Abcarian: Steve Bannon discovers the hard way that defying Congress is no joke
If there is one quality we’ve come to know and understand from George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, it’s the tenacity to put country before party.
So it’s fair to say that the current White House occupant has spent his entire life, up to now, on the political right.
To his credit, Steve Bannon has at least managed to stay out of the fray so far. He has served in three Presidents’ Cabinets and been involved in every major foreign policy debate since his time in the 1990s.
So what happened to change Bannon into someone who is so deeply aligned with the Republican Party?
We have yet to see an obvious reason. Perhaps it has to do with his own past, which was one of the most difficult cases in history where Bannon has had to choose between his party and country.
Bannon has spent a career in politics, but what you don’t know is that he has been a lifelong Republican. He has grown up in a Republican family, with his father, a member of the House of Representatives, and his older brother, the former Secretary of State James Baker, who served as Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan.
What we have found more interesting is that Bannon had a political conversion that happened while he was attending Harvard Business School. His father told him a story about a time when his father, a member of the House and the son of a former Speaker of the House with a strong Republican Party loyalty, had been threatened by a conservative Republican senator who wanted Bannon to make himself unavailable to his father so that he could be hired, thus depriving Senate Republicans of the one person who represented their interests in Washington.
Bannon had to choose between his family and the party that had elected his father to office. He chose his father and his party, and the story continued.
Bannon got his own point across to his father in 1999. His father needed protection. His father asked Bannon to defend him to the