The DHS Funding Fight: Pragmatism, Principle, and Empty Words

By Dan Cadman on March 3, 2015

Abraham Lincoln is without doubt among the best and wisest of our chief executives (many of whom have been mediocre, if truth be told), and almost certainly the greatest Republican president.

Lincoln was that rarest of creatures: a great leader unburdened by ego whose homespun roots gave him the everyman ability to seek practical solutions to problems, but whose moral comprehension provided him the wisdom to know when pragmatism must give way to principle. Finally, he was not a man of empty words or rhetorical flourishes for their own sake; the Gettysburg Address consists of a mere 272 words.

A couple of media articles have had me thinking about Lincoln, and the Republican party, vis-a-vis the ongoing scrum over funding for the Department of Homeland Security — not nearly so pressing a threat as civil war or so weighty an issue as slavery, I freely acknowledge, but not irrelevant either.

On March 2, the Christian Science Monitor published a an article titled "DHS funding fight gives voice to Republicans' growing pragmatist fringe". According to the article, Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.) is illustrative of this "pragmatist fringe", who simply want to see the whole issue of defunding executive action on immigration — which, really, is what the DHS funding kerfuffle is all about — to go away since it will likely hit a stumbling block in the Senate. (One suspects that the journalist who wrote the article has deliberately cherry-picked a vital, attractive, young, Hispanic, first-term Republican to make her point. What better way to not-so-subtly suggest that those other guys are out-of-touch wackos for gumming up the works?)

Where does principle enter into this simplistic "pragmatic" thinking? Has the Constitution become such a footnote in the collective psyche of modern America — including our legislators — that permitting this president to trample on it is simply something to overlook because it is inconvenient? What good, then, is the rest of the Constitution, if it, too, can be cherry-picked as one wishes? How about the Bill of Rights? Which of those should we abandon as inconvenient? And how did we get to this point?

Part of the answer to how we got here rests with the Republican leadership, which opportunistically used executive action as a wedge in the run-up to midterm elections to great advantage because, as they know well, it resonates with voters. Those leaders, including Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Chairman of the Republican National Committee Reince Priebus, roundly condemned the administration's imperious end-run on the Constitution, but now that they have the majority in both houses of Congress they don't seem inclined to walk the walk in order to back up the talk. It's all been just a lot of empty words. Unfortunately, they find themselves in a bind because of all that talk and the electorate's candidate choices in giving them their majority.

Instead of taking the high road and matching deeds to words though, we discover, courtesy of Breitbart.com in another article, "Boehner, Priebus Ex-Chiefs of Staff Air Ads to Pressure Conservatives Resisting Executive Amnesty", that these leaders are using former staff as shills to try to wear down the stalwart members of their party who have in fact put principle over pragmatism in taking on the DHS funding fight. They're doing it by spending big bucks on advertising to discredit them in their home districts.

This kind of backbiting and skullduggery seems sure to backfire on the party in the long run, but it begs the question: What ever happened to the party of Lincoln?