If the Republicans lose the House, I don’t think there is any question that John Boehner will go down in history as the most inept Speaker in the history of the country. He’s so bad, in fact, that he should lose his gavel even if the Republicans retain control of the House. On some level it would be difficult for anyone to govern in these circumstances. He has a caucus that thinks they’re in office to carry out a revolution, but they’re really there to fund the government and make its agencies work better. If they had some help from the Senate and a friendly president, they could make some significant structural reforms, but, as it stands, all they can do is ruin our country’s credit rating and make themselves look ineffectual and foolish. So, I can sympathize with Boehner to a certain degree. But he isn’t just struggling to get things done. He’s totally failing. He holds closed-door meetings with his caucus where he implores them to come to their senses. And they simply refuse. A more self-confident Speaker would go cut deals with the Democrats and the president until his rowdy fringe base learned their lesson. But Boehner always caves when the cavemen grunt. So, now he’s going to pass the Senate’s version of the surface transportation bill because he could not find a way to get a bunch of right-wingers to support his own awful version of the bill. He’s reduced to rubber-stamping Harry Reid’s work because his own caucus doesn’t care about him or his needs or his begging and pleading.
Never has a house of Congress been more deserving of defeat. Who could have predicted?
And yet they’re gearing up for another government shutdown as we speak.
I thought he’d be gone by Christmas. Cantor has more patience than I gave him credit for.
(Actually, I expect Cantor to eventually find his own Hastert, so to speak, and to run things from the wings, just offstage.)
I expect Nancy Pelosi to be in charge again come January.
I would like to think so, but I’ll take the evil and the points. Evil doesn’t always triumph, but it usually covers the point spread.
I dislike Boehner intensely. I pegged him as a classic bully and a pathological liar before there ever was a Tea Party. Although you explain his predicament accurately, I wouldn’t even say I sympathize with him “to a certain degree”– I’m getting too much Schadenfreude for that.
And yet, fundamentally, I don’t attribute Boehner’s failure to ineptness. Granted he’s not the brightest bulb in the box, not a political genius or even a creative mind. But not being a genius is not equivalent to being inept. He knows the ropes. It’s just that, given his pedestrian leadership skills and basic cowardice, he’s in over his head in the present historic situation.
Someone might reply that ineptness is relative to the situation, and I suppose that is true, but it obscures an important point. The country, and especially the GOP, has drifted along on that kind of ineptness for decades, because under “business as usual” it was perfectly adequate for playing the game. You just had to know the ropes. We find ourselves in a different situation today, the game of politics isn’t working the way it’s supposed to. There isn’t one leading Republican capable of dealing with it. Boehner’s ineptness is no different than Romney’s. Five, ten years ago they were logical aspirants to the positions they now occupy. Dull as crap, like most of them, but perfectly fine. It’s the times that have changed.
As for the more vicious ones, the new breed like Cantor and his ilk, they’re full of piss and vinegar, but no less clueless. They will soon find themselves in the dustbin of history, wondering what happened to their “revolution”.
It’s still kind of stunning to me. What Booman describes is Politics 101. Politics is, among other things, about using one’s power to compromise. Boehner could, I suspect, pretty easily get 40-100 Democratic votes on any number of bills, and not need the right wing of his own party. Why he doesn’t do that is something of a mystery—even allowing for a certain level of cowardice and incompetence.
In this day and age, you become a RINO simply for admitting that Democrats are fellow human beings. Compromise without a gun to your head is out of the question.
You want him to tell 40% of his caucus to go suck it and stop taking their phone calls? Congress ain’t parliament.
Cowardice really would go along way to explain it. Again, you might ask the same question of Romney. But there may be something else as well. I wonder if it isn’t simply because Boehner — and Romney, and so many others — while discomfited by their methods, basically share their goals?
It would be terribly Godwinian of me to bring this up, so I won’t — but I can’t help wondering why so much of the non-Nazi German right supported Hitler?
http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Godwin%27s_Law%27s_Law
You may be right about Boehner, but so what? The problem with this kind of personalization is that it distracts from the important reality: that one of the nation’s 2 working political parties has gone off the deep end. The insane asylum is the insane asylum because its inmates are insane, not because their patient representative is so inept.
Rachel Maddow said it first…Orange Julius is LOUSY at his job
A more self-confident Speaker would go cut deals with the Democrats and the president until his rowdy fringe base learned their lesson.
I think I see the problem. Can these yayhoos learn a lesson.