“The Republican Winter Carnival”: Will John Boehner’s Speakership Survive Until Plan C?
Has there been a House speaker in modern American history with less control over his members than John Boehner?
Over the past three days, Boehner has focused all attention on “Plan B”: an effort to strengthen his hand in negotiations with President Obama by passing backup legislation that would extend the Bush tax cuts for all income under $1 million.
Tonight, Boehner lost that vote. In a dramatic turn of events on the House floor, he pulled the legislation. In a statement released moments ago, he said, “The House did not take up the tax measure today because it did not have sufficient support from our members to pass.” Boehner lost.
Plan A, which was a deal with Obama, was put on ice, many believe, because Boehner couldn’t wrangle the votes to pass anything Obama would sign. Plan B failed because Boehner couldn’t wrangle the Republican votes to pass something Obama had sworn he wouldn’t sign.
The failure of Plan B proved something important: Boehner doesn’t have enough Republican support to pass any bill that increases taxes — even one meant to block a larger tax increase — without a significant number of Democrats. The House has now adjourned until after Christmas, but it’s clear now what Plan C is going to have to be: Boehner is going to need to accept the simple reality that if he’s to be a successful speaker, he’s going to need to begin passing legislation with Democratic votes.
There’s an asterisk there, though: It’s not entirely clear whether Boehner will be the speaker of the House a month from today. The vote to elect the next speaker is on Jan. 3. To win, you need an absolute majority of the House, not a plurality. Even a hopeless conservative challenge that attracts only a handful of Republican votes could deny Boehner the speakership until a consensus candidate emerged. Tonight’s vote makes that challenge more likely.
A significant number of Boehner’s members clearly don’t trust his strategic instincts, they don’t feel personally bound to support him, they clearly disagree with his belief that tax rates must rise as part of a deal, and they, along with many other Republicans, must be humiliated after the shenanigans on the House floor this evening. Worse, they know that Boehner knows he’ll need Democratic support to get a budget deal done. That means “a cave,” at least from the perspective of the conservative bloc, is certain. That, too, will make a change of leadership appealing.
If a conservative spoiler runs, he or she could very possibly deny Boehner the 218 votes he needs to become speaker, clearing the way for a more moderate candidate like Eric Cantor to unite the party. It’s hard to say exactly how likely that is. But it’s likelier than it was, say, this morning.
By: Ezra Klein, The Washington Post, December 20, 2012
“So Many Hard Decisions”: House Republicans Eye Violence Against Women Act Changes
Among Congress’ many other looming deadlines, the Violence Against Women Act is still waiting for reauthorization. It easily passed the Senate with bipartisan support in April, but House Republicans insist the current version is too supportive of immigrants, the LGBT community, and Native Americans.
Is there any chance policymakers can work something out? One of the original VAWA authors from 1994 is now the nation’s vice president, and he’s working behind the scenes to work out a deal.
Vice President Joe Biden is quietly working with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) to try to pass an inclusive version of the Violence Against Women Act in the lame-duck Congress. And so far, sources tell HuffPost, Cantor is on board as long as one thing is stripped from the bill: a key protection for Native American women.
Staffers for Biden and Cantor have been trying to reach a deal on the bill for at least a week. Neither camp publicly let on it was talking to the other until Wednesday, when Cantor said the two are in negotiations and he’s feeling hopeful about a deal.
For nearly two decades, VAWA reauthorization was effortless — even the most far-right members didn’t want to be seen opposing resources for state and local governments to combat domestic violence. But as Republicans move further and further to the right, congressional support for the law has grown difficult in ways few could have imagined.
In this case, Cantor is willing to bend on LGBT and immigrant provisions, but he wants Democrats to scrap protections for Native American women. According to the Huffington Post, the Democratic provision gives tribal courts limited jurisdiction to oversee domestic violence offenses committed against Native American women by non-Native American men on tribal lands, and the House Republican leader wants this expansion curtailed.
We’ll know soon enough whether an agreement is possible in the limited time remaining, but in the meantime, GOP officials should probably hope Dana Perino isn’t the leading conservative voice when it comes to domestic violence.
Indeed, it’s astonishing that a Republican media figure would say this out loud on national television.
Appearing on Fox News Wednesday evening, Dana Perino suggested female victims of violence should “make better decisions” in order to escape harm.
Media Matters has the video.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, December 7, 2012
“Disdain For Workers”: Of The Wealthy, By The Wealthy, And For The Wealthy
By now everyone knows how Mitt Romney, speaking to donors in Boca Raton, washed his hands of almost half the country — the 47 percent who don’t pay income taxes — declaring, “My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” By now, also, many people are aware that the great bulk of the 47 percent are hardly moochers; most are working families who pay payroll taxes, and elderly or disabled Americans make up a majority of the rest.
But here’s the question: Should we imagine that Mr. Romney and his party would think better of the 47 percent on learning that the great majority of them actually are or were hard workers, who very much have taken personal responsibility for their lives? And the answer is no.
For the fact is that the modern Republican Party just doesn’t have much respect for people who work for other people, no matter how faithfully and well they do their jobs. All the party’s affection is reserved for “job creators,” a k a employers and investors. Leading figures in the party find it hard even to pretend to have any regard for ordinary working families — who, it goes without saying, make up the vast majority of Americans.
Am I exaggerating? Consider the Twitter message sent out by Eric Cantor, the Republican House majority leader, on Labor Day — a holiday that specifically celebrates America’s workers. Here’s what it said, in its entirety: “Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned their own success.” Yes, on a day set aside to honor workers, all Mr. Cantor could bring himself to do was praise their bosses.
Lest you think that this was just a personal slip, consider Mr. Romney’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. What did he have to say about American workers? Actually, nothing: the words “worker” or “workers” never passed his lips. This was in strong contrast to President Obama’s convention speech a week later, which put a lot of emphasis on workers — especially, of course, but not only, workers who benefited from the auto bailout.
And when Mr. Romney waxed rhapsodic about the opportunities America offered to immigrants, he declared that they came in pursuit of “freedom to build a business.” What about those who came here not to found businesses, but simply to make an honest living? Not worth mentioning.
Needless to say, the G.O.P.’s disdain for workers goes deeper than rhetoric. It’s deeply embedded in the party’s policy priorities. Mr. Romney’s remarks spoke to a widespread belief on the right that taxes on working Americans are, if anything, too low. Indeed, The Wall Street Journal famously described low-income workers whose wages fall below the income-tax threshold as “lucky duckies.”
What really needs cutting, the right believes, are taxes on corporate profits, capital gains, dividends, and very high salaries — that is, taxes that fall on investors and executives, not ordinary workers. This despite the fact that people who derive their income from investments, not wages — people like, say, Willard Mitt Romney — already pay remarkably little in taxes.
Where does this disdain for workers come from? Some of it, obviously, reflects the influence of money in politics: big-money donors, like the ones Mr. Romney was speaking to when he went off on half the nation, don’t live paycheck to paycheck. But it also reflects the extent to which the G.O.P. has been taken over by an Ayn Rand-type vision of society, in which a handful of heroic businessmen are responsible for all economic good, while the rest of us are just along for the ride.
In the eyes of those who share this vision, the wealthy deserve special treatment, and not just in the form of low taxes. They must also receive respect, indeed deference, at all times. That’s why even the slightest hint from the president that the rich might not be all that — that, say, some bankers may have behaved badly, or that even “job creators” depend on government-built infrastructure — elicits frantic cries that Mr. Obama is a socialist.
Now, such sentiments aren’t new; “Atlas Shrugged” was, after all, published in 1957. In the past, however, even Republican politicians who privately shared the elite’s contempt for the masses knew enough to keep it to themselves and managed to fake some appreciation for ordinary workers. At this point, however, the party’s contempt for the working class is apparently too complete, too pervasive to hide.
The point is that what people are now calling the Boca Moment wasn’t some trivial gaffe. It was a window into the true attitudes of what has become a party of the wealthy, by the wealthy, and for the wealthy, a party that considers the rest of us unworthy of even a pretense of respect.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, September 20, 2012
“He Who Has No Name”: At News Conference, Republicans Made No Reference To Party Standard-Bearer Mitt Romney
Republican leaders had all kinds of things to talk about in their first day back on Capitol Hill from their month-long recess.
They spoke about jobs and the economy, about military spending and automatic budget cuts, about the national debt and the need for energy legislation.
But there was one thing House Republican leaders did not mention in their statements to the cameras after Tuesday morning’s caucus: Mitt Romney.
They uttered 1,350 words in their opening remarks at the news conference but made no reference to the party standard-bearer who would be at the top of their ticket in just 56 days.
NBC’s Luke Russert tried to help the lawmakers address this omission. “Governor Romney said that it was a bad decision for Republicans to agree to the bipartisan debt deal,” he pointed out. “What’s your response to him?”
House Speaker John Boehner, who negotiated the deal, looked unwell.
“I don’t think there’s anybody that worked harder than Eric and I to try to work with the president to come to an agreement,” he said, with Majority Leader Eric Cantor standing just behind him. Boehner tried to pin the agreement’s automatic cuts in defense spending on President Obama, but he ultimately defended the package: “Somehow, we have to deal with our spending problem.”
That Romney would go on “Meet the Press” and say that last year’s bipartisan spending deal was a “mistake”— never mind thatRomney had applauded Boehner for negotiating the deal at the time — made clear that the GOP nominee does not wish to run on the record of congressional Republicans.
That House Republicans would not so much as breathe Romney’s name makes clear the sentiment is mutual.
The seven leaders at the microphone didn’t mention Romney even when asked about him — as though he is some sort of political Voldemort. Instead, they kept contrasting House Republicans’ record on jobs bills with those of Senate Democrats and the White House while leaving Romney out of it.
For good measure, the Republican lawmakers also praised a bill that would remove trade restrictions on Russia, a country Romney has called “our number one geopolitical foe”; Romney opposes the trade measure unless Russia is also punished over human rights.
The estrangement seen in the past few days is part of a broader dynamic in which the Republican Party seems to be readying itself to cut and run from its nominee. At the convention in Tampa, a gaggle of younger Republicans — Chris Christie, Scott Walker, Nikki Haley, Rand Paul — delivered speeches light on mentions of Romney and heavy on self-promotion. Overall, Romney was mentioned far less at his convention than Obama was at the Democratic convention.
This tepidity furthers the impression that Romney is a placeholder for the next generation of Republicans, tempered by partisan squabbles and disciplined by conservative activists, and unwilling to negotiate or compromise. Romney himself, though a businessman by temperament, had to affect the younger Republicans’ mannerisms to win the nomination. He further ingratiated himself with the young conservatives by tapping as his running mate Rep. Paul Ryan — one of a trio of self-styled “young guns” in the House, with Cantor and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy.
In the House GOP caucus meeting Tuesday, Boehner told his members privately that the choice of Ryan “validated all the work House Republicans have done over the past 19 months.” Boehner is correct about that. The Ryan choice was a bow to where the power is in the party, where it’s going and who its future leaders are. If Romney wins, congressional conservatives would drive his agenda from Capitol Hill. If Romney loses, congressional conservatives would immediately inherit the party in preparation for 2014 and 2016.
Either way, it promises to be a cacophony. At the news conference that followed the caucus gathering, a campaign-style backdrop proclaimed “Focused on American Jobs” and repeated the phrase “American Jobs” 30 times. But it was also Sept. 11, and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Wash.) argued that the hijackers “didn’t attack us as a Republican or a Democrat; they attacked us as Americans, and we would do well to remember that.”
The leaders had difficulty sticking to either theme in their zeal to campaign against the president: “There’s a lack of leadership in this administration. . . . Can’t find a job in the Obama economy. . . . The president has done nothing.” Boehner said he was “not confident at all” about avoiding downgrades of U.S. debt, accusing Obama of being “absent without leave.”
Actually, Obama has been present; Republicans just find his presence objectionable. The notable absence from congressional Republicans’ calculations is Romney.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 11, 2012
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