Kimberly Strassel: GOP blowing opportunities at messaging

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Another day, another missed opportunity for Republicans to make their case. Past accomplishments aren’t going to cut it. Vague fearmongering about “communists” will go only so far.

An obvious theme is going by the wayside: the choice between productive governance and burn-it-down obstructionism. Many House Democrats this week voted in Borg-like fashion against the late South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham’s Russia sanctions bill. It passed, 262-159, so thankfully will become law. But only 58 Democrats supported a bill designed to punish Vladimir Putin by stripping him of funds he needs to continue his brutal war of aggression against Ukraine. An estimated 125,000 to 150,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed at Mr. Putin’s orders, and 152 Democrats voted to let him carry on.

Only 58 House Democrats voted in favor of a bill whose co-author is Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a liberal Democrat. A bill that passed the Senate 86-11. A bill that included Republican concessions designed to attract bipartisan support. A bill that helps Ukraine, which Democrats insist is one of the party’s top priorities. When House Republicans stripped some Ukraine aid from a spending bill in 2023, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer railed against the move as a “gift to Putin.”

What now justifies Democrats’ own gift to the Russian tyrant? What else? Donald Trump. Eager to maintain a perfect opposition record, House Democrats conjured up the complaint that it would be too dangerous to allow the president the authority to impose tariffs on buyers of Russian oil like China—an argument Senate Democrats said was silly. Even House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries voted to kill the bill, and with seven Republicans voting no, it was only the courage of Democratic rebels that allowed the House to pass it.

Democratic obstruction isn’t new—we are in year 10 of the Trump “resistance”—but the past 18 months really did mark a next-level display of governance sabotage. Democrats last year forced the longest shutdown in government history—43 days—shoving at least 675,000 federal employees into furlough and forcing another 730,000 to work without pay. Their complaint was that Republicans wouldn’t continue paying a Covid-era subsidy that Democrats themselves had designed to expire. Only the near expiration of food assistance for 42 million Americans finally pushed them to release their federal hostage.

They then shut down the Department of Homeland Security for a record-breaking 80 days, causing airport security delays, staffing strains and missed paychecks for the people who protect our coasts and our cyber networks and who manage disaster assistance. That shutdown ended only because the GOP creatively funded parts of DHS outside regular appropriations.

Over the past year, Democrats successfully tanked a vote to renew a crucial intelligence-gathering tool, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, causing it to go dark for the first time since 2008. They killed the annual defense authorization bill—the first time in 65 years Congress has failed to pass that bipartisan legislation. They blocked a bill to protect women and girls in sports. They thwarted legislation to prevent future shutdowns. They blocked the SAVE America Act, which would require voter ID. This week Senate Democrats killed the Clarity Act, which would establish a regulatory framework for digital currencies.

Voters, and the media, have fleeting political memories, but this recent history is worth recounting on the campaign trail. Republicans are right to call out the left’s turn toward socialism and, better yet, to spell out what those policies would mean for voters’ lives. But the Democrats of the here and now, leaderless and rudderless, have already shown they have nothing to offer beyond gridlock.

This is a message that can resonate with the huge number of voters who are disgusted by Washington’s dysfunction, many of whom voted for Mr. Trump in the hope that an outsider could bust through a broken status quo. The GOP might make the obvious point that Democrats have no intention of fulfilling campaign promises to make things more “affordable,” because they have no intention of working at all with a GOP White House.

The progressive left won’t allow it, and as is clear from House Democrats’ abandonment of Ukraine, what activists want, they get. No matter how outrageous. A Democratic Congress would bring wild investigations and impeachment—not cheaper groceries.

This side-by-side would be far easier, of course, if Republicans had their own set of concrete promises, which they could point to as at risk from Democratic rule. But it would at least be a start to begin reminding voters of the past 18 months and pointing at that old truth: Past behavior is the best indicator of future action. No recent Democratic past in any way resembles governance.

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