley, and Scott owe their come-from-behind victories solely to Trump’s unflagging support.

There is no clearer sign of hubris than this: Establishment Senate Republicans are breaking with the president because Trump’s approval-disapproval rating is 42%-55 %. And what is the approval-disapproval rating of the GOP Senate geniuses of self-preservation? It’s 12%-69%

Today’s situation is reminiscent of another break-the-mold president and the challenges he faced from the ancien régime of his own party.
When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, the pre-Reagan Republican senators were a stumbling block to his policy initiatives.

Trump has inherited a bureaucracy and policy “processes” from Barack Obama and George W. Bush and the State Department of Hillary Clinton. Consider: All of the transition briefing books prepared by the Obama Administration for the next president were intended for Hillary Clinton.

But Republican primary voters decisively chose Trump, who repudiated the George W. Bush foreign affairs disasters while the other candidates offered themselves as Dubya on steroids.

No president can change the intelligence community very much. That’s why it’s called the deep state. It’s a permanent bureaucracy, not especially accountable to presidents, and much inclined to preserve its prerogatives by serving the Iron Triangle against presidential authority.

Instead of trying to push the president around, the Senate should get its own national security house in order. In particular, freshman senators elected in 2018 because of Trump’s support should back the president, not the Iron Triangle.

Anti-Trump Republicans are gambling that they can ride out the Trump years and things will return in 2021 to the GW Bush foreign policy. They resemble the Republican Old Guard that considered Reagan a fluke and pined for a return to the comfort zone they enjoyed with Jerry Ford.