The latest Quinnipiac Poll reveals that the GOP race for the nomination has come down to a choice between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. The poll has Trump 28, Cruz 24, Rubio 12, and Ben Carson at 10. Everybody else is in low single digits.
The air continues to leak out of Carson’s balloon, and Rubio is beginning his inexorable drift downward, as his authorship of the Gang of Eight amnesty bill begins to drag him beneath the waves.
Cruz is closing fast on Trump, with now just four points separating the two. That differential is inside the poll’s 4.4% margin of error, so in essence Cruz and Trump are locked in a dead heat. Cruz has opened up a 28-18 lead in the “honest/trustworthy” category, which bodes well for his campaign since 95% of voters value that in a candidate.
It’s down to Cruz and Trump because they’re the only two who have made a career out of confronting the weak, feckless and inept Republican leadership in Washington, D.C. The passage of the omnibus bill last Friday is quite frankly a death knell for the Republican establishment, and validates every complaint Cruz has lodged against it from day one.
In fact, the GOP establishment, by crowing about this grotesque monstrosity of a bloated, gargantuan, budget-busting behemoth, just kneecapped itself by absolutely guaranteeing that no establishment Republican has a snowball’s chance of getting the nomination. Rubio, Bush, Christie and Kasich can fuhgeddaboudit.
The base is seething right now, with good reason. Not only did the establishment fully fund the baby butchers at Planned Parenthood, they produced a bill that has Chuck Schumer giddy with excitement and talking about what an excellent year the Democrats have had. The Democrats had a better year out of power than they did in power.
The utter moral bankruptcy of the GOP establishment means conservatives officially have no reason whatsoever to place any hope in the party at all. At every turn, the base has been betrayed by those we sent to D.C. precisely because they promised us they would stop all this reckless spending and all the unconstitutional machinations of President Obama. Then they proceeded to fund every one of his amnesty programs, his push for unrestrained and unvetted Islamic immigration, and his tilting-at-windmills battle against the non-existent problem of global warming.
So the bottom line for socially conservative Americans is that there is no reason any longer to place any hope in the Republican Party. None. They are like the splintered reed the prophets spoke of, that pierces the hand of anyone who leans on it for support.
Pragmatically, this means that the one last hope Americans have of not sliding off the cliff into the abyss is a president who will fight the Democrats and the Republican Party establishment alike with all of his determination, might and skill.
We must elect a president who has proven that he is unbendable, who could care less about what the Republican Party leadership thinks of him because he has a country to save. A president who will reverse every last one of President Obama’s unconstitutional executive orders, emasculate every unconstitutional federal bureaucracy, veto every rotten piece of legislation and every bloated irresponsible budget.
A president who dares Congress, Democrat and Republican alike, to override his vetoes. A president who will take the case for his vetoes directly to the American people and enlist their support. A president who will use the occasion of every veto to conduct a mini constitutional seminar to explain exactly why, based on the Constitution, he is compelled to veto this or that piece of legislation.
Every veto would become an opportunity for him to reintroduce the American people to the Constitution - not the one mangled by the Supreme Court but the one crafted by the Founders. Our next president will have to be the one to teach America its founding document because our schools aren’t doing it and our law schools just teach lawyers how to twist it and shred it even further.
Bottom line: the number one qualification for our next president is that he be a man who is steeped in the Constitution, can articulate and defend its principles to the American people, and who will not hesitate to act fearlessly with the Constitution as his guide and his authority.
A candidate who has argued the Constitution nine times before the Supreme Court might not be a bad place to start.
With a standard like that as the measuring rod, the choice between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz just might become clearer with every passing day.
