It’s interesting to read about last night’s debacle from a Republican point of view. It doesn’t seem like there was any attempted coup or backstabbing from Boehner’s leadership team. It doesn’t even look like there was any concerted plan by Tea Partiers to act as a group. It looks more like too many members wanted Plan B to pass, but without their vote. Everyone appeared stunned that Boehner didn’t have the votes and that he was just pulling the bill and sending everyone home for the holidays. For a group that acts with a hive-mind mentality, there was no central control of their behavior. The only thing that seemed in control was raw political fear. Bush and Cheney seemed to be able to get their congressional members to do their bidding even when it conflicted with party orthodoxy. Those days are over.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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I live in McMorris Rogers district. When I first came over here, the hotel I stayed in only had 3 tv channels to watch for morning news. This is an area with a heavy concentration of conservatives.
For the 3 days that I stayed at the hotel, every morning the lead story was the headless chicken who was still walking around his barnyard. Reporters came from quite the distance to interview the farmer. Sucker lived nearly a week before he keeled over. Good news is, he did keel over.
In “The GOP Is Nuts” thread, RT directed readers to Charles P Pierce’s John Boehner’s Career Sunk Last Night. It’s a masterpiece in that it is a narrative of US national politics over the past couple of years leading up to Boehner’s display of impotence.
And those aren’t even the best part of his article.
“The only thing that seemed in control was raw political fear.”
The GOP has been peddling fear night and day for so long that perhaps those particular chickens are wandering home at last.
The GOP is leaderless, and has been for a while. The question is whether a leader can emerge at all.
We all know they had a strong leader in Gingrich in the 90s, who not only kept his perpetually slim majority in line on all key votes but also kept the Senate toeing the same line. Then from 2000-2006 the leadership came out of the Rove/Cheney administration – until Bush fired Rove and sidelined Cheney after the 2006 elections (and quietly handed policy reigns over to his father’s buddies).
But I’m wondering now if the GOP has devolved to the point where neither a Gingrich nor a Rove could control the angry mob that they’ve become. Do you see today’s GOP House voting for the Medicare Drug benefit, even with the huge giveaway to big pharma? Or any of the compromise bills Gingrich agreed to?
The primary tool that Gingrich and Rove used to keep their caucuses in line was fear of retribution – if you don’t play along we’ll cut your party campaign funds and threaten your corporate contributors to do likewise, then fund a primary challenge. How would that play in today’s GOP, where a large minority of the current congresscritters are the extreme right winners of primary election battles and the others are terrified that they’ll be the next to be challenged? How do you threaten a congresscritter with a primary challenge who actually won on a primary challenge campaigning against the establishment GOP?
Honestly, I am now thinking that the ONLY strategy the current GOP can successfully adopt is NO. Anything actually constructive won’t work because it will require compromise – and that’s off the table.
The bottom line is that a large contingent of the GOP has absolutely no interest in governing. They are there simply to kill the evil beast of government from the inside. And the only thing which might pique their interest at all is when they have the opportunity to either line the pockets of those they consider allies and co-conspirators in their quest or to further their vision of utopian ideological purity through legislation.
Beyond that, they could not care less about whether government functions for the other 99.99% of the country. If the core governmental functions of our republic, with the possible exception of the military, completely evaporated tomorrow, it would the happiest day of their lives.
Possibly their constituents will have something to say about this. Especially after their (middle-class) taxes go up and President Obama wants nothing more than to lower them.
I don’t have a lot confidence that the constituents will be able to connect the dots. If the fever swamp around here is any indication, there will no correlation made between the actions of the GOP and the dire circumstances which might be on the horizon. In the FOX News world in which these people live (and I’m surrounded by them), all of this is due to Barack Hussein Obama’s massive government spending and handouts to all his deadbeat voters. That is all they know. And there is little room left in their reptilian brains for pieces of conflicting information. Heard some poll results last night that something like 53% of people will blame both parties equally for any fiscal cliff disasters. That dynamic in their minds would seem to be a difficult one to change.
Apparently what happened is that Hayworth and the Club for Growth lowered the boom. Gotta love ’em.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/21/boehner-budget-failure-conservative-groups_n_2342979.html
One things is for certain. The shock doctrine works in that major changes, even in entrenched political public opinion, can happen and happen quickly in the wake of crisis or tragedy. I can’t get over watching top sports figures and even judges who have a brief national microphone, use that opportunity to point out the utter insanity of the opposition to meaningful gun control. This is a direct result of the shock of the Newtown massacre. Any politician who does not get this runs the risk of political suicide especially if people are organized to point this out about that individual politician at the local level. Gerrymandered or not, that politician is in trouble unless positions are changed.
Get ready for the next shock. Last night Rachel Maddow pointed out via Jared Bernstein, the revised CBO figures say our economy grew by +3.1% last quarter. With an unresolved physical curb, the growth will drop to +2.0% this quarter then drop to -3.9% for next year’s first quarter. By the end of next year the unemployment rate could go as high as 9%. This is a completely artificially self designed crisis due entirely to the dysfunctional politics of the Republican party. If the outrage from this much pain can be directed at the individual House members who support dysfunctional politics, those members will be in serious trouble with all but the most extreme crazy of their own base.
If the idea of setting this trap was to break the fever, whoever did it certainly knew what they were doing. It’s going to get ugly but it’s going to be worth it because once the fever breaks we might have a chance to fix real problems and make our economy roar back to life.
Steny and Van Hollen just covered the Repubs miserable fleeing asses by saying that Obama had come more than halfway and that should be the starting point in any future negotiation.
WTF? Was it necessary to say anything? Is it now still necessary for Democrats to do anything except let the clock run out?
Has no one there ever heard of zero-base negotiations. If you reject my best offer, we go back to one that starts from you getting zero.
Well who the fuck could have seen that coming??
With Democrats like that in the House, we might as well just give the GOP a slip of paper right now, ask them to write down what they want, transcribe it into a bill and pass the son of a bitch. All because the poor GOP is going to hold its collective breath until they turn blue?? And Pelosi is on board with this??
Maddening. Just insanely maddening. These people are idiots.
Idiots? No, false and reprehensible. They are as ‘broken’ as the repugnants. Luckily the repugnants have already gone over the cliff, without their intransigence the Democrats would have jumped first. Tomorrow’s headline: Proressives embrace Boehner for saving Obama from himself. Obama is an embarrassment.
I didn’t know it had a name (zero-base negotiations) but that’s exactly what I was thinking this morning.
Apparently Steny and Van Hollen were not coordinating with the White House.
Current rumor FWIW. White House proposal is that Senate take House’s bill, gut it and replace with a bill that (1) extends the middle class tax cut, (2) postpones the automatic sequester, and (3) renews unemployment benefit extensions.
Are the GOP over the barrel enough to agree to that? Are they rational enough to agree to that?
Nice Hobson’s choice for the Repubs.
That’s more like it.
Needless to say, it fails BooMan’s three criteria.
It will be interesting to see what the Republicans do with that. I’d like it better if the white house proposal also dealt with the debt ceiling.
Truth be told, I’d like it a lot better if the white house said, okay, we’re back at square one.
Seems to be what the President called for in his statement earlier.
I doubt that it happens, though. If Boehner corrals a handful of Republican votes to complement Democratic votes in order to make this happen, it will be his last act as Speaker. The Tea Party caucus will eviscerate him.
Think it’s more likely we are bound for the fiscal curb.
That’s my reading to as to results. But with essentially 27, 28, 29, 30, 31 as negotiating days, that is really putting the GOP in front of two doors and asking them to pick which worst case they want. But…the out is the GOP can argue that they did not vote to raise taxes (except for their grimy fingerprints on the tax cut extension legislation).
Then it simply becomes an exercise is splitting hairs. Just a question of whether they value a pyrrhic victory more than they might fear taking the fall for a journey into the fiscal abyss. I really wonder, though, if they give a shit at all about anything. The President encouraged everyone to go home, take a breather and reassess their positions. If past history is any indication, they will come back more steadfast than ever in their intransigence.