“Dear Leader” Boehner And House Republicans Cave In Payroll Taxcut Fight
This morning, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and other leading officials from his caucus told reporters that House Republicans would stick to their guns when it comes to extending the payroll tax break. If Democrats wanted to avoid a tax increase on the middle class, they would have to cave and make Boehner and his cohorts happy.
Not quite six hours later, Boehner and his cohorts threw in the towel.
House Republicans on Thursday crumpled under the weight of White House and public pressure and have agreed to pass a two-month extension of the 2 percent payroll-tax cut, Republican and Democratic sources told National Journal.
The House made the move after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., agreed to appoint conferees to a committee to resolve differences between the Senate’s two-month payroll-tax cut and the House’s one-year alternative.
Reid, you’ll remember, made this offer on Monday, and soon after Boehner said this morning that the deal wasn’t good enough, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) endorsed Reid’s solution. President Obama backed the same approach shortly thereafter.
The House will reportedly make some technical changes to the Senate bill, and the Senate will approve that final bill by unanimous consent.
With nine days to go, it appears all but certain that the payroll tax break — as well as a clean extension of unemployment benefits — will be extended for two months. Between now and then, a conference committee will be tasked with working on a deal for a full-year extension.
What changed Boehner’s mind? Or more accurately, what changed Boehner’s mind again? The Speaker, as recently as Saturday, wanted to pass the Senate compromise and send his caucus home for the holidays. They rebelled and the leader quickly became the follower.
By some accounts, this happened again today. House Republicans —- Wisconsin’s Sean Duffy, Arkansas’ Rick Crawford, Pennsylvania’s Charlie Dent, among others — started breaking ranks after getting an earful in their local districts. GOP lawmakers who wanted to fight the Senate Braveheart-style came to the conclusion, “Maybe that Senate bill isn’t so bad after all.” When his members reversed course, the Speaker again took his cues from them, rather than the other way around.
If Boehner were a stronger, more effective House Speaker, this fiasco could have been easily avoided. He could have told his caucus this was a fight they were likely to lose, so passing the Senate bill quickly was the smart course of action. But he couldn’t — Boehner takes orders; he doesn’t give them.
It’s what helps make this story a disaster, not only for Republicans in general, but also for John Boehner personally. As he surrenders this afternoon, Boehner becomes The Speaker Who Has No Clothes.
He stuck out his neck, vowing not to cave, knowing he’d likely have to cave anyway. Boehner than waited until the pressure became unbearable — after he’d lost face and friends — and walked away with his tail between his legs.
Neither party has had a Speaker this feeble in modern times. His instincts told him to take the deal over the weekend, but Boehner allowed himself to be pushed around by his unhinged caucus, then get pushed around by Democrats, then get pushed around by his allies, then get pushed around by Senate Republicans.
How big a disaster was this for Boehner? Keep an eye on whether Eric Cantor’s travel schedule changes over the holidays.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, December 22, 2011
John Boehner Is Letting The Inmates Run The Asylum
Things are going from bad to worse for Speaker Boehner and the House Republicans.
It hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing for the speaker over the last two years since all his Tea Party freshmen hit town. The good news for him was that he was elected speaker; the bad news was who elected him!
And it is not helpful that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor seems to want his job and is coddling the conservatives in the caucus.
For Speaker Boehner this is like herding feral cats that are getting increasingly wild.
The House rejection Tuesday of the bill overwhelming agreed upon in the Senate (89-10) to enact a compromise on the extension of the middle class tax cuts and unemployment payments was a shock—maybe even to Boehner when his caucus revolted over the weekend.
Anyone who is watching the inmates take over the asylum that is becoming the Republican caucus has got to fear for the country—and the Republican party.
If the House Republicans are responsible for raising taxes this year on the middle class, taking $1,500 out of their pockets as a little Christmas present, they will send the very clear message that they do the bidding of the millionaires and billionaires but put coal in the stocking of working families.
And as America’s businessmen and woman understand, the best prescription for growth, hiring, and greater profits, is a middle class that is well-off enough to buy their products. Starving middle class families does not exactly help their bottom line.
In addition, Republicans cannot make the argument that they are so concerned about the deficit that they want to shackle the middle class but let the wealthiest of Americans continue to get hundred of thousands of dollars in tax breaks that “are not paid for!”
The speaker understands that effectively raising taxes now on middle class families, while continuing huge tax cuts for the richest Americans, simply will not wash.
Such a decision is kryptonite in a political year such as this one.
Hiding behind a conference committee or talking about a year extension is simply hogwash—the Tea Party House members want to kill it, pure and simple.
Speaker Boehner is in real trouble on this one and he knows it; he is better off to cut the crazies loose in his own party, make a deal with Democrats and reasonable Republicans, and move on. It is the right thing to do for the country to prevent a double dip recession and the right thing to do politically. If Cantor tries to dethrone him, so be it, he did the right thing. But, right now, he is getting run over by a right wing caucus out of control.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, December 20, 2011
The Pointlessness Of Being A Republican House Speaker
It appears that the House will vote later today on a plan to extend payroll tax cuts for two more months that breezed through the Senate by an 89-10 margin over the weekend. But there’s no suspense: Speaker John Boehner even says it’s going to fail. So why go ahead with the vote? There are some technical and procedural reasons, but it probably has more to do with an attempt at face-saving on the speaker’s part.
The problem for Boehner, as has been amply demonstrated this year, is that he’s a speaker who lacks the muscle typically associated with his title. This really isn’t his fault. The GOP’s House membership can roughly be divided into two groups: 1) Conservative true believers (many of whom won their seats in 2010) who embody the Tea Party’s anti-Washington, anti-Obama, anti-compromise absolutism; and 2) conservatives who have some pragmatic instincts but who are terrified of acting on them in the Obama era, lest it prompt a primary challenge from a Tea Party purist.
Now consider what Boehner, an 11-term House incumbent who led the GOP in the lower chamber during the final few years of the Bush presidency, represents to the average Tea Party activist: the exact sort of entrenched D.C. insider who spent the Bush years signing off on W’s big government agenda and giving conservatism a bad name, thereby abetting the rise of Obama in 2008. He managed to secure the speaker’s gavel for the 112th Congress mainly by being in the right place at the right time, but he’s had to wield it with the knowledge that scores of his members (along with the conservative activists and media personalities who have credibility with the Tea Party base) are ready to punish him the minute he sells them out. Add in the presence of an ambitious No. 2 House GOP leader who isn’t very fond of Boehner and who enjoys far more trust from the Tea Party crowd, Eric Cantor, and it becomes clear that Boehner is essentially a speaker-in-name-only.
Which makes situations like the payroll tax debate painful to watch. The rate is set to rise to 6.2 percent unless an agreement can be reached by the end of the year, and after some intense posturing, it seemed like one had been struck over the weekend, with Senate Democrats and Republicans voting nearly unanimously to extend it through February and to pay for it with a series of small cuts previously agreed to by both parties during deficit reduction talks. To mollify Republicans, a provision was included to force Obama to decide on the Keystone XL pipeline by February. The deal could hardly have been described as a big win for either side. It was what it was: a way to prevent a tax increase on millions of middle class Americans that neither party wants to be blamed for.
Boehner was well aware of this. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell kept him in the loop as he negotiated with Majority Leader Harry Reid, with Boehner saying then: “If the Senate acts, I’m committed to bringing the House back — we can do it within 24 hours — to deal with whatever the Senate does.” But when McConnell and Reid struck their deal and the Senate approved it on Saturday, Boehner took part in a conference call with the House’s GOP members. According to numerous reports, he started out by calling it a “good” deal and expressing his support. But then Cantor and his allies trashed it, and so did numerous other members on the call. A strong speaker, one who isn’t constantly on guard against potential mutinies, might have laid down the law at this point and leaned on his leadership team to twist arms and bring the membership into line. But Boehner was in no position to do that, and he hasn’t been all year.
So that was that. By Sunday, Boehner was on television calling the deal unacceptable, vowing that the House GOP wouldn’t approve it, and raising the possibility that the tax cuts will expire at the end of the year. Which brings us to today’s pointless vote. Asked by Greg Sargent to reconcile Boehner’s eagerness to move on a McConnell-Reid deal last week with his new position, Boehner’s spokesman claimed there was no inconsistency because the speaker had only said that the House would act on it — not that the vote would turn out a certain way.
Believe that if you want, but this sure feels like only the latest episode in which Boehner wanted to protect his party from inflicting political damage on itself but had no standing to do so.
By: Steve Kornacki, Salon War Room, December 19, 2011
John Boehner And The Notion Of “Common Ground”
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) made an appeal to super-committee members yesterday, urging them to work towards a debt-reduction solution built on areas of agreement between the parties. If only his argument was as sensible as it sounds.
Boehner encouraged the committee to hone in on working to reform entitlements such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in order to meet the committee’s mandate to drop $1.5 trillion from the deficit in the next decade. […]
Explaining that common ground is not analogous to compromise, the speaker called on Democrats and Republicans to come together on areas of agreement without violating the principles that brought them to elected office.
“Common ground doesn’t mean compromising on your principles. Common ground means finding the places where your agenda overlaps with that of the other party, locking arms, and getting it done, without violating your principles,” Boehner said. “The jobs crisis in America today demands that we seek common ground, and act on it where it’s found.”
That seems fair, doesn’t it? Democrats have a policy agenda; Republicans have a very different agenda; and to get something done, the two sides should focus on areas of commonality.
The context, however, makes all the difference. In this case, Boehner was talking about entitlements, and support in both parties for making structural “reforms” to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. If Democrats and Republicans agree that entitlement changes are worthwhile to address long-term financing challenges, in the Speaker’s mind, it means the parties should “lock arms” and adopt these changes.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) made a very similar argument over the summer: “We both agree on doing something that’s good for the country, which is dealing with entitlements. Why don’t we just do that? Why do we have to sit here and say we still got to raise taxes when we don’t agree on that?”
The problem here is that GOP leaders don’t seem to understand what the words “compromise” and “common ground” mean.
Consider an example. Let’s say I go to pick up some lunch at the sandwich shop around the corner. The guy behind the counter and I are prepared to engage in a transaction — I’ll give him $5 and he’ll give me a sandwich. But I decide I’m not fully satisfied with the terms. “Look,” I tell the guy, “both of us agree that I should get the sandwich. It’s already right there on the counter, and this is the area where both of our agendas overlap. So, let’s focus on this area of common ground, I’ll eat the sandwich, and we can argue about the $5 later.”
This is, in effect, what Republican leaders are telling Democrats. Leading Dems in Congress and at the White House have told the GOP they’re willing to accept some entitlement “reforms” in exchange for some additional tax revenue from the wealthy. It’s a balanced approach that calls for broad sacrifice, which addresses the debt problem created by Republicans over the last decade.
Boehner and Cantor are saying, “Well, we both want to tackle entitlements, but we disagree about taxes, so just give us what we want since it’s an area of ‘common ground.’”
What GOP leaders don’t seem to understand — or at least choose to be confused about — is that giving one side everything it wants, and demanding no concessions at all from that side, is in no way similar to “finding the places where your agenda overlaps with that of the other party, locking arms, and getting it done.”
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, November 1, 2011
An Efficient Metaphor For What’s Wrong With Congress
We know Congress isn’t getting along. But that’s no good reason to spend less time together.
The House’s 2012 calendar is out, and it reflects some of the divisions the chamber is experiencing. Majority Leader Eric Canto has scheduled just 109 days in session, a schedule he said will make for a more streamlined legislative process while giving lawmakers the opportunity to spend time with their constituents. House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer complained that the schedule is “more of the same.” This year so far, the House has conducted legislative business for just 111 days, Hoyer noted, nearly equal to the 104 days spent in recess or in pro forma session.
Let’s be clear: when the House is back home, they are not on vacation. Their work schedules in the district are sometimes more arduous than those they have in Washington, since lawmakers are expected to travel around their districts, speaking to a myriad of constituencies. They also have to raise campaign cash during these trips, a task that is becoming an increasingly larger part of their jobs.
Nor is Congress slacking off when they are not actually on the floors of the House and Senate. They have committee hearings, meetings with constituents, and (hopefully) negotiating sessions with fellow lawmakers.
But spending less time in Washington is not going to heal the divisions in Congress. In fact, it’s likely to get worse. Especially in the House, with its 435 members, personal relationships are critical to achieving compromise. Lawmakers who barely see each other will never get past the party-identification barrier.
Further, the calendar (like this year’s) is out of synch with the Senate calendar. The two chambers take week-long recesses at different times, making it harder for the House and Senate to reach the compromises necessary to pass legislation.
The 2012 calendar is campaign-friendly, however. After October 5, members are free until after the 2012 elections, giving them the time to keep their jobs, but not actually do their jobs. The new calendar is indeed more efficient, as Cantor contends. But it’s an efficient metaphor for what has gone wrong with Congress.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, October 28, 2011
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