“Why Conservatives Hate John Boehner”: They Wanted Someone To Beat Obama, As Their Presidential Nominees Couldn’t Do
When Marco Rubio announced to the Values Voter Summit on Friday morning that House Speaker John Boehner was resigning, the crowd of social conservatives cheered. The Florida senator and 2016 presidential contender seemed to share the sentiment.
“I’m not here to bash anyone, but the time has come to turn the page,” Rubio said. “It is time to turn the page and allow a new generation of leaders.”
Fellow 2016er Sen. Ted Cruz had a similar shtick. “You want to know how much each of you terrifies Washington?” he asked the crowd of conservative activists. “Yesterday John Boehner was speaker of the House. Y’all come to town and somehow that changes. My only request is, can you come by more often?”
Some of this is self-serving. Both men are younger Republican leaders who have a personal stake in seeing the old guard shuffle off to retirement. And both are competing for a similar slice of conservative primary voters and playing to the same audience.
The fact that Boehner’s impending departure is an applause line at conservative gatherings, however, is reflective of the Republican leadership crisis. Large parts of the base do not trust the party’s leaders, do not believe they have GOP voters’ best interests or conservative principles at heart, and would mourn their leaving office about as much when Barack Obama’s presidency is over.
House speakers aren’t often leaders of inspirational movements. They are usually legislative tacticians and enforcers of party discipline. Boehner is a survivor, having been booted from the leadership team in the 1990s only to claw back to the minority leader and then speaker’s position.
But after the 2010 midterm elections, when Democrats lost the House while keeping the Senate and the presidency, Boehner found himself the ranking Republican in Washington. It’s a role for which he was in many respects ill-suited.
If you compare Boehner’s reign to that of disgraced former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, conservatives should consider it an improvement. Hastert, with the help of President George W. Bush, jacked up government spending and presided over a culture of earmarks and corruption. They authorized the Iraq war.
Under Boehner, the House helped deliver sequestration that put the brakes on explosive spending growth. He effectively ended earmarks. His fellow Republicans tried to stop a war in Libya and succeeded in averting one in Syria, though not always with the speaker’s blessing.
Yet conservatives were looking for someone more like Newt Gingrich, albeit with better long-term results. They wanted someone who could communicate conservative principles and fight for the Republican platform. They wanted someone to beat Obama, as their presidential nominees couldn’t do. They wanted someone to stop playing defense and go on offense against ObamaCare and a slew of liberal programs that offended them.
Even Boehner’s conservative accomplishments were not universally beloved by the right. Many hawks detested sequestration’s impact on defense spending, and were willing to trade away the budget caps. The earmarks ban was criticized as too loose by some conservatives, and too detrimental to getting things done on the House floor by some in the Republican establishment.
What Boehner mostly did as House speaker was rescue the more conservative members of his caucus from dire political miscalculations while offering little alternative vision of his own. That was never good enough for conservatives and became increasingly untenable as Boehner began to advance legislation with Democrats and a rump of Republicans.
Can conservatives do better at running the House and governing in general, or can they only function as an opposition party even when they are among the majority? Will they even get the opportunity to replace Boehner, or will he be succeeded by another establishment figure? Can the GOP ever resolve its leadership crisis?
Tea Party leader Mark Meckler crowed, “Boehner is gone, and we are still here.” Now, perhaps, we’ll see to what end.
By: W. James Antler III, The Week, September 25, 2015
“A Sinful Tendency To Pervert Faith”: Pope Francis’ Familiar Denunciation Of ‘Ideological Extremism’
It’s hard to overstate just how furious conservatives were in February after hearing President Obama’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast. I’ll be curious to see how many of them are equally livid with Pope Francis today.
Nearly eight months ago, the president noted that while many faith communities around the world are “inspiring people to lift up one another,” we also see “faith being twisted and distorted, used as a wedge – or, worse, sometimes used as a weapon.” The president explained that no faith tradition is immune and every religion, including his own, has chapters its adherents are not proud of.
“Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history,” he said. “And lest we [Christians] get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ…. So this is not unique to one group or one religion. There is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith.”
Conservatives, quite content atop their high horse, were disgusted. Just this week, we saw Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) continue to whine about the Prayer Breakfast remarks, pointing the speech as evidence of the president serving as an “apologist for radical Islamic terrorists.”
But take a moment to consider what Pope Francis said this morning during his address to Congress.
“Our world is increasingly a place of violent conflict, hatred and brutal atrocities, committed even in the name of God and of religion. We know that no religion is immune from forms of individual delusion or ideological extremism. This means that we must be especially attentive to every type of fundamentalism, whether religious or of any other kind. A delicate balance is required to combat violence perpetrated in the name of a religion, an ideology or an economic system, while also safeguarding religious freedom, intellectual freedom and individual freedoms.”
In U.S. News, Gary Emerling noted, “The pontiff said all religions are susceptible to extremism and violence, just like Obama said in February.” I heard it the exact same way.
In fact, as best as I can tell, when Pope Francis said that “no religion is immune from forms of individual delusion or ideological extremism,” the only difference between this sentiment and Obama’s in February is that the president bolstered his point with examples.
Will the right lambaste Francis with equal vigor? Somehow I doubt it, but if readers see any examples of this, I hope you’ll let me know.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 25, 2015
“They Want To Torch Washington, Not Run It”: GOP’s Kamikaze Caucus Takes Out John Boehner
“I consider this a victory for the crazies,” said one Republican congressman who attended the meeting in which Speaker John Boehner shocked the political world by announcing his resignation.
Boehner, the consummate congressional dealmaker, faced another looming government shutdown. His abrupt decision to resign at the end of October is a sign that there are no more deals to be made with the conservative Kamikaze caucus.
The fundamentalist crew that Boehner-allied Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes has called “lemmings with suicide vests” and “right-wing Marxists” has been preparing to take the country to the brink of shutdown and default again this fall over their demand to defund Planned Parenthood and refusal to raise the debt ceiling.
In the closed-door meeting, the speaker warned against a government shutdown, telling the assembled Republicans that shutting down the government was self-defeating for the GOP and the pro-life cause. But his announcement “took all the air out of the room,” the attending congressman told The Daily Beast. “No one expected it.”
Boehner is an old-school Main Street Midwestern Republican—he’s conservative, but not crazy. His insistence that governing is more important than grandstanding has made him a punching bag for presidential candidates playing to populists. Take the recent cattle call hosted by the conservative frat-boy scam that parades under the name Heritage Action. Candidate after candidate blamed Boehner for all the ills facing their party. One of the attendees, a man named Valentine Sanchez, told The Daily Beast’s Patricia Murphy that he wanted Boehner out “the sooner the better. We need conservatives in there.”
In fact, Boehner’s been one of the steady voices of sanity in an unhinged time for the Republican Party. He’s been the adult in the room filled with red-faced tantrums and toddler-esque factional squabbles. And he’s been constrained from pursuing many of his true goals by trying to hold in check the Tea Partiers that got him elected speaker in 2010 as they morphed into the Troll Party, more welcoming to ultra-right absolutists than to conservative reformers.
Not only that, his longtime friends have disappeared one by one. Veteran Reps. Tom Latham, Steve Latourette, and Buck McKeon have all retired in recent years, leaving more and more him alone on the throne.
Still, he’s given as good as he’s got, calling Ted Cruz as a “jackass” for cheerleading the last shutdown and slamming Heritage Action and other members of the conservative activist class, saying, “They’re using our members and they’re using the American people for their own goals…This is ridiculous.”
As a result, Boehner’s ambition to shepherd conservative immigration reform through the House fell apart. In the spring of 2014, he noted that the immigration “problem’s been around for at least the last 15 years. It’s been turned into a political football. I think it’s unfair…I think it’s time to deal with it.”
This pronouncement was swiftly declared a “Death Warrant for Conservatism,” by the Powerline blog, while Heritage Action’s Dan Holler told The Daily Beast’s Patricia Murphy that Boehner’s statement was “a full-throated embrace of amnesty.” This kind of overheated exaggeration is typical of the kind of opposition Boehner faced.
Boehner’s ambition was abandoned once his deputy, Republican Majority leader Eric Cantor, was cannibalized in a primary, losing to an activist who joined in the anti-immigration reform chorus. In the closed-door meeting, Boehner referred to the upset, saying that he only intended to serve two terms as speaker but then Cantor lost. “Life changes, plans change,” Boehner explained.
The emotional impetus for his surprising decision might have been Pope Francis’s historic speech to Congress the day before, in which the progressive pontiff made a case for exactly the kind of bipartisan reasoning together that has been targeted by the Kamikaze caucus: “We must move forward together, as one, in a renewed spirit of fraternity and solidarity, cooperating generously for the common good.” This approach to governing has been effectively criminalized by too much of the current conservative movement. It is a firing offense.
And so Boehner decided to jump before he was pushed, tired of the prospect of another self-defeating fight with the extremists in his own party. Maybe Boehner could’ve held on as speaker—if he’d decided to depend on votes from Democrats to retain his seat. But while most of Boehner’s recent legislative successes required bipartisan coalitions, that degree of career-saving support was likely too much to ask from Nancy Pelosi & Co.
Now President Obama has witnessed the vanquishing of two conservative congressional leaders—Boehner and Cantor—who were deemed insufficiently radical by the conservative populists they first empowered.
With the Republicans still reeling under the Capitol dome, the impact of Boehner’s surprise decision and his successor is still unclear, but it does not bode well for hopes that the United States can avoid another stupidly self-inflicted shutdown. Names like House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Budget Committee Paul Ryan were quickly floated as Boehner replacements—and were just as quickly shot down for being insufficient in their fealty to the crash-and-burn Kamikaze caucus.
Moments after the speaker ended his announcement by reading the Prayer of St. Francis (“where there is hatred, let me sow love”) stunned Republican congressmen saw “the crazies already huddling in the hallway.”
By: John Avlon, with additional reporting by Michael Daly; The Daily Beast, September 25, 2015
“Career Politicians Need Not Apply”: Scott Walker’s 2016 Bid Floundered Because He’s Done Little In Life But Run For Office
A Google news search for Scott Walker this week scoops up endless pundit theories about why he didn’t quite make it as a presidential candidate – from his “boring” personality to his various gaffes or lack of foreign policy expertise. Each theory misses the larger point: Scott Walker is a career politician. And Republican voters’ job description for presidential candidates is pretty clear at this point: Career politicians need not apply.
Walker first ran for public office when he was 22 years old. He first won a race for the state legislature at the age of 25; he has held elective office ever since.
The political establishment sees this type of professional history as a good resume. Regular people see it as a little weird.
It reminds me of something my father used to say when he was a state legislator (in the Vermont House, for two, two-year terms) – he always derisively called his legislative paycheck “my welfare check.” As a bedrock conservative, he was fairly uncomfortable being paid by Vermont’s taxpayers. After all, one of the reasons he ran for office in the first place was his desire to lower taxes and reduce the size of government. Being part of the government made him a little squirmy. I think that’s a good thing.
I recall my father easing his discomfort during the legislative session by refusing to draw a paycheck from the small business he owned and operated, even though he was almost certainly putting 40 hours (or more) a week into his business (at night and on the weekends) while he served the people of his district during the week.
This approach is what’s known as being a citizen legislator. It’s what the founders envisioned and it’s what many voters are so ready to return to in 2016.
The near-entirety of Walker’s adult income has been courtesy of the taxpayers of Wisconsin. There is something inherently not-very-conservative about that. Similarly, making a case for limited government is less believable when a candidate also lists one of his greatest accomplishments as getting re-elected.
In last week’s debate, when describing why professional politicians don’t seem to grasp the voters’ anger and frustration with the ongoing dysfunction of government and politics, Carly Fiorina pointedly said: “A fish swims in water; it doesn’t know it’s water.” This season’s anti-establishment voters love that kind of talk. Walker is a fish, and a critical mass of Republican voters knew it and/or sensed it. (His poll-tested, focus-grouped, GOP-talking-points style of rhetoric was a pretty good indication that the guy hadn’t spent much time out of the water.)
Walker’s more dynamic, bright peer on the presidential stage has also been a bit of a fish: Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. I like Rubio very much, but worry that his time swimming in government water will also hold him back in this early Republican season of anti-professional-politician sentiment. Watch for critiques from the professional political class about Rubio’s age. For frustrated Republican voters right now, age isn’t the issue. It’s the raw percentage of one’s adult life that has been spent in the waters of politics and government.
Poor Jeb Bush has it the worst, as his heritage means he’s been in politics since he first drew breath. This is at the core of why Jeb is struggling in Republican contest polls.
Even on the Democratic side, there is a similar anti-professional-politician sentiment, which helps explain Hillary Clinton’s sagging poll numbers; people are just tired of the same old, same old from the Clinton political machine.
The job of the pundit class is to dissect political failure and accomplishment, but at some point this cycle, they will have to dissect their own perspective and get in closer touch with what so many voters are thinking and feeling at this pivotal moment in our history. Let’s start with this fact, made crystal clear by Walker’s failed bid: A net worth made of taxpayer dollars is not a qualification, but instead may be a black mark on a presidential job application. Fish need not apply.
By: Jean Care, Thomas Jefferson Street Blog, U. S. News and World Report, Septemer 24, 2015
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