If you’ve been following the debate over the impending “sequester,” you have probably seen liberals quoting Speaker Boehner saying that he got 98 percent of what he wanted in the deal that created it. What you might not have noticed is that Boehner made that remark in an August 1st, 2011 interview with CBS News reporter Scott Pelley, who had just asked him the following question:
SCOTT PELLEY: You were unable to get your own caucus behind your bill a few days ago. Do you intend to remain Speaker of the House?
In other words, what Boehner was really saying was “Why would I quit? I just got a sweet deal!”
In reality, Speaker Boehner had just tried and failed to sell a deal to his caucus. His back-up plan wasn’t really his plan. As he likes to point out, the sequester was first broached by people in the White House who were desperately trying to find something that Boehner could sell to his caucus to avoid our country defaulting on its debts, destroying its credit rating, and tanking the global economy. Boehner agreed to it because he had nothing else to offer. Left to his own devices, the world would have come crashing down on his (and all our) heads. He’s incompetent.
And he probably should have absorbed what Scott Pelley was (with little subtlety) suggesting. He should have realized that he had no power and resigned. Instead, he pushed his caucus to accept the sequester deal and went around telling anyone who would listen that it was a great accomplishment. He started out saying that anyway, but by September of 2012 he was saying that the sequester was insane and that it would be like using a “meat-axe” on the federal budget.
SPEAKER BOEHNER: The sequester was designed to be ugly. Why? So that no one would go there. But because the president didn’t help, didn’t lead when it came to fixing or working with the supercommittee, Senate Democrats didn’t cooperate making this — helping us make the supercommittee function, we end up with a sequester. The sequester is like taking a meat-axe to federal spending. It is not — it — no one on either side of the aisle believes this is an appropriate way to reduce the role of government. And so that’s why the House acted in May to pass a bill to replace the sequester. It continues to sit in the United States Senate.” [Federal News Service – Weekly Press Conference with Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH), 9/21/12]
“Meat-axe” is apparently a term he enjoys, since he repeated it just two weeks ago.
The truth is that John Boehner hates the sequester and plainly thinks it will endanger our national security and cost hundreds of thousands of jobs, in addition to being insane. In fact, he said as much in a Wall Street Journal piece today. It’s a jarring position. So jarring, in fact, that conservative columnist Byron York is flummoxed.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Wednesday, House Speaker John Boehner describes the upcoming sequester as a policy “that threatens U.S. national security, thousands of jobs and more.”
Which leads to the question: Why would Republicans support a measure that threatens national security and thousands of jobs? Boehner and the GOP are determined to allow the $1.2 trillion sequester go into effect unless President Obama and Democrats agree to replacement cuts, of an equal amount, that target entitlement spending…
…Could the GOP message on the sequester be any more self-defeating? Boehner could argue that the sequester cuts are necessary as a first — and somewhat modest — step toward controlling the deficits that threaten the economy. Instead, he describes them as a threat to national security and jobs that he nevertheless supports. It’s not an argument that is likely to persuade millions of Americans.
Just a week ago, Boehner told the Associated Press that the sequester was a disaster that would present him and his members with nothing but bleak options if it went into effect. And that’s just on the budget and the economy. Boehner surely agrees with Bill Kristol that the sequester is a political loser that is pointless, won’t get the Republicans any leverage, and will threaten our national security.
So why is he playing along?
To answer this question, perhaps we should go back to a piece that appeared on January 13th in Politico. Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Jake Sherman reported in that piece that the House Republicans were so deranged that they might default on our debt, allow the sequester, or force a government shutdown in the fall. The leadership didn’t know what to do with them.
GOP officials said more than half of their members are prepared to allow default unless Obama agrees to dramatic cuts he has repeatedly said he opposes. Many more members, including some party leaders, are prepared to shut down the government to make their point. House Speaker John Boehner “may need a shutdown just to get it out of their system,” said a top GOP leadership adviser. “We might need to do that for member-management purposes — so they have an endgame and can show their constituents they’re fighting.”
We don’t know who that “top GOP leadership adviser” is, but he or she kind of gave the game away, don’t you think? For “member-management purposes” and to help Tea Party nut cases “get it out of their system,” Speaker Boehner is going to let the sequester kick in rather than take proactive and prophylactic steps to prevent damage to our country and countless people’s lives.
That’s what we’re dealing with here. That’s what Boehner is dealing with here. Unhinged lunatics are roaming around the Capitol like it’s an asylum, and their drunken leader hasn’t the faintest clue how to lead them.
So, he says things like “this here grenade in my hand will blow my arm off if I pull this pin.” And then he pulls the pin.
No compromise.
Can’t he waive the Hastert rule again?
Maybe, but apparently not preemptively.
If I was a Republican congressman, I wouldn’t just fire him if he tried, I would legitimately murder him and stick his head on a pike out front of the capitol.
If Boehner screws over his caucus one more time (after apparently making zero effective effort to avoid falling into another crisis in the first place through any kind of strategy or legislative competence), he and the 10-20% of House GOPers who keep voting with the president’s deals should just go be Democrats and end this charade of majority/minority.
But they don’t. I haven’t heard anything like that.
I’m honestly not sure these guys actually care about real-world results. They just want the freedom to show their onstituents, and the good Lord, the pristine purity of their conservative hearts, let the overall vote be what it may.
If I’m wrong, enlighten me . . .
I think they recognize far more than the professional left how advanced the activist expansion of government has progressed the last four years (at negligible net cost). The deficit window is slowly closing, and the space to prioritize spending cuts over taxes is closing with it.
Everything the right worked so hard to achieve blew up in 2009 and 2010, and they haven’t been able to roll back even a fraction of it in the years since. They’re just about on their last chance to bottle things up until the Next Magic Leader can save them (won’t happen).
OK, they do care, but they are being reduced to symbolic protest. Kind of like lefties who show up for tiny ritualized demonstrations without any hope of any practical achievement, they can’t even get media to cover it other than their own of which they are the only audience; they show up to witness before God and man, sing “Kumbaya”, etc.
progressives sure taught Obama a lesson in 2010.
Yes, Progressives are all powerful. Ed Schultz caused millions upon millions of voters to stay home. He’s all powerful. He can change an election with a single show!!
Indeed.
The people who made such a big show of threatening to stay home couldn’t swing a state senate race in Montana.
This is why it doesn’t make sense to blame them for the 2010 election, and also why it doesn’t make sense when they call themselves “the Democratic base.”
Yep, that raging progressive Kent Conrad holding out for a Presidential deficit commission as payoff for letting ACA reconciliation through really worked out well. For both Obama and Conrad, n’est-ce pas?
Also available in orange.
The uncritical acceptance, in some quarters, of Boehner’s boast about getting 98% of what he wanted always had a whiff of desperation about it.
People who’d begun a premature endzone dance over being proven right about cuts to entitlement benefits needed something to show they weren’t Wrong On The Internet.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/02/20/senate-dems-look-past-sequester-to-gover
nment-shutdown-fight/
Everybody’s gone unhinged. The tea party warped an entire generation of political minds, and hostage negotiations are now being waged over numbers that would have been considered unfathomable even three years ago. It’s all very awkward.
Democrats are obsessed with very specific, very narrow tax hikes on the wealthiest sliver of the population. The radical right believes they were elected to halt the president’s activism by any means necessary, and cannot believe that they have already done as much on revenues to aid his redistributive agenda as his own party did.
There will be no compromise. Neither side wants one. They want blood. The issue will be settled in high stakes public brinksmanship. We know which side’s populism is more popular. The anti-rich/”fairness” populism is now more successful than white populism. That is a political sea change from the 20th century. So Democrats are the overwhelming favorite to “win” here. But you can’t be surprised that after year after year of hearing how the two parties have never been more polarized, that the system would tend towards total ideological warfare with a trillion dollars at stake.
Since Obama has always been offering hundreds of millions in spending cuts to go with new revenue, your characterization of the democratic position is not very accurate.
Incorrect. The Democratic offer is a maximalist position that cuts payouts to agricultural and defense welfare takers and is for rhetorical consumption alone. It’s a tidy “balanced” front that allows the president to play the “if I was a radical, I’d be demanding 100% tax hikes and no spending cuts” card while at the same time, being completely untenable to his opposition. Thus claiming the center while isolating his opponents and giving absolutely nothing up in the process.
There are no negotiations because there is no incentive to compromise. Politics must be very confusing for you if your moral sycophancy requires you to believe that your side would never say one thing while really doing another in furtherance of their agenda. Why, the next thing you’ll tell me, Obama was never opposed to gay marriage in the first place! Madness.
Stripped of the ad hominem attack on Torpid Bunny, I agree with you.
Just curious: how is a package that includes cuts in agricultural subsidies and in oil tax loopholes a “maximalist position”?
Obama offers 900 billion in spending cuts.
That doesn’t look like a maximalist position to me. To me it looks like there’s just one party with a maximalist position.
Nothing you said changes the fact that he has offered spending cuts. To say that doesn’t matter because the GOP can’t accept it, well, that’s nice. But you’re statement that the democrats are only looking for tax increases on the 1% is simply not accurate.
Ha. That’s downright autistic. Unless you think spending cuts are a four letter word, what matters is what would be cut. Which in this case, is zero to Democratic priorities (which is why it’s an uncompromising, maximalist position that carries the false veneer of balance to the ignorant and undecided).
The Democratic agenda is to tax the 1% and abolish corporate welfare. I thought you whiners would be happy about that. Instead, I’m getting nothing but boo-hooing here because President Daddy isn’t as pure as the driven snow. Heaven forbid he play hardball politics.
And TPM? Double ha. Sure, the “big deal” is still “on the table.” The GOP can have its spending cuts consisting of cuts to Medicare…providers and the Pentagon, for only the low, low price of $600B more in taxes. They’d be fools not to take it!
The Democratic agenda is to tax the 1% and abolish corporate welfare.
Huh? Maybe for a handful of them. Other wise a stretch and an undocumented assertion.
I kind of like the term “meat-axe” too. The whole debate might be proceeding a little differently if this package of massive schedule cuts was called “the meat-axe” rather than “the sequester.” The term “sequester” makes it sound rather anodyne, and tends to obscure the fact that what we’re talking about here is nothing more or less than a bunch of massive cuts to the federal budget.
OFF topic — Rick Scott sees the light on Obamacare
Ha! The hospitals got to ol’ Rick. Ok, heading over to Redstate to watch heads explode. :0)
He’s figured out a grift. Medicaid involves federal and state funds. Wonder how he’s going to defraud the state and the feds this time.
The volume on Boehner’s ineffectiveness has been ratcheting up all day. It’s everywhere. The next two weeks are going to kill his career.