Ryan Ellis writes for Forbes on “When tax and fiscal policy meets political reality”:

There’s been a wave of anger and frustration directed at Speaker Paul D. Ryan in particular and the Congressional Republican majority in general ever since last week’s passage of the omnibus and the permanent tax extenders.

The criticism all boils down to one thing: the bills were a giant giveaway to liberals and crony capitalist K Street interests, and conservatives were (once again) sold down the river by the establishment.

Well, I have some uncomfortably blunt news for the Tea Party, the Freedom Caucus, the true believers on social media, and the armchair political general at your Christmas dinner table who knows exactly how the country should be run: it’s all your fault, guys.

It takes 218 votes to pass anything off the floor of the U.S. House. The Republican majority in the House has 246 Members of Congress in its ranks, so the Democrats should be irrelevant on every vote. Thanks to the Most Hardcore Conservatives on Earth (trademark pending), that is not the case. On the omnibus spending bill, for example, only 150 of the 246 House Republicans voted for final passage. That’s actually pretty good for them–only 79 voted for the budget deal which ultimately set the discretionary cap for the fiscal year. That would be the same budget deal forced on us by our own defense hawks who flat out refused to support the Budget Control Act caps anymore, but that’s another case of Republican stupidity and hypocrisy.

In order to pass the bill off the floor, Speaker Ryan was forced to deal with the Democrats to bridge the gap between the 150 GOP votes he could wring out of his own caucus and the 218 votes he needed to fund the government. Each and every one of those 68 Democrat votes came with a price.

Since the overall funding level for the government was not in question (that having been settled in the waning days of the Boehner speakership), the pound of flesh the Democrats were able to bargain for was a massive watering down of the policy “riders” which would attach to the spending bill. They were also able to get spending priorities within the overall cap different than what 218 Republicans would have allocated.

To their credit, Speaker Ryan and his fellow Republican negotiators did get three very significant wins for conservatives (none of which they are getting any credit for).

• Making 21 of the 55 tax extenders permanent, and about two-thirds of the dollar value of this perpetually expiring collection of tax breaks. This lowers the 10 year tax revenue baseline by over $500 billion, making revenue neutral tax reform far easier to craft without hedging on pro-growth priorities. Notably, small business expensing was made permanent, which is a longstanding goal of conservative tax activists. This was done without tax hikes to “pay for” an extension of present tax law, including no increased capital gains taxes on investment partnerships (i.e., “carried interest” capital gains, a big target of the Left this year).
• Stopping a bailout of Big Insurance. Thanks to this rider, insurance companies will not be bailed out by taxpayers for the money they lose by participating in Obamacare exchanges. “Winner” insurance companies might share some scanty profits with the many “loser” companies, but taxpayers won’t be funding any of it. There’s a lot of evidence that this smart, strategic maneuver has been the single most effective thing Republicans have done to counter Obamacare, as insurance companies are hemorrhaging money and United Healthcare has said they might be exiting the Obamacare space altogether.  It’s certainly worked better than shutting down the government to supposedly defund Obamacare.
• Lifting the crude oil export ban. This relic of the Carter Administration means real jobs for the energy sector and is worth, in the words of Speaker Ryan, “a thousand Keystone pipelines.” Not bad.

Those three riders, along with some long past due oversight and restraints on the IRS, represented the entirety of the political capital available to a “majority” offering 150 votes in a 218 vote game.

The Democrats, for their part, drove a hard bargain. They got an extra $290 million in funding for the IRS, after several years of budget cuts (real ones, as in less each year) to that most loathed of government agencies. They also killedseveral very important conservative policy riders.

There was nothing in the omnibus on Syria refugees, nothing on Planned Parenthood defunding, nothing stopping the executive order on immigration, nothing on Iran sanctions, nothing restricting Obamacare outside the risk corridor neutrality, and nothing to stop the budget gimmick known as “CHIMPS.” The bill delayed Obamacare’s Cadillac Plan excise tax (a top priority of Big Labor), extended the Wind Production Tax Credit and solar tax credits, paid for the United Nations Green Climate Fund, and paved the way for the implementation of the Department of Labor’s IRA-killing “fiduciary rule.” It also regulated vaping products as if they were cigarettes, the simple fact they are not cigarettes notwithstanding. Puerto Rico still faces a debt crisis with the possibility of a taxpayer bailout and no financial controls.

By any measure, that’s a lot of wins we didn’t get. The question is why we didn’t get them. It’s clear to many of us who have worked closely in the Congressional process that it’s House conservatives who are to blame. By withholding their votes for the omnibus, they forcedLeadership to negotiate with the Democrats rather than advancing a Republican-only bill. The price of that foolishness is seeing these essential conservative policy riders thrown to the wayside.

There’s no world in which we would have gotten absolutely everything (there’s still the Senate Democrats and President Obama to deal with, after all), but we clearly didn’t get as much as we could have if our own team had kept their GOP jerseys on and voted for the best possible omnibus package. Instead, they effectively empowered the House Democrat minority (which should have no power at all) in contravention of our shared policy objectives.

Some House conservative staffers have said to me and others that there’s another side to this narrative. If, they say, House Leadership had put forward a bill including all these conservative riders, the resulting changed minds on the right would have yielded 218 Republican votes. That may be the case, but I share the Leadership’s skepticism here. Far too often, many House conservatives have had a “no, and no matter what” attitude on bills like this that essentially gives their vote to Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, the House Democrat leaders. The goalposts seem to keep moving, and “principle” seems to always demand a no.

The bottom line is that it will take trust on both sides for the House GOP majority to actually act like a majority and not the “governing minority” House conservatives have forced them into time and again. Given the history of their anti-strategic and base-baiting activities, however, the first step must come from the Freedom Caucus/Tea Party Members, not the Leadership.

George F. Will:

If you look beyond Donald Trump’s comprehensive unpleasantness — is there a disagreeable human trait he does not have? — you might see this: He is a fundamentally sad figure. His compulsive boasting is evidence of insecurity. His unassuageable neediness suggests an aching hunger for others’ approval to ratify his self-admiration. His incessant announcements of his self-esteem indicate that he is not self-persuaded. Now, panting with a puppy’s insatiable eagerness to be petted, Trump has reveled in the approval of Vladimir Putin, murderer and war criminal.

Putin slyly stirred America’s politics by saying Trump is “very . . . talented,” adding that he welcomed Trump’s promise of “closer, deeper relations,” whatever that might mean, with Russia. Trump announced himself flattered to be “so nicely complimented” by a “highly respected” man: “When people call you brilliant, it’s always good.” When MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said Putin “kills journalists, political opponents and invades countries,” Trump replied that “at least he’s a leader.” Besides, Trump breezily asserted, “I think our country does plenty of killing also.” Two days later, Trump, who rarely feigns judiciousness, said: “It has not been proven that he’s killed reporters.”

Well. Perhaps the 56 journalists murdered were coincidental victims of amazingly random violence that the former KGB operative’s police state is powerless to stop. It has, however, been “proven,” perhaps even to Trump’s exacting standards, that Putin has dismembered Ukraine. (Counts one and two at the 1946 Nuremberg trials concerned conspiracy to wage, and waging, aggressive war.)

Until now, Trump’s ever-more-exotic effusions have had an almost numbing effect. Almost. But by his embrace of Putin, and by postulating a slanderous moral equivalence — Putin kills journalists, the United States kills terrorists, what’s the big deal, or the difference? — Trump has forced conservatives to recognize their immediate priority.

Certainly conservatives consider it crucial to deny the Democratic Party a third consecutive term controlling the executive branch. Extending from eight to 12 years its use of unbridled executive power would further emancipate the administrative state from control by either a withering legislative branch or a supine judiciary. But first things first. Conservatives’ highest priority now must be to prevent Trump from winning the Republican nomination in this, the GOP’s third epochal intraparty struggle in 104 years.

In 1912, former president Theodore Roosevelt campaigned for the Republican nomination on an explicitly progressive platform. Having failed to win the nomination, he ran a third-party campaign against the Republican nominee, President William Howard Taft, and the Democratic nominee, New Jersey Gov. Woodrow Wilson, who that November would become the first person elected president who was deeply critical of the American founding.

TR shared Wilson’s impatience with the separation of powers, which both men considered an 18th-century relic incompatible with a properly energetic executive. Espousing unconstrained majoritarianism, TR favored a passive judiciary deferential to elected legislatures and executives; he also endorsed the powers of popular majorities to overturn judicial decisions and recall all public officials.

Taft finished third, carrying only Utah and Vermont. But because Taft hewed to conservatism, and was supported by some other leading Republicans (e.g., Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, one of TR’s closest friends, and Elihu Root, TR’s secretary of war and then secretary of state), the Republican Party survived as a counterbalance to a progressive Democratic Party.

In 1964, Barry Goldwater mounted a successful conservative insurgency against a Republican establishment that was content to blur and dilute the Republican distinctiveness that had been preserved 52 years earlier. Goldwater defeated New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller for the nomination, just as Taft had defeated TR, a former New York governor. Like Taft, Goldwater was trounced (he carried six states). But the Republican Party won five of the next seven presidential elections. In two of them, Ronald Reagan secured the party’s continuity as the custodian of conservatism.

In 2016, a Trump nomination would not just mean another Democratic presidency. It would also mean the loss of what Taft and then Goldwater made possible — a conservative party as a constant presence in U.S. politics.

It is possible Trump will not win any primary, and that by the middle of March our long national embarrassment will be over. But this avatar of unfettered government and executive authoritarianism has mesmerized a large portion of Republicans for six months. The larger portion should understand this:

One hundred and four years of history is in the balance. If Trump is the Republican nominee in 2016, there might not be a conservative party in 2020 either.