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Ruth: Drums of war awaken a slumbering Congress

 
House Speaker John Boehner, leaving a meeting with Dick Cheney, has ordered members to show up a day early to cast a vote on approving military action against ISIS.
House Speaker John Boehner, leaving a meeting with Dick Cheney, has ordered members to show up a day early to cast a vote on approving military action against ISIS.
Published Sept. 12, 2014

How fitting that House Republicans somehow managed to find a scintilla of time away from their work sclerotic to squeeze in a few moments to hear from former Vice President Dick Cheney for a pep talk on Babel-rattling.

After an all-too-brief five-week vacation away from Washington, members of Congress returned to the oppressive grind of their job to undertake a brutal schedule of about seven legislative work days before they will take most of the rest of the year off.

It was fortuitous then that President Barack Obama delivered a major address on confronting the growing threat of the ISIS terrorist movement, if for no other reason than it afforded Republicans an opportunity to practice their indignant harrumphs.

Who better to kick off the cluckfest than the man who is largely responsible for getting the United States into the Iraq morass to begin with? So there was Cheney, the General Halftrack of the Potomac, who successfully managed to grift the nation into a phony war with very real body bags, lecturing House members to remain steadfast in the war on terror while criticizing Obama's Middle East foreign policy.

This was a bit like a Ponzi schemer offering up accounting advice.

House Republicans actually showed up to listen to the discredited Lying of Baghdad's drivel. Why not? They don't seem to have anything else to do before heading home to campaign for re-election to a post with less productivity than a Chia Pet.

Obama could have announced Wednesday that he was unleashing the equivalent of the Normandy Invasion, the Inchon Landing and Hannibal's march across the Alps to crush ISIS upon the dung heap of history and his detractors would still dismiss the strategy as a tepid, ineffectual pinprick.

The insufferable yellow poseur of Texas, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Green Eggs and Scam, was among the first to land on his perch at Fox News to dismiss Obama's speech to the nation as "fundamentally unserious," a condition he is intimately familiar with. But it's probably an indication Cruz is reaching his point of political marginal returns, when anchor Megyn Kelly cut him off once he started frothing about the death of the Prophet Mohammed in 632 A.D. (twice!) as if to impress everyone he had just read Islam for Dummies.

Cruz feigned outrage that Obama, puffed up with "presidential hubris," had "brazenly" declared he really doesn't need congressional approval to begin bombing ISIS back to at least the 11th century or perhaps when Mohammed breathed his last, which was 632 A.D., in case you were wondering.

It was understandable why this president would argue he can do without an official "You go, Barack!" from Capitol Hill since this is a Congress that wouldn't vote to approve a proclamation honoring sunflowers if had Obama's fingerprints on the paperwork. That might explain why House Speaker John Boehner announced that even though Obama believes he can act against ISIS without congressional approval, the House was going to vote to give it to him whether he likes it or not. So there.

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You would probably have to go back to the last time Ralph Kramden's Raccoon Lodge gaveled itself to order to find this kind of bold leadership.

Boehner is so determined to show the commander in chief that the House can't be pushed around that he has ordered members to show up for work a day early on Monday to cast a vote on approving military action against ISIS.

That ought to teach the White House a lesson or two.

What greater patriotic gesture can Congress make than to extend its normal three-day work week into a salt mine-esque four-day work week in order to assert its authority over pressing matters of state?

How can you not admire the gutsiness of members of Congress who will sacrifice an entire day from their campaign schedule to cast a rare vote that doesn't involve abolishing the Affordable Care Act?

Let us pause here for a few bars of My Country, 'Tis of Thee.

We may be on to something here. Perhaps Obama should dramatically insist that under no circumstances should votes be taken on immigration reform, addressing global warming and gun control before the Maynard G. Krebs Congress leaves for yet another vacation on Friday.

The clock is ticking and time's a wastin'.