Congratulations Congressional Republicans- You've Managed to Make Trump Look Better Than You

My mind was made up about Donald Trump when I was five years old. My father was a big fan of Howard Stern, and Donald Trump was "that clown" that would be on the show, and we really wouldn't listen to him. I grew up about an hour from New York City, and Trump was a fixture in our media- and he was a joke. I watched him go belly-up in business, and I watched his Atlantic City empire fall apart. I've considered the man a joke, a clown, and a fraud, and frankly, I'll never take him as a serious or intellectually capable man. He is a poster-child for why "trust fund babies" shouldn't be allowed to run anything, ever, and why "wealth" is not something I deem worthy of respect. He can't win me over, and his "victory" in November is not so much a sign of his success to me, as much as a sign of the failure of our electoral system. I don't hold Donald in any kind of esteem.

Amazingly though, this week he has shown me that he is quite a bit more capable than the generally ignorant bunch of people known as Congressional Republicans. Those buffoons were going to gut out the Office of Congressional Ethics, moving it under the control of the Ethics Committees in Congress, effectively removing any semblance of independence, and the ability to bring in law enforcement when needed. These folks passed this into their rules package on the night of January 2nd, and were going to pass it on the floor of Congress on January 3rd. This genius idea to rid the Congress of any kind of ethical control was called off- because of embarrassing exposure caused by Donald Trump tweeting that it was a bad idea. Seriously. The guy who won't release his taxes and has spent his life skirting by at the edge of the rules was the "voice of reason" here. That is utterly embarrassing.

It isn't the only time Trump has put Congressional Republicans into a box recently, or even the most important one. While Trump has supported Congressional Republicans in their calls to "repeal Obamacare," Trump has also pledged to protect the popular stuff- like protections for people with pre-existing conditions, allowing children to stay on their parents plans until they are 26, and other consumer protections that are part of the law. Of course, if Congressional Republicans pass an actual repeal of the law, those things go too. The one way to protect those things would be to amend the original Affordable Care Act in areas they want to change, while not touching those protections. This puts Congressional Republicans in an unworkable political position. They promised repeal to their voters, and anything short of that can be sold as defeat by people who want to celebrate that (namely, Democrats and Tea Party radicals in the Republican caucus), but can't really be put at the foot of the next President. On the other hand, if they actually pass a repeal of the legislation, there's no guarantee now that Trump will sign it and get rid of the things he says he'll defend. Even if he does sign a repeal, he may call on them to re-pass the things he says he's defending, which are many of the things the hard-liners in the Republican Caucus don't want. In short, if they fail to pass repeal, Republicans in Congress will wear it, and if they do pass repeal, they'll essentially own it, even in the areas they don't want to. Trump on the other hand is likely to skate by and blame it on them- Congressional Republicans.

I have no use for Donald Trump, nor do I hope for his success and happiness in office. With that said, I must applaud the way he has set up Congressional members in his own party to serve as useful idiots for him, with no recourse to fight back on. They have him saddled with the possibility of investigations, sure, so I know he will sign their crazy ideas to gut Medicare and Social Security, so on the one hand they do have the upper hand. On the other hand, it seems likely that Trump will make them look like the useless buffoons on those issues too, as he has on the OCE and the ACA. For the optimist, Trump's ability to make nearly 300 Congressional Republicans in DC look like the useless corporate henchmen that they are might make you take heart that he has some form of positive abilities. For the rest of us, his ability to make a bunch of supposedly capable adults look like a bunch of imbeciles is actually horrifying, because again, this is Donald Trump we're talking about here.