“‘Speaker John Boehner’ and ‘Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’ have a real nice ring to them, but the bigger question is what the Republicans plan to do with the mandate the voters handed them in November. I’m seeing some worrying signs already,” said former House Speaker Tom Delay in a Washington Times editorial last week.
And he’s not the only one.
Signals from Boehner and McConnell have fed an emerging narrative in Washington that the message of November’s Republican victory is that Americans want to see lawmakers compromise and find common ground, not oppose Obama’s promised “fundamental transformation” of America.
That’s not sitting well with over 50 national conservative leaders who’ve stepped forward to protect and promote a “Citizens’ Mandate.”
Calling the 2014 election a “repudiation of the complicity of the United States Congress in President Obama’s dramatic and unconstitutional expansion of government,” the “Citizens Mandate” campaign is calling on lawmakers to:
- Stop the president’s promised “Fundamental Transformation” of the country,
- End Executive branch overreach,
- Restore constitutional balance of power among the three branches of government,
- Bring an end to the perennially unpopular Affordable Care Act,
- Stop the president’s executive amnesty initiatives,
- Hold the Executive branch accountable for its myriad abuses of power and its national security failures both foreign and domestic, and
- Put the interests of the United States of America first among nations.
Read the entire Citizens’ Mandate document here.
The Mandate document, signed by Richard Viguerie, Phyllis Schlafly, Frank Gaffney, Tim Wildmon, James Dobson, Joseph Farah and others is the result of a collaboration over the holidays to identify the concerns of voters and to craft their message to Congress and the Republican leadership, in particular.
JOIN THE DON’T BE YELLOW, DUMP BOEHNER NOW CAMPAIGN.
The campaign to pressure Congress prior to President Obama’s State of the Union speech follows the rejection of Boehner’s leadership by 25 Republicans in last week’s vote for speaker. Despite Boehner retaining his position, opposition still continues, thanks in large part to WND’s Don’t Be Yellow, Dump Boehner Now campaign.
The calls generated by the campaign to lawmakers opposing Boehner rattled the House leadership, reported the Washington Examiner.
“There were hundreds of them, jamming the phone lines of the district and Capitol offices of dozens of House GOP lawmakers,” the report said. “The callers were not angry about legislation. Nor were they asking for help with a local matter. They were demanding their representative vote against Boehner … in his bid to win election to a third term as speaker.”
“We’ve never been lobbied quite like that,” House Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions, R-Texas, told the Examiner.
The Examiner, citing people in the room at the time, said Boehner was so agitated by the phone calls that he raised the issue to his rank and file in a private meeting Wednesday morning. Boehner was defensive, according to witnesses, telling GOP lawmakers he has long espoused the tea-party principles that the callers accused him of abandoning.
The Dump Boehner campaign already has generated 565,000 letters to the GOP members of the U.S. House – a stack closing in on 20 stories tall.
Joseph Farah, WND founder and campaign organizer, said the opposition is largely because of two issues – Obamacare and amnesty. Republicans in the U.S. House before Christmas, under Boehner’s leadership, allowed funding for both programs to continue into 2015.
The campaign has earned the support of the founder of Tea Party Nation, one of the organizations that helped rouse the American electorate in 2010 and give the GOP control of the U.S. House.
“Absolutely,” Judson Phillips told WND. “I want people storming the halls of Congress. Melting the phone lines and anything else.”
The Citizens’ Mandate campaign has the potential to rattle the Capitol again, focusing as it does on the GOP’s legislative agenda and not just its leadership.
The message of the last election was “loud, clear and simple,” said Lott. “Stop President Obama and his leftist/socialist/anti-Constitution/big government philosophy in its tracks. … the voters just demanded a bigger vision – repealing Obamacare, rolling back the immigration amnesty, balancing the budget, restoring the sensible welfare reforms we passed in the 1990s and that this president has totally gutted.”