Thanks, GOP!

President Trump, flanked by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Texas) and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), applauds in the Rose Garden of the White House on May 4, 2017, after the House pushed through a healthcare bill. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

A Wall Street Journal opinion piece gets it just right:

The media template for covering the 115th Congress apparently goes like this: When Republicans fail to pass a bill, they’re doomed. But when they succeed, they’re also doomed.

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This is not only true on the left, whose media from the New York Times to CNN now sounds like a girls’ locker room after a mouse got in. But it’s true on the right too, where every compromise is reported as a catastrophe.

I would like to offer an alternative narrative. President Trump and the GOP are actually doing a pretty good job so far.

I know. The recent budget stank, but it put off a fight we didn’t need right now for another day and kept the government open for health care and tax reform. And I know: the House health care bill doesn’t repeal Obamacare. But on first glance, it strikes me as a cleverly designed poison pill that will allow Obamacare to die state by state while providing a soft landing for those who were helped by the failing law — which, in turn, might preserve the Republican majority in Congress. Plus, it shows that Republicans have the guts to try to fix O-Care when they could have simply stood back and let it die and then blamed Democrats. Plus, it shows that, after a shaky start, a divided Republican House majority can govern. So… on to the Senate.

In any case, compromise and dissatisfaction are part of politics. With a center-right Congress in a center-right country with a president with instincts on both sides of the line, we conservatives are not going to win them all.

But let’s step back from the close-up bill-by-bill view for a moment, and take a look at the bigger picture.

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The Democratic Party has now become a far left party antithetical to American liberty. That is, the Democrats no longer support the limits on government that protect the right of each person to choose his own way, express his own thoughts and use his own property and money as he sees fit. To the end of limiting that liberty they appoint justices to the Supreme Court who interpret the Constitution not according to its meaning, but according to their whims; they amass regulations in order to vastly expand the power of the unelected state; they corrupt and misuse powerful departments and bureaus like Justice and the IRS to overturn laws by non-enforcement and silence speech by delay and penalty; and they use their very powerful news media to essentially censor information in their favor.

In each of these spheres, President Trump and the GOP Congress have begun to strike back effectively. The appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court is not just a Trump promise nobly kept, it may well mean the preservation of the First and Second Amendments in the face of leftist justices who are trying to theorize both out of meaningful existence. Congress has passed and the president has signed thirteen bills erasing late-stage Obama regulations, causing the New York Times (a former newspaper) to lament that they are taking a “wrecking ball” to Obama’s legacy. And Trump executive orders are aimed at slowing new regulations down. FBI Director James Comey’s recent testimony before a Senate committee gave the strong impression that federal law dogs had been hamstrung by a corrupt Loretta Lynch Justice Department determined to protect Democrat interests at all costs. The appointment of Jeff Sessions as attorney general puts an honest man at the helm.

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And President Trump’s brutal and hilarious trolling of the dishonest, failed, fake news media has marginalized these deeply corrupt faux journalists to the point of irrelevance. This is no small accomplishment in itself.

So yes, let those of us on the right continue to push for more conservative legislation, and let us complain some whenever we don’t get it. But let’s not be blinded to the fact that things are going pretty well for the good guys right now.

Maybe we could call a pause in carping at President Trump and tarring and feathering Speaker Ryan and scorning Senator Mitch McConnell just long enough to tell them thanks.

For more commentary, listen to my podcast Monday through Thursday.

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