‘From Embattled To Pitiful”: Boehner Has A New Pitch To Defend Congressional Ineptitude
About a year ago, a reporter started to ask House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) about Congress’ “historically unproductive” term. “That’s just total nonsense,” he snapped, before the question was even finished.
In reality, it wasn’t nonsense at all, and the question appears even more apt now. The fact remains that this is the least productive Congress since clerks started keeping track nearly a century ago.
Soon after, Boehner switched gears and tried to turn the argument around – sure, he said, Congress isn’t legislating, but that’s a good thing. According to Boehner, Congress “should not be judged by how many new laws we create,” but rather, Congress “ought to be judged on how many laws we repeal.”
This effort to rebrand failure also posed a problem: Congress hasn’t repealed laws, either. By either standard, the legislative branch was failing miserably.
But the hapless House Speaker clearly remains sensitive about Congress’ ineptitude, which seems to have led him to an entirely new argument: Congress isn’t working, but the Republican-led House is awesome.
As he began his annual month-long, 14-state bus tour this week, the Ohio Republican left many of the red-meat issues that rev up his base back in Washington. Instead, he’s trying to promote a different message: Republicans are doing the legislating while everyone else is slacking off. […]
“When you hear all this stuff about the Congress, understand there are two bodies in the Congress,” Boehner said during a morning fundraiser in Bolingbrook, a suburb of Chicago. “One is working our rear ends off, and frankly, you’d be surprised all the stuff we do is done on a bipartisan basis. [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid didn’t even try to pass a border bill that we passed last Friday.”
And it’s at this point when the House Speaker made the transition from embattled to pitiful.
Boehner may feel slightly embarrassed for creating an accomplishment-free legacy for himself, and he’s no doubt frustrated by the fact that Congress’ approval rating has fallen to levels unseen since the dawn of modern polling, but this latest tack to rationalize failure is laughable.
Consider the example Boehner himself is using: the GOP-led House passed a “border bill,” while the Democratic-led Senate ignored it. Proof of House Republicans working their “rear ends off”? Not for anyone who was actually awake and watching Congress last week.
The House’s “border bill” was a ridiculous joke that even Boehner didn’t like. The Speaker pushed an entirely different bill; his own members decided to ignore his weak leadership (again); causing Boehner to give up and tell right-wing extremists to write whatever they wanted, without any regard for whether it would become law.
It was a pathetic effort to ram through a symbolic gesture, not a legitimate effort to pass a real bill. That Boehner is using this as a great example of how effective House Republicans are helps prove the exact opposite point.
On the surface, it stands to reason both sides are going to blame the other – in this do-nothing Congress, the Democratic Senate wants voters to blame the Republican House and vice versa. None of this is surprising.
But there’s an objective truth available to anyone who wants to see it. This Congress could approve immigration reform, tax reform, ENDA, and a minimum-wage increase, among other things, were it not for the no-compromise, far-right party dominating the U.S. House. That’s just the reality.
Boehner, taking orders instead of giving them, has approved a bunch of symbolic, partisan bills that no one, including Republicans, expect to become law, but that’s not governing – it’s self-indulgent posturing. Until the Speaker is prepared to acknowledge the difference, Congress will remain a national embarrassment.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 7, 2014
“Dumb And Dumber”: House Republicans Vote To Deport As Many Kids As Possible
Dumb and dumber. That’s the best way to describe two bills passed by House Republicans on Friday night. They passed a supplemental funding bill allocating about $700 million for the crisis on the border. It includes changes to current law that will make it easier to send child migrants back to Central America. They also voted to wind down the Obama administration’s Deferred Action program for young immigrants. So forget about comprehensive reform: House Republicans have settled on the “Let’s deport as many kids as possible” approach.
These two bills do not represent a coherent response to our border crisis. They reflect House Speaker John Boehner’s failed leadership as well as the triumph of immigration extremists. While these bills will have zero policy impact, the GOP will likely feel their political impact for years to come — and not in a good way.
To understand why these bills passed, let’s back up for a moment. Recall that Speaker Boehner originally wanted to vote on a border crisis bill on Thursday. But he couldn’t round up enough votes, and the bill was pulled. This was a major embarrassment for the Speaker. Amazingly, Boehner then suggested that President Obama should take executive action on immigration. “There are numerous steps the president can and should be taking right now, without the need for congressional action,” he said in a statement, “to secure our borders and ensure these children are returned swiftly and safely to their countries.”
Huh? Right now the House is suing the president for taking executive action. For the Speaker to suggest that President Obama act on his own on immigration is inconsistent and hypocritical (Does that mean he will support the president’s expected executive action on immigration?).
As it turned out, in order to get the votes for a border bill Boehner allowed a vote on a bill that would end the Deferred Action for Child Arrivals (DACA) program. Introduced by the Obama administration in 2012, DACA grants relief from deportation to undocumented immigrants brought illegally to the U.S. as children. About half a million of these young people, also known as Dreamers, have so far qualified for its protection.
In case you’re wondering, DACA has nothing to do with the crisis on the border. Although some Republicans have surmised that it caused the ongoing influx of child migrants, there is no evidence to support this claim.
Now Boehner can say that House Republicans did something on immigration before they left for the August recess. Yet this is a hollow victory, because these bills are going nowhere. The Senate would never approve them and even if they did, the president has pledged to veto them.
The anti-DACA vote, however, will have real consequences for the Republican Party. Consider that recent polling from Latino Decisions showed that 75 percent of Latino voters said that any move to dismantle DACA would make them less favorably inclined towards the GOP. Ana Navarro, a Republican strategist, tweeted that the anti-DACA vote “antagonizes Latinos, energizes Democratic base, and emboldens the GOP ‘No’ caucus.” She is right — and the GOP will be paying the price for years to come. Two hundred sixteen House members, many of whom harbor national ambitions, are now on record as opposing a policy supported by overwhelming majorities of Latino voters.
Obviously, a majority of House Republicans supported these measures — or they wouldn’t have passed. “The changes brought into this (the border bills) are ones I’ve developed and advocated for over the past two years. It’s like I ordered it off the menu,” Rep. Steve King (R- Iowa) told CQ Roll Call. The fact that the GOP position on immigration is now in sync with King, a man who once compared Dreamers to drug mules, should be alarming to Republicans concerned about their long-term viability as a national party. As disappointing as President Obama has been on immigration, these mean-spirited votes make it clearer than ever which party values Hispanic voters.
Friday’s House votes were a sad spectacle. On immigration, the GOP has taken another hard lurch to the right, and Latino voters will not soon forget it.
By: Raul A. Reyes, The Huffington Post Blog, August 4, 2014
“What Boehner’s Lawsuit Really Means”: The One Thing Republicans Hate More Than A Democratic President, Is This President Himself
Thank you John Boehner. The nation truly appreciates you and your fellow House Republicans altruistically devoting your last moments in Congress, before a much-deserved 5 1/2 week vacation (hey, you try doing nothing for a whole year…it’s exhausting!) to protecting healthcare. Despite obsessively voting fifty times and spending $70+ million of taxpayer money to repeal the Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, you’re on a mission to ensure that Americans receive every single benefit the insurance law intended. Bravo!
That’s right. Republicans have sued the President of the United States. That’s a pretty serious action. Must’ve been over something so egregious… something so detrimental to America’s health and welfare… something that, if unchecked, could literally bring down our great nation. Guess again.
The lawsuit is over Obama’s use of an executive order to delay for one-year the employer mandate provision of ACA, which requires business owners to provide health care for its employees. Forget Immigration, minimum wage or extended unemployment insurance. There’s no time to waste on these pesky little issues when one aspect of Obamacare is at risk! Because no one wants to force businesses to provide health insurance to employees more than House Republicans, right?
Oh, those executive orders! Republicans hate them, especially when it’s a Democrat who signs them. But for anyone keeping score, Obama’s signed 183, far less than any president in modern history, especially Republicans. George W. Bush signed 291 of them. Bill Clinton 364. Ronald Reagan 381. And George H. W. Bush 166 (in four years). So why all the Republican concern about the Constitution all of a sudden? It’s because the only one thing Republicans hate more than a Democratic president’s use of executive orders is this president himself. No president has been more disrespected, or been the object of more vengeful scheming, than Obama.
To be sure, for Republicans, the lawsuit is not only baseless but meaningless. It will have no material impact on Obama’s presidency, and its cost to taxpayers will ultimately seem small compared to the cost to the party come election day. But the real gain is to be had by Democrats, whose base is more energized than ever heading into November’s critical midterms, while being handed on a silver platter a delicious boon to fundraising. They’ve raised millions since the suit’s been filed… at a rate of about $1-million per day.
By: Andy Ostroy, The Huffington Post Blog, August 4, 2014
“Ted Cruz, Legislative Innovator”: What’s Bad For The GOP Can Be Good For Little Teddy
Congress, it is said, is divided into “work horses” and “show horses.” The former try to make laws, while the latter worry more about whether they can get on TV. Plenty of members try to be both, but there are a surprising number that don’t even bother legislating. And these days, being a show horse offers a much clearer path to one day running for president. It’s still technically possible to spend a few decades crafting a legislative record and working your way up the leadership ladder, then eventually get your party’s nomination, like Bob Dole did. But it’s a hell of a lot easier to inject yourself into a few controversies, make some notable speeches, and take a trip or two to Iowa. Do that, and like Rand Paul or Ted Cruz (or Barack Obama), you can run for president in your first term.
Cruz, however, is doing something completely new. He may not bother to introduce any bills, but he is creating a new kind of legislative innovation. Perhaps for the first time in American history—I can’t think of any precedent, and knowledgeable people I’ve asked can’t either—we have a senator who has taken it upon himself to lead revolts in the House in order to undermine his own party’s leadership there.
Last year, Cruz held private meetings with Tea Party members in the House, urging them to keep the government shut down in the vain hope that they could destroy Obamacare as the price of ending the crisis. And this week, he was at it again:
The beginning of the collapse of House Speaker John A. Boehner’s border bill came Wednesday evening, when Texas Sen. Ted Cruz gathered more than a dozen House Republicans at his office in the Dirksen building on Capitol Hill.
It was there, as Boehner (R-Ohio) held his own meetings on the other side of Constitution Avenue, that Cruz heard that the speaker didn’t have enough votes—and realized that if his House allies held firm, he could rupture the fragile coalition supporting the measure…
He agreed that Boehner was distracted and said they should stick to their principles. The freshman senator also reminded them to be skeptical of promises from House leaders, particularly of “show votes”—legislative action designed to placate conservatives that carry little, if any, weight.
That quiet assurance was enough to persuade the conservatives to effectively topple Boehner’s plan, at least on Thursday, by balking when he said he would hold a largely symbolic standalone vote on Obama’s program.
We shouldn’t overstate the impact of Cruz’s involvement; it’s likely that Boehner’s immigration plan would have failed even if this meeting hadn’t taken place. But once again, Cruz has used his influence with House conservatives to help undermine Boehner and engineer a debacle for Republicans.
You might wonder at the strategic wisdom of that, but what’s bad for the GOP can be good for Ted Cruz. If we assume that his primary goal is mounting a presidential campaign, Republican unity isn’t something to be desired. You know what Republican unity gets you? Candidates like Bob Dole and Mitt Romney: establishment figures who get the nomination because it’s their turn and they seem like the best chance the GOP has of winning. Cruz is going to be the candidate of the far right, and the only way he could possibly prevail in a nomination fight is if it turns out to be a complete mess, with multiple factions engaged in bitter recriminations that fail to resolve themselves. If there’s a compromise candidate, it isn’t going to be Ted Cruz; if there’s a bloodbath, he stands at least a chance of being the last one standing.
I think it’s highly unlikely that Cruz could get the GOP nomination. But if you think about his actions in terms of stoking the GOP division and dismay that give him a shot, they make a lot more sense.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 1, 2014
“A Republican Chronic Affliction”: From Clinton To Obama; Why GOP Impeachment Fever Is Now So Predictable
Making predictions is a perilous practice for any political journalist. Too often, the would-be seers turn out to be dead wrong – as can be attested to by George Will, Michael Barone, Larry Kudlow, and the humiliated boy genius on Fox News, all of whom projected a big victory for Mitt Romney in 2012.
Yet there is at least one future event that could be safely forecast years ago, almost as soon as Barack Obama entered the White House: a movement among House Republicans to impeach the president.
In the conventional wisdom that chronically afflicts Washington, all the current muttering about impeachment is merely a theatrical display for the GOP’s wingnut base – as Democrats use the same threat to stir emotions (and donations) among Obama loyalists. Such complacent analysis misreads not only the mood and character of the Republican Party’s dominant Tea Party wing, but the recent history of impeachment as a political instrument of the far right.
The same forces that have sought to ruin Obama from the beginning were hatching schemes to remove Bill Clinton from office long before the unveiling of his reckless indiscretions with Monica Lewinsky. Back then, the talk of impeachment among zealots who schemed against Clinton, ranging from Pittsburgh billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife and disgraced former attorney general Ed Meese to an assortment of back-bench congressmembers and religious hucksters, could be easily brushed aside. Today, many of the survivors among that old cast of characters are peddling Impeach Obama bumperstickers– notably including Joseph Farah of WorldNetDaily, which features an “impeachment store” online.
Claims that Clinton had committed a high crime or misdemeanor worthy of impeachment under the Constitution dated as far back as 1994, the year after his inauguration, when the teamwork of determined right-wing activists and incompetent mainstream reporters ginned up a series of phony scandals. At secret meetings, the leadership of ultra-right organizations such as the Council for National Policy persuaded themselves that Hillary Clinton was about to be indicted (for something), and that Bill Clinton could soon be impeached (for anything).
The itch to impeach Clinton gathered momentum in 1997, not long after his re-election, a democratic victory that did not impress his right-wing enemies. As with Obama, they wanted to undo his presidency not because he had committed a supposed constitutional offense, but simply because his “liberal, globalist, socialist” politics offended their sense of morality. Of course, they feel the same way about Obama today. Indeed, from the perspective of the insurrectionary Tea Party Republicans and other self-styled “patriots,” elections hardly matter at all, unless their candidate wins. To them, a Democratic president lacks legitimacy by definition.
For a pungent whiff of irony, remember that electing Obama in 2008 was supposed to preserve us from another decade of political trench warfare, instigated by those polarizing Clintons. Electing Hillary Clinton would lead America back into the partisan psychodrama of the Nineties, or so the Washington pundits warned us; better to choose that nice, inspirational, bipartisan-sounding senator from Illinois, they advised.
And how did that work out for us? Scarcely through any fault of Obama, the result has been no different from the scary projections of a divisive Clinton presidency: legislative gridlock, economic brinksmanship, kooky conspiracy theories, and now congressional lawsuits accompanied by loud talk of impeachment. Clinton and Obama are just names for the object of hate, against whom any slanderous, mendacious, and vacuous attack can be mounted.
That was why gullible rubes once bought hundreds of thousands of videotapes accusing the Clintons of murder – and why the same kind of suckers bought into the race-baiting “birther” insinuations about Obama. It is why a top House Republican will lie blatantly on television about the Supreme Court’s dozen rebukes of this president’s alleged constitutional overreach – when most of those cases involved George W. Bush.
In temperament and ideology, the Tea Party Republicans who run the House aren’t much different from the Gingrich gang that went after Clinton. They don’t care whether Obama won the election in a near-landslide — or that seeking to remove him would be very dangerous for our country and the world. If their party wins control of the Senate in November, then the reactionary impulse to impeach may well become irresistible.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, The National Memo, August 1, 2014
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