House GOP Leadership Colluded With National Review To Blunt Criticism Of ‘Pledge To America’

THINK PROGRESS

The Daily Caller’s Jon Ward reports that there is “pretty widespread” discontent inside the GOP caucus with the recently-released “Pledge to America,” citing the document’s omission of an earmarks ban and its regurgitation of many health reform elements contained in the Affordable Care Act. But, Ward reports, the House GOP leadership was able to restrain much of the internal consternation among its members by circulating a positive editorial written by the National Review.

In the editorial titled “We’ll Take The Pledge,” the National Review editors lauded the document as being “bolder” than the Contract for America. The editorial also called the Pledge “compelling,” “praiseworthy,” and “a shrewd political document.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Republican sources told the Daily Caller that the GOP leadership colluded with the National Review in prearranging the editorial:

Two high-level Republican sources said that the National Review editorial had been prearranged, however, by Neil Bradley, a top leadership aide who is close to April Ponnuru, the executive director of the National Review Institute, and Kate O’Beirne, NRI’s president.

“It was a political blowjob,” one Republican aide said of the National Review editorial.

Bradley denied the accusation: “The assertion that I ‘prearranged’ the National Review editorial, or any editorial, is 100 percent false,” he said.

O’Beirne also denied the allegation, calling it “absolutely, categorically false.

In his weekly address, President Obama ripped the “Pledge to America.” “It is grounded in the same worn out philosophy: cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires; cut the rules for Wall Street and the special interests; and cut the middle class loose to fend for itself. That’s not a prescription for a better future. It’s an echo of a disastrous decade we can’t afford to relive,” he said.