“Speaker In Name Only”: Why John Boehner’s Failures Don’t Affect His Job Security
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has struggled since grabbing the gavel 33 months ago, but the last few weeks have been especially brutal. He didn’t want a government shutdown, but his own members rejected his advice. Boehner didn’t want a debt-ceiling crisis, either, but his members balked at following his lead on this, too.
Even last night, after the Speaker endorsed a bipartisan resolution to the crisis his own caucus created, most House Republicans rejected the plan Boehner grudgingly supported.
Indeed, just 24 hours ago, National Review’s Robert Costa had breakfast with some House Republican lawmakers who said they’re “losing faith in their leadership.”
So how much trouble is Boehner really in? Not as much as common sense might suggest.
House conservatives said Wednesday that Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is in no danger of losing his post, despite presiding over a Republican defeat in the fight over government funding and the debt ceiling.
“I don’t think Speaker Boehner has anything to worry about right now,” said Rep. Raúl Labrador (R-Idaho), a conservative who refused to vote for Boehner in January.
When Boehner hosted a caucus meeting yesterday, breaking the news that the House would have to pass the Senate’s bipartisan compromise, he received a standing ovation – even though most House Republicans opposed and rejected the plan.
Roll Call added, “GOP lawmakers from across the conference say there are no coup attempts in the works and few complaints over the job Boehner did on the shutdown and debt limit fights.”
How is this possible? As implausible as this may seem, congressional Republicans are pointing a lot of fingers this morning, but none of them are pointed at the Speaker. GOP pragmatists are blaming Tea Partiers; Tea Partiers are blaming pragmatists; and they’re both blaming the media. Republicans are furious with President Obama for not caving the way they expected him to, and are even angrier with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for making them look bad.
But Boehner, at least for the time being, is in the clear. He took orders from his followers, so for now, they’re satisfied.
Stepping back, though, the bigger picture offers a good-news/bad-news dynamic for the embattled, accomplishment-free Speaker. The good news is, Boehner’s GOP conference still likes him and sees no need to replace him.
The bad news is his members intend to keep ignoring his wishes and rejecting his advice.
In other words, Boehner is still the Speaker. He’s also still the Speaker In Name Only.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 17, 2013
“Was It Worth It?”: Republicans Are Now Competing With Shingles And Herpes For Popularity
Remember back when this government shutdown started and the Republicans had so many ambitions? They were going to defund ObamaCare, or at least delay the individual mandate for a year. They were going to introduce a “conscience clause” that would allow employers to deny their workers access to contraception. They were going to compel the administration to bypass the deliberative process at the State Department and preemptively license the Keystone XL pipeline. They were going to gut coal-ash regulations and expand offshore drilling. They were going to get fast track authority for tax reform legislation based on Rep. Paul Ryan’s principles. They were going to cripple the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and rip apart the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reforms. They’d means-test Medicare and finally get tort reform. They had these dreams and many more besides.
But where are we now? All the various deals and negotiations have collapsed, and it’s down to a one-on-one between Reid and McConnell.
Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, spoke cordially by telephone but remained deadlocked. The stumbling block is over spending levels, the length of a debt ceiling increase and how long a temporary spending measure should keep the government open until a longer-term budget deal can be reached.
Translation: the talks are about how much new spending will be added to the sequester, how much the borrowing limit will be expanded, and how much time will be covered under the continuing resolution.
Further translation: the Republicans aren’t even asking for anything on their wish-list anymore.
Which is as it should be, because they never offered the Democrats a damn thing in return.
Republicans reacted with frustration over what they saw as the shifting demands of a Democratic leadership intent on inflicting maximum damage on adversaries sinking in the polls and increasingly isolated.
“The Democrats keep moving the goal posts,” Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and a lead negotiator, said Sunday. “Decisions within the Democratic conference are constantly changing.”
But Democratic aides said a deal taking shape among a bipartisan group of senators offered Democrats nothing beyond a reopening of the government and temporary assurances that the government will not default in the coming days. Those should be seen not as concessions but as basic obligations of Congress, they say.
How many times have I heard this president be criticized for giving the store away? I think all that talk is almost as delusional as the ambitions the Republicans took into this showdown. Back in 2011, during the last debt ceiling fiasco, the Republicans had the ability and the motivation to cripple the economy to such a degree that the president probably could not have been reelected. Would they have actually done it?
I guess we’ll never know, but who can blame the president for being unwilling to hand that decision to his political opponents? All he ever asked was for a balanced approach that included some new tax revenue, and his opponents have not yet ever come close to taking ‘yes’ for an answer if it required violating their pledge to Grover Norquist. What we got instead was sequestration. That was the only way the Republicans could keep some of the president’s concessions without making any of their own. In order to get the president to give away the store, they had to eschew most of what they said they really wanted and appropriate with a sledgehammer that removed all discretion, wisdom, and values from the system.
And where has it gotten them?
Now they are competing with shingles and herpes for popularity. Now they are hopelessly divided and business leaders are furious with them. And they’re back to square one, facing budget negotiations that will no longer allow them to pocket gains without making concessions. They will have to spell out what they want, which appears to be to diminish the value of their base’s earned benefits in return for agreeing to raise their base’s taxes.
Good luck with that.
By: Martin Longman, Washington Monthly Ploitical Animal, October 13, 2013
“Feeding The Gullible Beltway Media”: The Delusional And Dangerous Paul Ryan Holds Himself Up As A Broker
It’s a measure of how gullible the Beltway media are that when Rep. Paul Ryan held himself up as the guy to broker a GOP deal on the debt ceiling and government shutdown with President Obama last week, he was greeted as a potential savior. Nobody seemed to notice that he was trying to push much of his discredited Ryan budget on Democrats in exchange for Republicans simply doing their job: opening up government and avoiding a debt default.
As Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has belatedly begun reminding people, those are not concessions. Republicans say they want both things, and they should: their poll numbers are in the toilet and constituents are furious because of the government shutdown, and a debt ceiling would crater the economy.
But Ryan pushed anyway, as though he had a chance to force his terms on Obama and recalcitrant Democrats. That’s almost as delusional as former Vice President Dick Cheney saying we would be “greeted as liberators” in Iraq. But let’s give Cheney credit for one thing: He was elected vice president, twice. Ryan failed at that task a year ago and cannot be considered a serious candidate for national office.
The National Review’s Robert Costa, who is doing some of the best reporting on the House GOP, took issue with my calling Ryan “delusional” on MSNBC’s “Up with Steve Kornacki” Sunday morning. “I don’t think the word is delusional, because there was a moment last week when Ryan published that Wall Street Journal op-ed, the House was really leading the talks, and Ryan was engaging directly with the president. For a brief moment it seemed like Ryan could be the one to get his right flank to come along….Once Harry Reid really stepped into the fray, Paul Ryan’s whole influence over the process kind of evaporated.”
OK, but isn’t it a little bit delusional to believe Reid would stay out of the fray? Now comes news that Ryan has done a 180 and declared that House Republicans must fight whatever the Senate comes up with, even a compromise floated by GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine that Reid has already rejected for giving up too much. While the Collins proposal would open the government for six months and lift the debt ceiling enough to get to January, it delays the medical device tax two years and sets other conditions on the Affordable Care Act. Reid insists the Senate won’t negotiate about the ACA or anything else under debt-ceiling/shutdown duress.
Ryan, who was savaged by some on the right last week for seeming to trade the goal of repealing Obamacare in exchange for Obama embracing most of the infamous Ryan budget, is now back to Obamacare. In fact, he’s insisting the House GOP shouldn’t back any deal that opens the government or extends the debt ceiling deadline without major changes to the Affordable Care Act, including letting employers withhold birth-control coverage from insurance plans for religious reasons.
Get it? They’re back to their crusade against birth control access. If that doesn’t define delusional, I’m not sure what does.
To be fair to Ryan, he dropped his politically toxic plan to voucherize Medicare in his latest proposal and mostly stuck to Medicare trimming that Obama himself had endorsed in the last round of grand bargain negotiating in 2011. While I think the president was willing to go too far to cut a deal – and may have been saved from himself by Republican insanity – it must be noted he was offering those cuts in exchange for major revenue increases. He was not offering them in exchange for the House and Senate GOP coming to its senses and doing its job, instead of holding the country hostage to pass legislative changes they can’t win enough political power to enact through legislation.
So yes, Ryan was always delusional – but now he’s even more so. The individual mandate will not be delayed, and the contraceptive provisions of the ACA will not be made optional. What’s dangerous is that Beltway reporters are so hungry for signs of GOP sanity that they hold up Ryan as reasonable, which feeds his own delusion that he’s politically crucial.
Now Ryan is really, really angry at Senate Republicans, according to NRO’s Jonathan Strong, and he’s going to take his ball and go home. “They’re trying to cut the House out, and trying to jam us with the Senate. We’re not going to roll over and take that,” Ryan told reporters on Saturday.
The only way this ends is the only way it ever was going to end: with House Speaker John Boehner, having let extremist GOP babies cry themselves out, finally passing a deal with the support of Democrats. And he shouldn’t count on them being the Democrats who approved the debt-ceiling “deal” that ultimately imposed sequester cuts, or the fiscal-cliff deal that compromised on tax rates and kicked those cuts down the road. On both the Senate and House side – where Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi openly frets that Democrats have “been enablers” of the “irresponsible” GOP – there’s a new tone of toughness. Let’s hope it holds.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon.com, October 13, 2013
“How About The ‘Congress Does It’s Job’ Plan”: In The Midst Of Crises, Chaos Grips Congress
I’d thought about creating some kind of flow chart to capture ongoing developments in Capitol Hill, but quickly gave up. As Jonathan Cohn noted, it would have simply been too messy.
By my count, no less than four separate conversations are taking place right now: The White House is talking to House Republicans and, separately, it to Senate Republicans. In the Senate, moderate Republicans are talking to the Democratic leadership. In the House, Republicans from the party’s extreme wing are talking to Republicans from the not-so-extreme wing, all under the watchful eye of the caucus leaders.
And that’s just the official dialogue. Staff and outside interest groups are talking amongst themselves. The subject of these talks include myriad variations on how to write a bill reopening the government and giving it new borrowing authority, for different durations of time and under different conditions — or no conditions at all.
That ought to clear things up, right?
It’s been nearly two weeks since congressional Republicans shut down the government, and we’re just days from a debt-ceiling calamity, suggesting policymakers should theoretically be working towards some kind of resolution. But while there was a flurry of activity yesterday, it was largely a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.
House Republicans, for example, thought they’d presented the White House with a credible offer: Congress would temporarily raise the debt ceiling, the government would remain closed, Democrats would accept Medicare and/or Social Security cuts, and the severity of the sequestration cuts that neither party likes would be eased. President Obama declared this a joke, told House GOP leaders he could probably get a better offer from Senate Republicans, and so dejected House members promptly left Capitol Hill yesterday.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), meanwhile, thought she too had come up with a solution: Congress would reopen the government for six months and raise the debt limit for a year. Democrats would have to accept sequestration levels and throw in a two-year delay of the medical-device tax in the Affordable Care Act, and in exchange, Republicans would concede nothing. Yesterday, Democrats rejected this as wholly unacceptable, too.
And as a practical matter, it doesn’t much matter that Dems didn’t like it, since House Republicans said they’d refuse to even vote on the Collins plan — a plan in which Republicans give up nothing except temporary hold on some hostages — even if the Senate approved it and even if House GOP leaders could tolerate it.
So what happens now?
With House members having given up, at least for now, talks are now underway between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). What, if anything, they can expect to accomplish is unclear.
And even if they reached some sort of resolution, it may not matter, since House Republicans still appear to be in a sociopathic mood, and may simply reject anything that emerges from the upper chamber, no matter the consequences.
The anxiety levels are exceedingly high.
For what it’s worth, I remain fond of the “Congress does its job” plan. It goes like this: the government needs to be funded, and since the parties already agree on funding levels, Congress should do its job and reopen the government — neither side makes demands, neither side takes a hostage, neither side asks for concessions from the other, and neither side relies on extortion.
Similarly, the nation needs to pay its bills, and since the parties already agree that default would be catastrophic, Congress should do its job and extend the Treasury’s borrowing authority — neither side makes demands, neither side takes a hostage, neither side asks for concessions from the other, and neither side relies on extortion.
For reasons that only make sense to them, Republicans consider the “Congress does its job” plan to be wildly offensive and a proposal so outrageous, they’d rather hurt Americans on purpose than vote for it.
Tick tock.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 13, 2013
“GOP Fully Succumbs To Its Cultural Rage”: The Day The Mad Dogs Took Over The Republican Party
It was a head-spinning day in Washington, yesterday was, as the story seemed to change from hour to hour in terms of who was proposing or accepting or refusing what and who seemed up and who seemed down. But through it all, one constant did not change and doesn’t seem likely to change: The Republicans are wrecking themselves.
Indeed, historically so. This is one of those turning points in American political history, the kind you’ll tell your grandkids you were around to see: a once-respectable party that finally was eaten alive by the cultural rage it had so long used to its advantage but held in check in order to win elections. It was a long time coming and it’s a grand thing to watch, provided they don’t wreck the country along with themselves.
First, a quick recap. Thursday morning, John Boehner finally picked up on the signals the White House had been sending and offered a “clean” but short-term debt-limit increase. Since Boehner clearly knew that such a measure wouldn’t get votes from his loony-tunes caucus, he was aiming for something that might pass with a combination of Republican and Democratic votes. That was admirable. But there was a problem: He proposed to do nothing about the government shutdown until Nov. 22, and that was something most Democrats wouldn’t have gone for.
Still, the Obama administration signaled that it would play ball. This angered Harry Reid, who was at work trying to round up a few Republican votes for his own one-year increase of the debt limit. The afternoon skirmishing was intense, featuring a few Republican senators (Roy Blount, Susan Collins, and, most interestingly of all, John Cornyn) undercutting Boehner, saying they would like to alter his proposal to include a provision to allow the government to open back up. Then, late in the day, the Not-So-Magic Bus of 20 Republicans rolled up to the White House, and Boehner put… well, put something on the table to Obama, something involving a six-week increase in the debt limit but who knows what else, and Obama said: not yet.
It is true that Obama drew back from the signals his people had been sending for a couple of days. But it’s also true that we don’t know exactly what happened in that room and what was proposed. One of the various crazy things about the GOP position now is that we don’t even know what they’re negotiating for. “America’s pressing problems,” they kept saying. But what exactly are those? I guess now Obamacare isn’t one of them, since it’s off the table. Or maybe the medical-device tax is. So higher taxes on prostheses is the crisis that the country must solve yesterday?
They mean, of course, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. They want cuts. But they just want Obama to give in on those without giving him anything on revenues. This would be the normal way of what we call “negotiating.”
But the thing is this. People who have specific policy goals engage in negotiation. But these Republicans don’t have specific policy goals. They have what we might call emotional policy goals. They want to wipe Obamacare, and Obama’s desires on taxation, and the entire Obama record, really, from the face of the earth, like Pharoah wanted to wipe Moses’s name from the obelisks. They don’t even really know what they want to win, as Indiana GOP Congressman Martin Stutzman famously said last week. But if it humiliates Obama, it’s a win. Bad for the country? That doesn’t matter either. To them, by definition, if it’s bad for Obama, it’s good for the country. They actually think this.
And so, through a combination of a critical mass of anti-thought people in their caucus who won’t govern at all if it means seeing Obama come out OK, and a “leader” who can now plainly be called the weakest speaker since America became a country of consequence, the Republican Party has finally and fully succumbed to its cultural rage. It has used that rage mostly effectively for nigh on 50 years now, since Barry Goldwater. That rage has served it well on balance. It helped elect Nixon. It certainly helped elect Reagan, and even though it could be argued that once in office Reagan didn’t do that much to stoke it, he understood that he needed it to win, which is why he opened his 1980 campaign down in Mississippi, to say to his America that it was all right to resent black people, he understood you.
The rage kept the base galvanized. It kept the enemy, or enemies—liberal and the media, often one and the same—in the gun sights. But it could also be controlled, the way Reagan controlled it. And even Dubya controlled it. The rich didn’t really share the rage, or most of them. Even the Koch Brothers probably don’t, what with all the froufrou artsy-fartsy outfits up in New York they help sustain.
But all of them have used it. And they have tolerated it, the casual racism, the hatred of gay people, and the rest. They tolerated it because the booboisie voted the right way, and because they, the elites, remained in charge. Well, they’re not in charge now. The snarling dog they kept in a pen for decades has just escaped and bitten their hand off.
The Republicans still might pull it back together. They were also at a historic low after Nixon resigned. They won three of the next four elections. But that was just one man’s megalomania. This is the psychosis of one-quarter of the nation. That quarter is now leading the elites around by the nose. And the Red Sea just might swallow them all. It’s certainly what they deserve.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, October 11, 2013
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