By Michael Shannon

Until this week it had appeared the long-term effects of the Trump administration would be fleeting at best. Anything the president does by executive order can be overturned by a new leftist president. This means most of the changes conservatives have applauded are good only so long as management doesn’t change.

Rolling back conservative changes will take much less time than implementing them, since leftist judges won’t be issuing injunctions against Democrat executive orders.

The only lasting change had been Trump’s judicial appointments.

The tax bill changes that. Leftists will be forced to pass legislation to raise taxes and that’s much harder than the pen-and-a-phone approach. The same goes for slapping the paddles on Obamacare and trying to resuscitate that disaster through additional legislation.

The task for leftists is difficult, but not impossible. Their advantage is the obvious support of the Opposition Media. The OpMedia won’t term it a ‘tax increase.’ The bill will be ‘tax reform that produces money for smart government investment in the economy.’

Ditto for raising Obamacare from the dead. The OpMedia will happily call the bill ‘a necessary step toward making quality healthcare a right for all Americans.’

Letting the left approve the adjectives and descriptive terms that describe issues and legislation lets the left set the agenda. Evidently GOP leadership is too busy raising money and negotiating a soft landing on ‘K’ Street if they should happen to lose an election, because neither Curator of the Senate Mitch McConnell or Paul Ryan the Boy Wonder make any effort to set the record straight.

The only place where anyone has had the initiative and wisdom to begin the clause-to-clause ideological warfare necessary to turn the issue agenda in a conservative direction is in some of the cabinet agencies.

The Hill reports, with shocked dismay, the “Trump administration has reportedly banned the Centers for Disease Control from using the phrases “evidence-based” and “science-based” on official documents.”

These are leftist buzzwords that, when sprinkled liberally through a policy paper, are designed to make the paper impervious to criticism. If the CDC paper is “science-based,” that pretty much says it all. The language implies that any objections are obviously “witch doctor-based” and can be dismissed out of hand.

Instead of the leftist buzz, the CDC is to use, “CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes.”

I have a whole list of Big Government buzzwords that need to be banned because, for the most part, the terms represent bureaucracy mission creep, ego gratification and/or a thinly disguised attempt to expand government at the expense of liberty.

Not surprisingly the perpetuity-crats in the CDC where flabbergasted by the memo. One analyst told The Hill, “It was very much. ‘Are you serious? Are you kidding?’ In my experience, we’ve never had any pushback from an ideological standpoint.”

AND THAT’S THE PROBLEM!

There is never any language pushback from conservatives. Take the tax bill. Curator McConnell boasted after passage, “If we can’t sell this to the American people I think we ought to go into another line of work.” In one sentence we see everything that’s wrong with McConnell’s ‘leadership.’ He should have been selling the bill from the day it was introduced.

McConnell and the Boy Wonder should have been pushing back in every OpMedia story that characterized the bill the way the Associated Press described it, “an overhaul that offers corporations and wealthy taxpayers the biggest benefits and triggers the loss of health care coverage for millions of Americans.”

That description is what the average American has been hearing about the tax bill for weeks and it’s why a Wall Street Journal poll says 41 percent of the public don’t support the bill. The Obama Presidential Library restroom experts at USA Today found 48 percent are in opposition and at CNN’s Fake News Control their poll had 55 percent in opposition.

Trump, bless his heart, fights back and says negative media coverage of the tax bill is because the OpMedia is desperate to please “their Democrat bosses.” Meanwhile, Ryan’s idea of strong advocacy is to sit meekly by while tax policy intellectual giant Savannah Guthrie asks him if he’s living in “a dream world.”

The real answer to that question is ‘yes.’

In McConnell and Ryan’s dream world you can sit back and let the OpMedia twist language to set the election agenda by calling tax reform ‘a giveaway to the rich,’ Obamacare repeal ‘stealing healthcare coverage from the poor’ and a reduction in the growth of spending as ‘slashing the budget’ and still think you’ll be in power after the 2018 mid-term elections.

Michael Shannon is a syndicated columnist.