“Boehner’s Pointless Leadership”: Wasting Everybody’s Time, He Has No One To Blame But Himself
House Speaker John Boehner needs to decide whether he wants to be remembered as an effective leader or a befuddled hack. So far, I’m afraid, it’s the latter.
Boehner’s performance last week was a series of comic pratfalls, culminating Friday in a stinging rebuke from the House Republicans he ostensibly leads. Boehner (R-Ohio) wasn’t asking for much: three weeks of funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which was hours from shutting down. He came away, humiliated, with just seven days’ worth of operating money for the agency charged with keeping Americans safe from terrorist attacks.
By any standard, the whole situation is beyond ridiculous. The government of the world’s leading military and economic power cannot be funded on a week-to-week basis. There’s no earthly excuse for this sorry spectacle — and no one to blame but Boehner.
As everyone knows, the speaker is being stymied by far-right conservatives who insist on using the Homeland Security funding measure as a vehicle to protest President Obama’s executive actions on immigration. And as everyone except those far-right conservatives knows, this is a self-defeating exercise in utter futility. The Senate won’t pass these immigration provisions. The president won’t sign them into law. For the House conservatives, this is not a winnable fight.
Boehner knows this. He also knows that the sprawling government department in charge of airport security, border protection and a host of other vital tasks has to be funded. And he knows that while failing to pass an appropriations bill would impact many Homeland Security functions, the agency charged with implementing Obama’s immigration orders — the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — gets about 95 percent of its funding from application fees, meaning it would be largely unaffected.
Finally, Boehner knows that a clean Homeland Security funding bill without the ridiculous immigration measures would surely pass the House. But he has refused to do his duty and bring such a bill to the floor.
We’re supposed to feel sorry for him. We’re supposed to boo-hoo about the fact that his majority refuses to fall in line — and might even take away his gavel if he dares to face reality. Mr. Speaker, would you please get over yourself?
When Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) held that job, she faced a similar impasse in 2007 over a funding bill for the Iraq War. Pelosi and most Democrats in Congress were, at that point, vocal opponents of the war. However, it was unthinkable to leave the troops without adequate funding. Democrats managed to push through both chambers an appropriations bill that specified a timetable for troop withdrawals. George W. Bush vetoed it.
So Pelosi swallowed hard and did what was necessary. She ended up bringing a funding bill — with no timetables — to the floor, and it was approved with the votes of Republicans and moderate Democrats. Pelosi voted against it, knowing it would pass.
“I am the speaker of the House,” she told reporters that day. “I have to take into account something broader than the majority of the majority of the Democratic caucus.”
When do we hear words like that from Boehner? Never.
He does eventually bow to reality, but not before a lot of pointless brinkmanship that wastes everybody’s time. There are those who argue that standing with the far right in these lost causes somehow strengthens Boehner’s hand as speaker. Really? To me, he seems to be demonstrating, again and again, that every time the children throw a tantrum, they’ll get to stay up all night watching television and eating candy.
Immigration is a matter of principle for conservatives. Everyone gets that. But guess what? It’s also a matter of principle for liberals and moderates. Whose principles triumph depends on arithmetic: Who has the votes to pass a bill or override a veto? In this case, the winner is Obama.
What amazes me is that Boehner had the perfect opportunity to declare victory and get the Homeland Security funding mess behind him. Last month, a federal judge in Texas temporarily blocked Obama’s executive actions on immigration. I think it’s likely that the judge’s order will eventually be reversed. But in the meantime, Boehner could have said, “See, our view about presidential overreach has been vindicated. Now we’ll let the courts take it from here.”
But no. Instead, Boehner knowingly led House Republicans up a blind alley.
One major theme for the Democratic presidential nominee next year, obviously, will be sharp criticism of the GOP-controlled Congress. At this rate, the Republican nominee will be tempted to join in.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 2, 2015
“Senators’ Letter To Iran Leader Sets Dangerous Precedent”: Nadir For A Republican Party Deformed By An Aging And Bigoted Base
Since his inauguration in 2009, President Obama’s harshest critics — all Republicans — have grown increasingly disdainful, resentful, even hateful. The most bellicose among them question his legitimacy, doubt his birth certificate and impugn his patriotism. And, all the while, leading Republican politicians have pandered to those ugly impulses.
This week, that disrespect for Obama and his presidency reached a new low when 47 Republican senators wrote a letter to Iranian leaders suggesting that any deal with him will be overturned once he leaves office. According to experts, that action is without precedent in American history. And it will go down, perhaps, as the nadir for a Republican Party already deformed by an aging and bigoted base.
President Obama’s foreign policy team is attempting to negotiate an agreement wherein Iran gives up its ambition of becoming a nuclear state. The negotiations may fail, but it’s certainly worth a try.
But GOP hardliners are opposed to even trying to negotiate an agreement. Additionally, they’d welcome any opportunity to try to embarrass Obama on the international stage.
Speaker John Boehner had already crossed all sorts of boundaries when he invited Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress — and didn’t bother to inform the president. Now, Boehner’s fellow partisans in the Senate have written a letter, dripping with condescension toward the Iranians, which suggests that the next president would likely overturn any agreement that Obama makes. (Since they don’t know who’ll be in the Oval Office in 2017, they can hardly make that prediction.)
This is outrageous — and a clear violation of the Logan Act, passed in 1799. It says that any unauthorized citizen “who directly or indirectly … carries on any correspondence with any foreign government … with intent to influence the conduct of that government … or to defeat the measures of the United States” may be imprisoned. In other words, the founders of the republic recognized the danger in allowing individual citizens to conduct their own ad hoc foreign policy.
Does Obama’s race have something to do with this level of hostility and disrespect for his office? If I may use a favorite phrase of Sarah Palin, one of the president’s most reliable haters, “You betcha!” There is a reliable, if aging, constituency in the GOP that simply cannot stomach a black president.
Sure, Republicans were hostile and unhinged when Bill Clinton was president. Some among them claimed he was tied to Arkansas drug dealers. Some insisted that his wife, Hillary, had killed Vince Foster, a White House aide who committed suicide. A GOP-led Congress impeached Clinton.
And, yes, there have long been bitter disagreements over foreign policy, going back to the beginning of the republic. (That helps to explain the passage of the Logan Act.) But politics generally stopped, as the cliche goes, “at the water’s edge.”
Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a longtime Congress-watcher, told Politico that this letter plows new ground in partisanship. “What’s unusual about this — but completely in tune with what’s happened in Washington in recent years — is the contempt with which it treats the president,” he said.
If those 47 Republican senators were engaged in an honest effort to forestall a nuclear Iran, they would never have written such a letter. Senator Bob Corker (R-TN), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, pointedly didn’t sign the letter because, he said, he needed to reach across the aisle in order to strengthen the agreement. (Seven GOP senators did not sign it.)
Earlier, several Democratic senators had indicated a willingness to work with Republicans to pass legislation that would give Congress a vote on any accord with Iran. Now, those Democrats are fuming over the disrespect shown Obama and are unlikely to go along with any GOP legislation.
But that’s not the greatest damage done by this gesture of contempt for Obama. Since Republicans have shown themselves willing to threaten the nation’s credibility on the world stage in order to embarrass a sitting president, they’ve set a precedent. Those are the new rules of the game, and they’re likely to be followed by Democrats and Republicans in the future — no matter who’s in the Oval Office.
That’s bad news.
By: Cynthia Tucker, Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2007; The National Memo, March 14, 2015
“The Option Behind Door #3”: McCain, Rand Paul Roll Out New Excuses For Sabotage Letter
After putting his signature on the Senate Republicans’ infamous sabotage letter, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) started hedging Tuesday night, saying the GOP’s missive to Iranian leaders may not have been “the best way” for his party to achieve its goals.
By late yesterday, the longtime senator offered an entirely new rationale.
Some Republican senators admitted Wednesday they were caught off guard by the backlash to a letter warning Iranian leaders against a nuclear agreement with President Barack Obama. And Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Republicans – many of whom blessed the missive during a brisk signing session at a Senate lunch a week ago, as senators prepared to flee a Washington snowstorm – should have given it closer consideration.
“It was kind of a very rapid process. Everybody was looking forward to getting out of town because of the snowstorm,” McCain said.
McCain went on to tell Politico that he and his colleagues “probably should have had more discussion” about the document, “given the blowback that there is.”
Note, this appears to be the third excuse Republicans have come up with for the letter intended to derail American foreign policy. The first rationale was that the 47 GOP senators were kidding, and this was all an attempt at being “cheeky.” The second was that Republicans tried to undermine international nuclear talks, but this is all President Obama’s fault.
And here’s John McCain rolling out the option behind Door #3: Republicans were concerned about snow, so they rushed.
Oddly enough, that’s probably slightly better than the rationale Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) came up with.
On NBC’s “Today” show yesterday morning, the Kentucky Republican told Matt Lauer that he signed on to the sabotage letter because he wanted to “strengthen the president’s hand.”
If there’s a way to see this as a coherent argument, I can’t think of it. Rand Paul thought it would strengthen Obama’s hand at the negotiating table if Republicans told Iranian officials not to trust or cooperate with Obama?
In the larger context, let’s not forget that Republicans tend to consider foreign policy and national security as their signature issues, and polls, reality notwithstanding, generally show Americans trust the GOP more on matters of international affairs. Credibility on foreign policy is generally seen as a birthright throughout the Republican Party.
And yet, consider what we’re seeing from Republican senators right now and the degree to which it’s amateur hour within the GOP.
At a certain level, the fact that so many in the GOP are scrambling to address the scandal they created is itself a heartening sign. All things considered, it’s better to hear Republicans making bizarre excuses than to hear then boast about how proud they are of their sabotage letter. Senators like McCain and Paul aren’t defending the letter on the merits so much as they’re looking for excuses to rationalize their participation in a dangerous stunt.
But I’m nevertheless reminded of Fred Kaplan’s assessment from earlier this week: “It is a useful thing when a political party reveals itself as utterly unsuited for national leadership.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 12, 2015
“The Similarities Are Pretty Uncanny”: Was Walker’s Secret E-mail System Shadier Than Clinton’s?
Every national politician in the country is going to be peppered with questions about what they think of Hillary Clinton’s e-mail controversy. This morning is Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s turn. Walker didn’t hold back–he told the Weekly Standard’s John McCormack:
“It’s a logical assumption that the secretary of state is talking about highly confidential classified information. How can she ensure that that information wasn’t compromised. I think that’s the bigger issue—is the audacity to think that someone would put their personal interest above classified, confidential, highly sensitive information that’s not only important to her but to the United States of America. I think is an outrage that Democrats as well as Republicans should be concerned about.”
As McCormack notes, Walker’s attack shows quite a bit of chutzpah, because he himself got caught running a secret e-mail network for his inner circle of advisers when he was Milwaukee County executive. In their illuminating book, More Than They Bargained For: Scott Walker, Unions, and the Fight for Wisconsin, Jason Stein and Patrick Marley, reporters for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, provide the details.
In May 2010, the Walker administration asked a constituent services coordinator named Darlene Wink to resign, after a Journal Sentinel columnist caught her posting online political comments supporting Walker while she was supposed to be working on the taxpayers’ dime. As Stein and Marley write,
When the Wink story broke, Walker’s deputy chief of staff, Kelly Rindfleisch, quickly dismantled a private Internet router set up in her office, which was twenty-five feet away from Walker’s. During her few months on the job, she had been using the secret router and a laptop—both separate from the regular county system—to trade electronic messages with Walker’s campaign staff and raise money for state Representative Brett Davis, a GOP candidate for lieutenant governor. With attention suddenly on Wink, who had also used the router, Rindfleisch stuffed the device into a credenza in her office. “I took the wireless down,” she wrote in an e-mail to Tim Russell, who had served as Walker’s deputy chief of staff before Rindfleisch. Russell, then working as Walker’s housing director, had initially set up the router for Wink and Rindfleisch to use, prosecutors alleged.
Walker e-mailed Russell that night, telling him he had talked to Wink and felt bad about what had happened. “We cannot afford another story like this one,” Walker wrote to Russell. “No one can give them any reason to do another story. That means no laptops, no websites, no time away during the work day, etc.”
As Walker emphasizes to McCormack, prosecutors never charged him with any wrongdoing, though two of his aides were convicted of doing political work while on the county payroll. And Walker obviously wasn’t privy to sensitive classified information, as Clinton was. Still, the similarities are pretty uncanny, and Walker’s willingness to attack Clinton anyway is a good illustration of his aggressive political style.
By: Joshua Green, Bloombery Politics, March 9, 2015
“Slavishly Beholden To A Small, Vocal Wing Of The Party”: Can John Boehner’s Catastrophic Speakership Get Any Worse?
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is not very good at his job. Or maybe he just hates the Republican Party. It’s impossible to tell anymore.
On Tuesday, Boehner finally threw in the towel on his foolhardy attempt to block President Obama’s immigration order via a fight over Homeland Security funding. It was a doomed attempt from the start, premised as it was on the belief that Democrats would magically give in to his demands. In the end, Boehner admitted a DHS shutdown was “simply not an option” and accepted the Senate’s bipartisan bill to fully fund DHS.
So what did Boehner accomplish from all this? Aside from placating his caucus’ insatiable right flank for a few months, nothing.
The DHS funding gambit was an exercise in cynicism from the start, and a transparent one at that. Boehner insisted for weeks that blame for a DHS shutdown should lie with Senate Democrats. But polls showed that a significant majority of Americans would have blamed Republicans. Even Fox News didn’t buy it.
By picking the losing fight anyway, Boehner once again painted his party as obstinate and clueless, and himself as slavishly beholden to a small, vocal wing of the party. It could have been worse. Had Boehner really allowed a DHS shutdown to occur — and weeks ago he said he was “certainly” willing to let that happen — it would have been a PR disaster for the party. Terrorism in the Middle East and Europe have dominated headlines for months, and a Homeland Security shutdown would have given Democrats a golden opportunity to assail Republicans for leaving America vulnerable.
Speaking of PR disasters, Tuesday also saw another calamity of Boehner’s creation, when Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu delivered a divisive speech to Congress blasting the Obama administration’s ongoing nuclear negotiations with Iran. The speech was condemned as a partisan stunt, in large part because Boehner invited Netanyahu without first informing the White House. Many Democrats refused to attend, and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who did go, came away calling it an “insult to the intelligence of the United States.”
Tuesday was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day for Boehner, but it was only the latest dismal chapter in his disastrous speakership.
Since grabbing the Speaker’s gavel, Boehner has been unable to figure out how to get around his party’s right wing. In every battle, Boehner must weigh the demands of an obstreperous cadre that considers “compromise” a four-letter word against a course of rational governance. And when the hardliners’ demands win out, Boehner forges ahead with no game plan to extricate his party from disaster. The fiscal cliff, the debt ceiling standoff, the government shutdown, the DHS fight, and on and on — all are products of Boehner’s floundering political machinations.
At times, Boehner’s stumbles have blown up in epic fashion. On multiple occasions, he canceled votes at the last minute when it became clear he lacked the votes to avoid humiliating revolts from his own caucus. In his race to please the base, he couldn’t even sue Obama properly, as two law firms quit his long-promised litigation over the Affordable Care Act.
Boehner’s bumbling makes sense to a point. In limp fits of self-preservation, he kowtows to the right before making a show of grudgingly dealing with Democrats. This would be perfectly understandable if not for the fact that Boehner keeps harming his own party in the process. The government shutdown torpedoed the GOP’s image. More petulant brinksmanship will only bring more of the same.
And to what end? Either Boehner truly believes he can stare Democrats into submission — and now that he’s formed a pattern of caving in fight after fight, there’s no reason why Dems would ever crack in the future — or he’s doing this all to save his own skin. Either he’s a horrible tactician, or a self-interested leader willing to save himself at his party’s expense.
In other words: Boehner is either terrible at his job, or he hates the GOP.
By: Jon Terbush, The Week, March 9, 2015
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