As I have pointed out repeatedly, the following is not technically true.
Washington correspondent for The New Yorker Ryan Lizza said Boehner has to bring Republicans some concession – the medical device tax, or a shorter delay of the individual mandate, for example – if he wants to preserve his job.
In other words, Boehner cannot put forward a bill that funds the government, without some sort of Obamacare concession attached.
“The consensus seems to be that if he puts a clean continuing resolution on the floor, and gets no concessions whatsoever after shutting down the government, that he will lose his job as Speaker,” said Lizza. “That’s the bind he’s in right now.”
The Speaker of the House is elected by the whole chamber and, by the rules, does not even need to be an actual elected member of Congress. The Republicans could make Clint Eastwood or Rob Schneider the Speaker if they wanted to. And the Democrats could assure that Boehner keeps his job either by voting for him or by abstaining from the vote, or by some combination of both.
What this means is that Boehner can, at any time, decide that he can’t effectively lead the Republican Party but he can lead the House. The Democrats would have every reason to agree to that arrangement, because there are enough reasonable Republicans in the House to pass immigration reform and to restore the old system of using the appropriations committees to make sensible investments for the future, and to raise the debt ceiling, and perhaps even to do some (very) minor gun violence control legislation.
If Ryan Lizza is correct that Boehner can’t maintain support from the Republican caucus if he doesn’t win some concession from the president, then his career is over as leader of the House Republicans. If he makes a deal anyway, to avoid a financial armageddon, for example, then the division of the Republican Party will be completed whether or not Boehner stays on as Speaker because a rump of moderate Republicans will have already joined with the whole of the Democratic caucus to break the back of the Tea Party. That coalition might as well have a leader, and if Boehner doesn’t want the job then maybe someone else does.
Regardless of what happens, so long as Boehner doesn’t get any concession and he remains unwilling to destroy our country’s credit rating, the grip of the Tea Party will shortly be broken and the Republican Party effectively divided.
That is what we are currently witnessing. This is an absolute prerequisite if we want President Obama to have anything resembling a functional second term in office, and the administration is well aware of the need to have and to win this showdown right now.
As for people who are complaining that the Democrats are not fighting the sequester-level of appropriations in the continuing resolution, please remember that the government is shut down even without the Democrats asking for higher, more sensible spending, and that the Senate’s CR only lasts 45 days, and that we’d rather have a fight in mid-November after the GOP has been divided than right now when all it would do is make us share some portion of the blame for the shutdown. We’ll have that fight soon, and on a battlefield heavily-tilted in our favor. That’s the point.
