“Apocryphal Scene”: Braveheart Republicans? Or False-Hearted?
House Republicans, on the eve of Tuesday’s vote denying tax relief to 160 million Americans, huddled in a conference room in the Capitol basement for more than two hours.
Were they puzzling over how to explain to constituents why they were effectively ordering a tax increase on the middle class after fighting for much larger tax breaks for the wealthy? Were they justifying the killing of a bipartisan compromise that had the support of all but eight Senate Republicans and the tacit approval of House Speaker John Boehner?
Nope. Turns out they were talking Monday night about their favorite scenes from “Braveheart.” About 10 House Republicans went to the microphones to share their memories of the Mel Gibson film, Republican sources told my Post colleagues Paul Kane and Rosalind Helderman.
One member spoke about the apocryphal scene in which the 13th-century Scottish rebel William Wallace ordered his troops to moon the English. Another member recounted the scene in which Wallace commanded the rebels to hold their positions before raising their spears against the charging English cavalry.
This inspired the assembled lawmakers to chant: “Hold! Hold! Hold! Hold!”
Finally, toward the end of the meeting, Rep. Rob Bishop (Utah) bravely rose to tell his colleagues that he hated the film. He introduced a motion that all references to “Braveheart” be banned. His colleagues laughed and heckled. The motion was not adopted.
But Bishop was right: “Braveheart” is a conspicuously poor choice for the House GOP.
For one thing, the Republicans are, if anything, in a reverse-“Braveheart” position: In this fight, they are the nobles putting down the overtaxed peasants. For another, the Scots they are emulating were defeated and slaughtered, and Wallace was captured (possibly betrayed by his own side), then drawn and quartered.
That the House Republicans would embrace a doomed cause and its martyred leader gets at their main problem in the majority: They’d rather make a point than govern the country. And in this case, it’s not entirely clear what point they’re trying to make.
Is it making sure the tax cut is paid for? For the last decade, Republicans approved billions of dollars in tax cuts, mostly for the rich, without paying for them.
Is it because they want the tax-cut extension to be for a year rather than just two months, as the Senate approved? Then why did so many Republicans originally criticize any tax-cut extension?
In killing the Senate compromise, which passed 89 to 10, with 39 Republican votes, the House GOP resorted to a variant of the “deem and pass” resolution they derided when Democrats proposed it during the health-care fight. Reneging on their pledge to hold a vote on the Senate compromise, Braveheart Republican leaders ordered up a resolution that rejected the Senate measure without a direct vote.
Caucus chairman Jeb Hensarling (Tex.), demanding a conference between the House and Senate to resolve differences, instructed his colleagues to “go and watch ‘Schoolhouse Rock’ ” to see how “things are settled between the House and Senate.” But this ignored the fact that Senate Democrats had already compromised with Senate Republicans; Hensarling was asking them to compromise on their compromise.
House Democrats didn’t exactly distinguish themselves, either. Rep. Jim McGovern (Mass.) said Republicans had imposed “martial law.” Rep. Jim McDermott (Wash.) brought a Christmas stocking and lump of coal to the floor. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) recalled a Woody Allen joke (“the food at this place is really terrible . . . and such small portions”) that she attributed to Yogi Berra.
But that didn’t hold a torch to the Republicans’ “Braveheart” performance. It wasn’t the first congressional invocation of the film (Dick Gephardt once showed up to a meeting in William Wallace attire when he was House Democratic leader), but until now it hasn’t been embraced quite so earnestly.
“Look, this is a ‘Braveheart’ moment,” Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.) said on Fox News on Monday, describing the House Republicans’ instructions to Boehner. “You, Mr. Speaker, are our William Wallace. Let’s rush to the fight.”
Apparently plenty of others felt the same way. Staffers emerged from the GOP caucus meeting at 6:45 p.m. Monday to say the meeting would break up in five minutes. But the Republicans’ impromptu movie night didn’t end until 8:17 p.m., when Boehner, face as orange as Mel Gibson’s was blue, marched forth with his Bravehearts in a cloud of cigarette smoke toward their inevitable tragedy.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 21, 2011
On Tap: “Boehner The Barkeep” And The Radical Republican Winterfest
House Speaker John Boehner gave a spirited reply when asked recently about whether his party’s resistance to middle-class tax cuts risked making Republicans appear to be lackeys of the rich.
“I’ve got 11 brothers and sisters on every rung of the economic ladder, all right?” Boehner said. “My dad owned a bar. I know what’s going on out in America.”
So Boehner has his finger on the American pulse because his deceased father owned a saloon? What strange brew have they been pouring in the speaker’s office?
Whatever advice Earl Boehner has been giving his son from the grave, it doesn’t appear to be working. On Monday, the bar owner’s son aligned himself with House conservatives in opposition to a broadly bipartisan plan to extend a payroll tax cut for 160 million Americans.
This new position, essentially reversing the one Boehner voiced a mere three days earlier, proves anew that the old-school speaker is less a leader of his caucus than a servant of his radical backbenchers. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say he’s their barkeep.
Three times at a news conference on Friday, Boehner was asked whether he could support a two-month extension of the payroll tax cut, as Senate Democrats and Republicans were planning. Three times, Boehner declined to state an objection to the two-month extension (he objected to a different part of the agreement, about an oil pipeline, which the senators subsequently changed to his liking).
“I just gave you an answer. How much clearer can I be?” Boehner said, refusing to take issue with the two-month extension.
And so senators passed the extension, 89 to 10. Tea Party heroes Pat Toomey and Marco Rubio voted for the compromise. The fiercest budget cutter of them all, Sen. Tom Coburn, voted for it. Republican lions such as John Cornyn, Jon Kyl and Mitch McConnell voted for it. Only seven Republicans voted “no.”
McConnell, the Senate Republican leader who negotiated the compromise, kept Boehner informed at every step — and was confident enough in Boehner’s acquiescence that his office sent out a notice saying there would be no more legislative business in the Senate until 2 p.m. on Jan. 23. But Boehner’s backbenchers — particularly the Tea Party freshmen — had other ideas, and, in a Saturday teleconference, made clear to Boehner that he would have to abandon the compromise.
The House Republican freshmen have become a bit tipsy with power, and freshman Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.) on Tuesday boasted at a news conference that his class is “performing more like sophomores now than freshmen.” Actually, their performance is more sophomoric than anything, but they’ve been able to deliver a string of insults to Boehner, most notably the July revolt that forced the speaker to pull his debt-limit plan from the floor. If Boehner needs any more evidence he’s out of style in his party, he can ponder the rise in the presidential race of Newt Gingrich, the man Boehner tried to depose from the speakership 15 years ago, losing his leadership position in the process.
On Tuesday, Boehner had the unpleasant task of going before the cameras to explain why his House Republicans, after championing tax cuts for millionaires, would be voting against a tax cut for ordinary Americans.
“You know, Americans are tired of, uh, Washington’s short-term fixes and gimmicks,” Boehner began. Behind him in the hallway outside his office, four American flags provided patriotic cover for the reversal. He complained that “the Senate Democratic leaders passed a two-month extension” — omitting mention that Senate Republicans, with Boehner’s knowledge and tacit support, had agreed.
So rather than pass a two-month extension, he’s willing to have the tax cuts lapse entirely when they expire at year end?
“I don’t believe the differences between the House and Senate are that great,” Boehner said, by way of reassurance. But this only confirmed that his side was making a big stink over nothing.
Why didn’t he raise warnings earlier about the two-month extension? “Uh, we expressed our reservations about what the Senate was doing,” he said.
What did he make of the fact that 90 percent of the Senate supported the compromise? Boehner, in reply, demanded to know why “we always have to go to the lowest common denominator” — which is exactly what he had done in letting his backbenchers lead him.
The speaker denied the obvious truth that he had encouraged the compromise before opposing it. He licked his lips, gave a “thanks, everybody” and disappeared.
The sophomoric freshmen must have needed their barkeep to serve them another round.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 19, 2011
“King Newt”: Why Not Just Call For Martial Law And Be Done With It?
There has been no shortage of wacky ideas from the Republican candidates, but Newt Gingrich’s attacks on the judiciary are truly far out on the lunatic fringe of right-wing politics.
At first he confined himself to merely railing against the independence of the judiciary, without which due process simply cannot exist. Recently, he’s started talking about arresting judges who issue rulings he doesn’t like. Intimidating judges used to be a criminal offense. Now it’s a campaign plank and a Sunday morning sound bite.
On the CBS News program “Face the Nation” yesterday, Mr. Gingrich said Congress should compel judges to testify about any decision that annoys the majority party on Capitol Hill. He said he would send U.S. Marshals to arrest them if they did not willingly come to testify. (Marshals, for what it’s worth, are charged with protecting federal judges, who get hundreds of death threats a year.) Mr. Gingrich is not the first politician to say shockingly inappropriate things about federal judges. In 2005, Tom DeLay, who was the Republican House Majority Leader, threatened retribution against the judges who ruled against his wishes in the Terri Schiavo case.
And that same year, John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, attributed episodes of courthouse violence to distress over judges who make “political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public.” This was shortly after a career criminal tried to shoot his way out of an Atlanta trial, killing the judge in the process. And after a deranged man murdered a Chicago judge’s mother and husband because the judge had dismissed his lawsuit.
But Mr. Gingrich takes the attack on the judiciary farther than any other national figure I’ve heard, at least since the Jim Crow days. He’s actually gone so far as to suggest Congress impeach uncooperative judges. Michael Mukasey, the former attorney general who served under George W. Bush, called Mr. Gingrich proposals “dangerous, ridiculous, totally irresponsible, outrageous, off the wall.”
Dangerous and irresponsible is right, for many reasons—but I’ll just give you two. One is that Mr. Gingrich’s proposal opens the door to Congress firing and hiring judges each time power changes hands between the political parties. Judges have lifetime terms to protect them from exactly this kind of pressure. Second, it would effectively eliminate the role of the Supreme Court as the ultimate arbiter of constitutionality.
Mr. Gingrich has referred several times to Thomas Jefferson’s elimination of federal judgeships at the turn of the 19th century. He presents that as an uncontroversial move, when in fact it was part of a highly partisan attempt to rescind his predecessor’s judicial appointments. He’s also fond of saying that the Supreme Court’s power of judicial review, established during Jefferson’s presidency with the seminal case Marbury v. Madison, has been “grossly overstated.”
That statement alone should turnoff primary voters. Marbury v. Madison was a founding decision for a fledgling democracy that had shed its blood to get away from a law that was subject to the will and whim of a political figure—the King of England.
By: Andrew Rosenthal, The New York Times, December 19,2011
Is The Republican Coalition Against Gingrich Insurmountable?
In his most recent appearance on Hugh Hewitt’s talk radio show, New Yorker staff writer Ryan Lizza talked about the Republican establishment’s disdain for Newt Gingrich — and Hewitt pointed out that the coalition against the former House Speaker’s candidacy goes well beyond them.
Here’s the transcript:
LIZZA: one thing about Gingrich that has just sort of shocked me, and maybe I should have realized this, but the level of hostility towards this guy from frankly the Washington Republican establishment, is off the charts. I’ve been, I don’t get out much. I have two small kids. But I’ve been going to a few holiday parties here in D.C., and all the conversations, of course, are about Gingrich. And I mean, there are Republicans in this town who are saying that they would vote for Obama before they would vote for Newt Gingrich in a general election.
HEWITT: Yeah.
LIZZA: And so this may be something you can help me understand. There’s a major mismatch here between, for lack of better words, the Republican establishment and the people who are telling pollsters that they like Newt better than Romney.
HEWITT: What’s interesting, Ryan, I think there are two camps. They’re, you know, Ann Coulter and Mark Steyn, neither of whom fit the term Washington insider…
LIZZA: Right, right.
HEWITT: Both has lacerated Newt Gingrich on ideas. Then, there is that great silence from everyone who served with him in Congress. I guess John Boehner broke that silence with Mike Allen today. I haven’t read it, yet. I was told by Chris Cillizza that Boehner damned with faint praise today. So there is a Beltway hostility, but there is a public intellectual hostility that I think goes to his ideas, which are not, in the final analysis, conservative.
LIZZA: And a lot of conservative intellectuals don’t respect him, and think he’s been all over the place, and he latches onto whatever the hot, new thing is, and then drops it two seconds later, and doesn’t have an attention span.
It is difficult to imagine Gingrich winning the GOP nomination with a coalition this diverse arrayed against him. And even less so when he’s widely thought to be the weaker general election candidate.
As Lizza put it later in the same conversation:
You can’t find a Democrat in Washington who thinks that Newt Gingrich would be a better candidate, would be more likely to beat Obama than Romney. I mean, it’s just, I’ve searched for these people. I’ve searched for the counter argument here, the sort of person who’s thinking outside the box and says oh, wait a second, actually Gingrich would be tougher to beat.
You can’t find that person.
Also hard to find: prominent champions of the proposition that Gingrich should be president. Absent that, I don’t think he can win.
By: Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, December 19, 2011
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