Why Conservative Republicans Keep Rebelling Against John Boehner
The House GOP’s initial decision to reject the extension of the payroll tax cut was a bone-headed move. Indeed, it was impressively masochistic in the way it brazenly violated not only public opinion, but also the will of Republicans in the Senate, the vast majority of whom voted for the bill. But while Congressional Republicans were violating all manner of political common sense, that’s not to say that they weren’t following any sort of political logic at all. It just happens to be a logic of a particularly twisted sort.
One of the dominant factors motivating the decisions of rank-and-file right-wing House Republicans—and not just freshmen—is their lack of trust in Speaker John Boehner. They like him, but they just don’t believe he’s a dependable defender of their interests and beliefs. Those suspicions aren’t entirely groundless. Yes, Boehner has gone out of his way to cultivate the most conservative members of his caucus—every time he has hit an impasse, his first move is to the right, to accommodate them, not to the middle to replace some of them with willing Democrats. But the Speaker has also shown a penchant for compromise that right-wing House members can’t abide.
The first negotiation he conducted with President Obama was over the fiscal 2011 Continuing Resolution, which he billed as a sweeping reduction in spending with nearly $40 billion cut from the year’s collective appropriations. But it turned out in the cold light of day to be something else entirely, with only a fraction of a fraction of the cuts occurring in the remainder of that fiscal year. Next came the Speaker’s negotiations with Obama over a “grand bargain” on deficit reduction as the debt limit approached. No matter that Boehner extracted a range of concessions from the president, including cuts in discretionary spending and on Medicare—the package included a tax increase which conservative Congressmen deemed unacceptable. So when the Speaker appeared to again sign onto a deal laden with compromise—this time over the payroll tax cut that extended it for only two months, while including the main concession conservatives had demanded, action on the Keystone pipeline—those conservatives noisily rebelled.
Boehner’s trust gap is exacerbated by the fact that the rest of the GOP House leadership has been undermining his credibility as a negotiator. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor noisily dropped out of the debt limit negotiations the minute the tax issue was raised, saying it was above his pay grade and had to be carried out by the Speaker and the President—only to immediately disavow the agreement that Boehner and Obama reached. On the payroll tax negotiation, Boehner had no choice but to cave to aggrieved Tea Party members, lest he risk again having Cantor abandon him, leaving him exposed to right-wing attacks.
Ultimately, the root of the problem may lie in the stark lessons that the Republicans elected to Congress in 2010 seem to have drawn from an earlier cohort of conservative Congressmen—those that Newt Gingrich lead into the majority in 1994. Today’s Tea Partiers recognize that they share a similar governing philosophy with their forebears, but they believe almost uniformly that the Gingrichites sold out too quickly, blinking unnecessarily when the political heat got turned up. The conclusion many have drawn is that Gingrich made a huge mistake when he gave in after the disastrous government shutdown at the end of 1995—if Republicans had held out, lashed themselves to the collective mast and weathered the storm of public disapproval, Clinton would have caved and they would have succeeded at rolling back the welfare state.
There is, of course, zero evidence for this thesis, but that doesn’t matter. Some of this group will come back to DC in January believing that Boehner and sellouts like Mitch McConnell and John McCain have just repeated the error of 1995. That will make John Boehner’s task even more difficult as he moves to negotiate a new deal on the year-long extension of the payroll tax cut, and will compound his difficulties as he considers other key decisions, including the looming expiration of the Bush tax cuts. For Boehner, the nightmare will not only continue, but deepen.
By: Norman Ornstein, Roll Call December 24, 2011
The GOP’s Slip Is Showing
Finally. After a year of artful camouflage and concealment, Republicans let us glimpse the rift between establishment pragmatists and Tea Party ideologues. There may be hope for the republic after all.
Forty Republican senators, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), joined Democrats in voting for compromise legislation providing a two-month extension of unemployment benefits and the payroll tax cut. The bill passed 89 to 10, the kind of margin usually reserved for ceremonial resolutions in favor of motherhood. Senators clearly were confident that House approval would quickly follow.
But it didn’t, because Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) couldn’t get his Tea Party freshmen to go along. The result was a kind of intramural sniping among Republicans that we haven’t seen in years.
“It angers me that House Republicans would rather continue playing politics than find solutions,” said Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts.
The stalemate “is harming the Republican Party,” said Sen. John McCain of Arizona.
“Are Republicans getting killed now in public opinion? There’s no question,” said Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, who urged House Republicans to just “get it over with.”
But Boehner hung tough, not out of principle but because he had no palatable choice. He didn’t dare bring the Senate bill to the floor for a vote, fearing that non-Tea Party members of the GOP caucus might defect. So he did nothing for four long days — and let the Republican Party be portrayed as so out-to-lunch that it would blithely raise taxes on 160 million Americans. The week before Christmas. As we roll into an election year.
The thing is, this portrayal is quite accurate, at least as it pertains to the Tea Party faction. More sensible Republicans have been so eager to take advantage of the Tea Party’s energy and emotion that they have essentially allowed the inmates to run the asylum. You will recall that it was the GOP, led by the Tea Party types, that threatened to send the Treasury into default last summer rather than approve a routine and necessary increase in the debt ceiling.
In the current imbroglio, nothing resembling a principle was involved. Boehner said that House Republicans wanted to extend the payroll tax cut for an entire year, rather than just two months. But even if you accept his claim at face value, it ignores the fact that the two-month deal was approved by the Senate for one reason only: to allow time for negotiation of a one-year extension.
In other words, the measure that House Republicans were so reluctant to pass, or even vote on, was crafted as a step toward the specific outcome that House Republicans claimed was their goal.
Boehner’s calls for compromise were absurd. The Senate bill was itself a bipartisan compromise, reached after tough bargaining and many concessions. Democrats abandoned their proposal for an income tax surcharge on those earning more than $1 million a year. President Obama accepted a rider forcing him to make a decision on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline project before the November election. Republicans had already won the negotiation — until zealots in the House threatened to scuttle the whole thing.
McConnell maintained a steely silence until Thursday, then built a ladder for Boehner to climb down. He proposed that the House promptly enact a “short-term” extension of the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance while working on a one-year measure. Within hours, the House caved.
This glimpse of honest debate among Republicans won’t last long, I predict. They’ll try their best to resume the practice of absolute anti-Obama unity, which has worked quite well for them. But no one can erase what voters have seen this week, and it wasn’t pretty.
There are only two possible reasons for House Republicans to behave the way they did. Maybe they are so blinded by ideology that they no longer care about the impact their actions might have on struggling American families. Or maybe their only guiding principle is that anything Obama supports, they oppose.
The week’s events offer a lesson for Obama, too. One reason for all the Republican angst was that public opinion has become more sensitive to issues of economic justice. This may be partly due to the Occupy protests. But I’m convinced that Obama’s fiery barnstorming in favor of his American Jobs Act has played a big role. People are hearing his message.
The president has been on the offensive. It’s no coincidence that, for the first time in quite a while, Republicans are backing up.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post,December 22, 2011
“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
The GOP’s Payroll Tax Fiasco: Even The WSJ Is Ticked Off With Their Own Minions
Cry Me A River….
GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell famously said a year ago that his main task in the 112th Congress was to make sure that President Obama would not be re-elected. Given how he and House Speaker John Boehner have handled the payroll tax debate, we wonder if they might end up re-electing the President before the 2012 campaign even begins in earnest.
The GOP leaders have somehow managed the remarkable feat of being blamed for opposing a one-year extension of a tax holiday that they are surely going to pass. This is no easy double play.
Republicans have also achieved the small miracle of letting Mr. Obama position himself as an election-year tax cutter, although he’s spent most of his Presidency promoting tax increases and he would hit the economy with one of the largest tax increases ever in 2013. This should be impossible.
House Republicans yesterday voted down the Senate’s two-month extension of the two-percentage-point payroll tax holiday to 4.2% from 6.2%. They say the short extension makes no economic sense, but then neither does a one-year extension. No employer is going to hire a worker based on such a small and temporary decrease in employment costs, as this year’s tax holiday has demonstrated. The entire exercise is political, but Republicans have thoroughly botched the politics.
Their first mistake was adopting the President’s language that he is proposing a tax cut rather than calling it a temporary tax holiday. People will understand the difference—and discount the benefit.
Republicans also failed to put together a unified House and Senate strategy. The House passed a one-year extension last week that included spending cuts to offset the $120 billion or so in lost revenue, such as a one-year freeze on raises for federal employees. Then Mr. McConnell agreed with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on the two-month extension financed by higher fees on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (meaning on mortgage borrowers), among other things. It passed with 89 votes and all but seven Republicans.
Senate Republicans say Mr. Boehner had signed off on the two-month extension, but House Members revolted over the weekend and so the Speaker flipped within 24 hours. Mr. Boehner is now demanding that Mr. Reid name conferees for a House-Senate conference on the payroll tax bills. But Mr. Reid and the White House are having too much fun blaming Republicans for “raising taxes on the middle class” as of January 1. Don’t be surprised if they stretch this out to the State of the Union, when Mr. Obama will have a national audience to capture the tax issue.
If Republicans didn’t want to extend the payroll tax cut on the merits, then they should have put together a strategy and the arguments for defeating it and explained why. But if they knew they would eventually pass it, as most of them surely believed, then they had one of two choices. Either pass it quickly and at least take some political credit for it. Or agree on a strategy to get something in return for passing it, which would mean focusing on a couple of popular policies that would put Mr. Obama and Democrats on the political spot. They finally did that last week by attaching a provision that requires Mr. Obama to make a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline within 60 days, and the President grumbled but has agreed to sign it.
But now Republicans are drowning out that victory in the sounds of their circular firing squad. Already four GOP Senators have rejected the House position, and the political rout will only get worse.
One reason for the revolt of House backbenchers is the accumulated frustration over a year of political disappointment. Their high point was the Paul Ryan budget in the spring that set the terms of debate and forced Mr. Obama to adopt at least the rhetoric of budget reform and spending cuts.
But then Messrs. Boehner and McConnell were gulled into going behind closed doors with the President, who dragged out negotiations and later emerged to sandbag them with his blame-the-GOP and soak-the-rich re-election strategy. Any difference between the parties on taxes and spending has been blurred in the interim.
After a year of the tea party House, Mr. Obama and Senate Democrats have had to make no major policy concessions beyond extending the Bush tax rates for two years. Mr. Obama is in a stronger re-election position today than he was a year ago, and the chances of Mr. McConnell becoming Majority Leader in 2013 are declining.
By: Editorial, The Wall Street Journal, December 21, 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
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 