Last Thursday night, John Boehner appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and admitted that he never thought it was a good idea to shut down the government:
“When I looked up, I saw my colleagues going this way. You learn that a leader without followers is simply a man taking a walk. So I said, ‘If you want to go fight this fight, I’ll go fight the fight with you.’ But it was a very predictable disaster. So the sooner we got it over with the better. We were fighting for the right thing, but I just thought tactfully it wasn’t the right thing to do.”
I think he meant “tactically,” but it works either way. The truth is that Boehner doesn’t have the power to work with the president. Tip O’Neill and Newt Gingrich were willing and able to work with a president from the other party to get things done. Sen. Bill Bradley (D-NJ) rewrote the country’s tax system in 1986. It’s possible to have a divided government that does big things, but we can’t do anything because the Republicans are so intransigent.
That’s why President Obama is reduced to acting unilaterally to do things like raise the minimum wage for federal workers and contractors. It will only help a few hundred thousand people, but it’s better than nothing. Still, it’s hard to listen to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell:
Republicans dismissed the notion that Mr. Obama should give up on Congress and rely on his own power more. “Ronald Reagan didn’t think that, and Bill Clinton didn’t think that,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said on “Fox News Sunday” over the weekend. “Frequently, times of divided government are quite good times in terms of achieving things for the American people.”
Remember what the New York Times reported back in May 2010:
Before the health care fight, before the economic stimulus package, before President Obama even took office, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, had a strategy for his party: use his extensive knowledge of Senate procedure to slow things down, take advantage of the difficulties Democrats would have in governing and deny Democrats any Republican support on big legislation.
Republicans embraced it. Democrats denounced it as rank obstructionism. Either way, it has led the two parties, as much as any other factor, to where they are right now.
Nearly four years later, we are in the same place, so Mitch McConnell should shut his pie-hole. He made the decision to oppose legislation regardless of its merits as part of an overall strategy of complete obstruction. John Boehner was initially a bit more willing to work with the administration, but he learned that
“a leader without followers is simply a man taking a walk.”
The president has now learned that he cannot rely on either of them to follow through on anything, so he has no choice but to “give up” on Congress. They’re worthless.
And, contrary to Ron Fournier, the blame for that does not belong to the president or his leadership skills. It is a choice that the Republicans made. The people elected and reelected the president, but they also elected Congress. If they don’t get rid of Republican control of Congress, nothing is going to happen. Either the American people figure this out, or we’ll be stuck with a broken legislature and a president who has to act unilaterally through executive action to address any of the nation’s pressing problems.
