Let the Wandering Begin....

Rep. Roy Blunt has stepped down as House Minority Whip after a mixed decade in GOP leadership. Summing up his move, Blunt wearily noted that "Ten years of asking people to do things they don't want to do is a long time." (WaPo)

Of course that is the job of a whip, to whip the troops into line. But what if that line is hard to find, let alone defend? In a what-happened-to-my-party statement, a chagrined Blunt charged, "Republicans need to stand on their principles in the years ahead."

Too bad he didn't take that stand.

Blunt cut his House leadership teeth under the Velvet Hammer, Tom Delay, in the heydays of GOP power. In January 1999 powerful House Majority Whip Delay elected Missouri representative Blunt as his chief deputy. Then in 2005, after rising to the position of House Majority Leader, a corrupt Delay was forced to step down as Leader after being indicted by a Texas grand jury.

The handwriting should have been on the wall for an overreaching GOP House whose members had only a nodding acquaintance with their touted conservative principles of less spending and smaller government.... both of which they abandoned in a power-grabbing spending spree that turned the voters off, and them out in 2006.

So today, after the party's second decimating election, Blunt announced that he would step down from the position of Minority Whip, allowing his own chief deputy, Rep Eric Cantor (R-Va.), to ascend to the Whip post.

Blunt's departure from Republican leadership severs one of the last remaining connections between the GOP's pinnacle of power in the House and its current predicament. Listen up Democratic Congress.... there is a powerful lesson here!