It looks increasingly like the House Republicans are on a suicide mission. It’s like they are hell-bent on making an amphibious landing on some beachhead against entrenched machine gun nests and heavy artillery fire without the benefit of any air cover. They are going to get cut to ribbons.
Speaker Boehner admits that he cannot come up with a plan to finance the government and pay its debts that wont be shot down by friendly-fire from his own caucus. That means that he will need to either consent to a government shutdown or go hat-in-hand to Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer and ask for their support in avoiding a catastrophe. But he doesn’t seem to want to do that preemptively, so he is still floundering around trying to appease his own Teahadist base.
A lot of people say that he will lose his speakership if he goes to the Democrats, but I don’t know that he would lose it immediately. If the Democrats wanted to, they could preserve Boehner’s speakership by voting for him if he is challenged by a substantial rump of the Republican caucus. I am unaware of an example of a Speaker being voted out of his position in the middle of a session of Congress, or even what the rules are for such a challenge. I know that Gingrich resigned, but I don’t know what would have happened if he had tried to stay on a fight for his gavel. I do know that the Speaker is elected by a vote of the entire House, and if the Democrats agreed to vote for Boehner, he couldn’t be ousted unless nearly the entire Republican caucus voted against him.
It seems like the House GOP is about to crack up on the shoals without even making a beach-landing.
