“Poisonous Intra-Party Politics”: John Boehner’s Resignation Won’t Save Republicans From Themselves
For all his flaws, House Speaker John Boehner, who announced on Friday that he will resign from Congress at the end of October, was badly served by a lot of people.
Boehner’s decision is due not to any ostensible scandal or illness but to cruel political mathematics: His conference has become so dysfunctional that when a Republican speaker resigns, the House becomes less, not more, chaotic and reckless. The circumstances that prefigured his resignation are thus a fitting metaphor for his entire speakership and for the state of the Republican Party as a whole. It would be to Boehner’s credit to do everything in his power in the next month to protect his successor from the same fate.
What makes Boehner’s decision surprising is that the forces that drove him to it are familiar enough that they’ve become mundane. Up against a deadline to complete a basic function of government—in this case, to fund it—Boehner found himself beset by conservative demands that he condition Congress’ obligation to help run the country on President Barack Obama’s capitulating to partisan demands. This time the demand was to defund Planned Parenthood. In the past it’s been to change immigration policy, slash social spending, and defund the Affordable Care Act. In each instance, Boehner was confronted with a terrible choice: provoke a crisis, like the 2013 government shutdown, or capitulate to Obama, and face repercussions from unruly conservative members, who were constantly threatening to depose him.
These episodes of brinkmanship always resolved themselves, sometimes in damaging ways. In addition to the shutdown, Boehner’s 2011 decision to ransom the statutory debt limit brought the country within hours of an economically devastating credit default, and precipitated an agreement to impose automatic, indiscriminate spending cuts that harm the government and the economy to this day. More recently, he placated his members by embroiling the House in a lawsuit against the president, which, if successful, would precipitate a constitutional crisis. But he always maintained his brittle grip on power. Either he no longer believes he can, or doesn’t want the hassle anymore.
By stepping down, but not for a month, Boehner has freed himself from the poisonous intraparty politics that made it all but impossible for him to govern, and left himself a brief opening in which to settle some accounts, before the next speaker is elected.
If the succession of power goes as it has in recent years, his deputy—Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California—will become speaker. A conservative dark horse, like Representative Jeb Hensarling of Texas, could mount a challenge. But any insurgent candidate will have to overcome the fact that the speakership, unlike the majority leadership and other high-ranking posts, is determined by the entire House. Democrats, who can not elect a speaker on their own, are ultimately likelier to assure a victory for McCarthy over the devil they don’t know.
But no matter who comes next, the question is whether they’ll immediately confront the same tawdry dynamic that ultimately felled Boehner, or whether Boehner takes it upon himself to bring some stability to the chamber.
If he takes the path of least resistance, the next speaker will have all the same problems Boehner had, minus his years of experience. That path would end with a brief continuation of government funding—just enough to hand the same political mess over to a new leadership team. It would leave the government no less vulnerable to a shutdown, or another debt limit crisis, or a lapse in highway funding, and the party no less vulnerable to bearing responsibility for a crisis in the middle of election season. Call it Boehner’s curse.
Boehner probably can’t end the vicious cycle that hobbled his speakership. But he could plausibly clear the deck for his successor for long enough that the big issues Republicans want to fight over can play out in the election, rather than in the throes of governance. He could place legislation on the floor that funds the government for a year, extends the debt limit through 2016, and replenishes the highway trust fund, and allow Democrats to supply most of the votes required to restore calm. If Boehner were determined to make the next speakership less volatile than his own, and to end his own speakership on a note of responsible stewardship, he almost certainly could. What remains to be seen is whether he has one last fight left in him.
By: Brian Beutler, Senior Editor, The New Republic; September 26, 2015
“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
“The Hostility Is Clarifying”: Conservatives To Pope Francis: Stick With Salvation; We’ll Handle Politics
In a 1979 column, George Will quoted Chekhov describing a character in these terms: “He was a rationalist, but he had to confess that he liked the ringing of church bells.” To Chekhov’s lovely words, Will added his own smarmy endorsement, writing, “Me too.” In his column, Will was affirming the quote in the most literal way possible: He was writing to celebrate bells. But it’s not hard to discern in the quote a larger attitude toward religion. Will is, as he told an interviewer from this magazine, an atheist, yet as a conservative he finds religion to be socially useful and often praises it for that reason. Like the political philosopher Leo Strauss, who has shaped much of his broader outlook, Will has a utilitarian attitude toward religion: Christianity might not be true, but it helps create a cohesive society. To put it another way, Will believes in philosophy for the elite and religion for the masses.
Not surprisingly given this attitude, Will has been at the head of the conservative chorus denouncing Pope Francis’s advocacy for the environment, for migrants, and for the poor—a chorus that has grown more vehement in the run-up to Francis’s U.S. journey. In a syndicated column published on Saturday, Will came out firing: “Pope Francis embodies sanctity but comes trailing clouds of sanctimony. With a convert’s indiscriminate zeal, he embraces ideas impeccably fashionable, demonstrably false, and deeply reactionary.”
Seeing religion as a tool for political ends, Will quite naturally praises religious figures he sees as politically simpatico (like Pope John Paul II) and savages those whose politics he finds politically unpalatable (like Pope Francis). It’s not surprising that Will is so nakedly partisan in his evaluation of religious leaders. What is perhaps more noteworthy is that the same pattern can be found among conservatives who claim to be genuinely devout. Some of these critics voice the objection that Francis is too political, but on closer inspection their real problem is the same as Will’s: They don’t like his politics.
In a 2005 column, for instance, Will praised John Paul II as one of the great heroes of the 20th century because he made common cause with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in fighting communism. Enthusiastically voicing a theme common to conservatives, Will marveled that “[i]n an amazingly fecund 27-month period, the cause of freedom was strengthened by the coming to high offices of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and John Paul II, who, like the president, had been an actor and was gifted at the presentational dimension of his office.”
Yet if John Paul II’s political interventions were held up as crucial in the battle against the enemies of civilization, then his successor Francis, seemingly embodying very different politics, stands condemned as a menace who threatens the very survival of capitalism. As one of America’s foremost climate change deniers, Will has nothing but contempt for Francis’s calls for environmental responsibility. In a 2014 column, Will condemned the Pope as a sanctimonious interloper whose ignorance of worldly matters threatens to leave millions impoverished. “He stands against modernity, rationality, science and, ultimately, the spontaneous creativity of open societies in which people and their desires are not problems but precious resources,” Will thundered. “Americans cannot simultaneously honor him and celebrate their nation’s premises.”
In taking up the cause of the environment, Will argued over the weekend, the church was abandoning its “salvific mission.” Since Will doesn’t actually believe that the salvation the church offers is real, his polemic amounts to a call for the church to continue to offer consoling lies to parishioners and ignore real problems so that the social system continues to work the way Will wants it to. Continue ringing those church bells, Will is saying, so they’ll drown out the protests of environmentalists.
The cynicism of Will’s position hardly needs to be underlined. Yet it is broadly shared by others on the right. Writing at the Federalist, Joy Pullmann, managing editor of the publication and a fellow at the lavishly funded climate change denialist think tank The Heartland Institute, makes many of the same arguments that Will does: that in voicing concern for the environment, the Pope is overstepping his proper duties as a religious leader, and that serious efforts to combat climate change would lead to an economic catastrophe that would have its worst impact on the world’s poor. In an extremely confusing line of argument, Pullmann seems to suggest that an environmental apocalypse might actually be a welcome outcome from a Christian point of view:
We will never achieve utopia in this world. That’s kind of the central story arc of the Bible: How humans screwed themselves and the whole world up, and how Jesus has and will ultimately put things to right. Getting all the way to a perfect eternity, however, requires first an apocalypse.
So maybe Pope Francis should welcome the environmental apocalypse he thinks is coming. That’s partly a joke and partly serious, because every time I see another Planned Parenthood butchering video I am ready for Jesus to take me and my kiddos right up to Paradise and end this sick, mad world.
Pullmann’s words might seem lurid and even nonsensical, but they follow the basic contours of Will’s: The church should stick to saving souls and leave the job of running the world to big business. She also upholds John Paul II as an example of a pope whom it was possible “to respect and admire”—further proof that what is wanted is not an apolitical pope but a pope who aligned with the Republican Party.
Pat Buchanan, the legendary conservative columnist, takes the right-wing hostility toward Francis to its logical conclusion and sees the current Pope, along with President Obama, as being emblematic of the deep sickness in Western civilization. In a breathtaking recent column, Buchanan opines that Francis is promoting “moral confusion,” and argues that both Putin’s Russia and Communist China show much greater cultural health than either Obama’s America or Francis’s church:
America is a different country today, a secular and post-Christian nation on its way to becoming anti-Christian. Some feel like strangers in their own land. And from the standpoint of traditional Catholicism, American culture is an open sewer. A vast volume of the traffic on the Internet is pornography.
Ironically, as all this unfolds in what was once “God’s country,” Vladimir Putin seeks to re-establish Eastern Orthodox Christianity as the basis of morality and law in Russia. And one reads in The Wall Street Journal on Monday that Xi Jinping is trying to reintroduce his Chinese Communist comrades to the teachings of Confucianism.
The world is turned upside down. Every civilization seems to recognize the necessity of faith except for the West, which has lost its faith and is shrinking and dying for lack of it.
Will is a religious skeptic, while both Pullmann and Buchanan are believers. Will’s prose is elegant and measured, while both Pullmann and Buchanan write shrill screeds. Yet despite these surface differences, they are making the same argument: that the proper role of the church is promoting individual salvation and social morality, a mission Francis is jeopardizing by advocating for political change.
The hostility conservatives of all stripes have toward Francis is clarifying. It shows that issues of belief and non-belief are less important to conservatives than adherence to an ideological party line. Despite their different metaphysics, Will, Pullmann, and Buchanan can unite in opposing Francis as a political enemy. Theology serves merely as a convenient cloak for politics.
By: Jeet Heer, Senior Editor, The New Republic; September 22, 2015
“Chief Justice John Roberts Just Isn’t Far Enough To The Right”: When Even Conservative Justices Aren’t Conservative Enough
Over the weekend, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) added a new line of attack to his offensive against his party’s Beltway establishment: the Republican presidential hopeful insisted that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts just isn’t far enough to the right.
In fact, the GOP senator, who was an enthusiastic Roberts booster in 2005, even criticized former President George W. Bush for his reluctance to “spend some political capital” in support of a genuinely right-wing nominee.
Jeb Bush was asked in last night’s debate whether Cruz was right, and though the former governor’s answer meandered a bit, Bush suggested he’d nominate different kinds of justices than his brother: “Roberts has made some really good decisions, for sure, but he did not have a proven, extensive record that would have made the clarity the important thing, and that’s what we need to do. And I’m willing to fight for those nominees to make sure that they get passed. You can’t do it the politically expedient way anymore.”
Cruz added in response:
“I’ve known John Roberts for 20 years, he’s amazingly talented lawyer, but, yes, it was a mistake when he was appointed to the Supreme Court. […]
“It is true that after George W. Bush nominated John Roberts, I supported his confirmation. That was a mistake and I regret that. I wouldn’t have nominated John Roberts.”
Watching this unfold last night, some viewers might have been left with the impression that Chief Justice Roberts is, well, retired Justice David Souter. One President Bush nominated a jurist who seemed conservative enough, but who turned out to approach the law from a center-left perspective, and then another President Bush did the same thing.
Except, that’s not even close to being true.
When Cruz and others on the right complain bitterly about Roberts, they’re generally referring to the justice’s rulings on the Affordable Care Act. But the fact remains that both of the major “Obamacare” rulings were genuinely ridiculous cases – and it’s not Roberts’ fault that he took the law, court precedent, and common sense seriously.
Health care cases notwithstanding, though, Roberts is not a moderate by any fair measurement. We are, after all, talking about a court that handed down the Citizens United ruling. And then later gutted the Voting Rights Act. Roberts didn’t even support marriage equality.
Souter he isn’t.
If Roberts isn’t radical enough for Cruz, who exactly would the Texas Republican like to see on the court? Three times last night he mentioned Judge Edith Jones of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. Given Jones’ jaw-dropping record, that tells us an awful lot about Cruz.
By: Steve Benen, The Madow Blog, September 17, 2015
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