By Calvin Freiburger
Life Site News
As they prepare for their new role as a minority party, on Wednesday House Republicans elected Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California to be the GOP’s Minority Leader in the House of Representatives. He’s been Majority Leader under retiring Speaker Paul Ryan for years, so on the surface this may seem like a mere formality.
But the circumstances this year were anything but ordinary. McCarthy is part of the leadership team that not only failed to defund Planned Parenthood but approved multiple budgets, under Presidents Obama and Trump alike, that contained the abortion giant’s blood money. Obviously, he’s also part of the leadership on whose watch the GOP just lost the House to the Democrats.
Most significantly, this year there was a choice.
As LifeSiteNews covered, pro-life Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio also ran for House GOP leader, and did so by explicitly making an issue of his party’s failure to keep its promises. He spoke out against the GOP’s pro-abortion budgets and failure to repeal Obamacare. He positioned himself as a productive ally of Donald Trump who was nonetheless willing to dissent when Trump strayed.
“This might be a tough pill to swallow, but I believe that if we’d handled the past two years differently, we would still be the majority party in the House of Representatives,” Jordan wrote after the midterms. “Part of the headwind our campaigns faced this year was an enthusiasm gap among our Republican base.”
“They are more passionate in their support for the President than for us. They perceive the President as fighting harder for their issues,” Jordan continued. But instead of learning from Trump’s 2016 victory, “we have largely been conducting ‘business as usual’ for the past two years, and we just paid the price.”
Several conservative advocacy groups backed Jordan, including Club for Growth, FreedomWorks, Tea Party Patriots, and For America. So did Conservative Review. Alas, House Republicans are apparently slow learners, as they picked McCarthy with 159 votes to a paltry 43 for Jordan.
Granted, the Swamp is far from drained, and it may well be that no amount of outside pressure could have gotten a majority of GOP congressmen to defy the establishment. But in light of how many times we’ve seen this play out with the same results, we need to have a frank discussion about why plenty of high-profile conservatives – and the vast majority of national-level pro-life activists – were nowhere to be found on the subject.
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