Now that Republicans have control of the Senate, some conservatives are incredibly concerned that the GOP is going to play it too nice.
Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh reminded Republicans that they were not elected to do their job so much as to prevent other people from getting anything done.
“It is to stop Barack Obama. It is to stop the Democrats,” Limbaugh said on his show Wednesday about Republicans’ agenda. “There is no other reason why Republicans were elected yesterday. Republicans were not elected to govern.”
“How can you govern with a president that is demonstrably lawless when he thinks he has to be?” Limbaugh continued. “The Republican Party was not elected to fix a broken system or to make it work. The Republican Party was not elected to compromise. The Republican Party was not elected to sit down and work together with the Democrats.”
Laura Ingraham said that attempts to craft bipartisan legislation and ignore the most conservative members of Congress would hurt the party in 2016. She lambasted Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) for calling for bipartisanship.
“That seems to me like it’s preemptive disarmament,” she said on her show on Thursday. “The establishment always believes that just because they have their leadership in place that they can win presidential elections and do so after they’ve really humiliated and denigrated or dismissed the strong conservative base that still is needed to win elections. I just think they better be very careful not to alienate the very people who showed up to vote in this election.”
The editors of the conservative National Review on Wednesday laid out how Senate Republicans can avoid the governing “trap” and just prepare the party for the 2016 elections.
And as Media Matters pointed out, conservative radio host Todd Starnes warned Republicans against working with the president.
Don’t be fooled, Republicans. Obama has no intention of working with you. Stand your ground.
— toddstarnes (@toddstarnes) November 5, 2014
A couple conservatives took issue with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s promise that there won’t be a government shutdown.
Conservative radio host Mark Levin said that the last shutdown didn’t hurt Republicans and that McConnell “just handed the power of the purse back to the President of the United States.”
“There’s nothing left. There’s nothing that can be done. There’s no leverage now,” Levin said, arguing that the budget is the only way the GOP can push through its agenda. “For those of you who disagree, I would ask you then what is left for Congress to use to control a lawless president?”
Red State’s Leon Wolf made a similar argument on Thursday.
“[I]t makes zero tactical sense, especially during a confrontation with a defiant and delusional enemy, to declare that you are pre-emptively removing a weapon from your arsenal,” Wolf wrote.
