A few days ago, Rolling Stone published a Tim Dickinson article on the inner doings of “the Republican suicide machine.” It’s a big piece, and on page four there is a description of John Boehner, Eric Cantor, and their relationship to the business community.
Boehner and Cantor have learned to speak the language of the Tea Party – the majority leader more fluently than the speaker – but their real job is to keep the old Republican-patronage machine humming. In their political bloodlines and in their donor networks, both Boehner and Cantor are deeply connected to the politics of Rove. Boehner’s signature accomplishment was steering George W. Bush’s education initiative No Child Left Behind to passage – a law that [Heritage Action president Michael] Needham decries as “a gargantuan federalization of education” and “an anathema to conservatives.” For his part, Cantor was a key member of the 2003 Tom DeLay whip team that twisted arms in an infamous all-night session required to pass the deficit-financed Medicare prescription-drug plan, a Rove-driven gift to Big Pharma and the most sweeping expansion of the program since the days of Lyndon Johnson.
Looting Main Street
Boehner is renowned as a “Chamber of Commerce Republican” – and the campaign-finance data are unambiguous: In the 2012 election cycle, Boehner was the House’s top recipient of campaign cash from 34 different industries, from hedge funds and investment firms to coal mining, studentÂloan companies, hospitals, nursing homes and Big Tobacco. He was also the top recipient of campaign cash from lobbyists themselves, raking in $393,000 according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. In D.C., the speaker’s clubby network of staffers and lobbyists is known as “Boehnerland,” and its members include heavy hitters for Citigroup, UPS, Altria, AmEx, Akin Gump and the National Federation of Independent Businesses. “The Boehner folks barbecue on Sunday together, they go on vacations together, they name their kids after each other,” says the former leadership aide.
Although he’s positioned himself as a kindred spirit of House insurgents, and has even joined the RSC, Cantor is perhaps more deeply knitted into the Republican establishment than Boehner is. It was Cantor’s prodigious fundÂraising talents that elevated him to the fast track in 2003, when he became chief-Âdeputy whip after just one term in Congress. Married to a former Goldman Sachs VP, he speaks the language of the investment class and is said to sell financiers on the “return on investment” of their political donations to the party. He’s been a fierce defender of the hedge-fund loophole that taxes the income of top investors at less than the rate of their secretaries – once arguing that taxing “carried interest” at normal rates would hurt “the average blue-jean-wearing American.” Over his career, he’s raised more than $2.4 million from the investment community.
John Boehner and Eric Cantor are a little different than freshman lawmakers like Rep. Ted Yoho of Florida whose day job in 2009 was cutting the balls off large mammals in his veterinary clinic. Rep. Ted Yoho was recently quoted saying that a default on the debt would “stabilize” global markets. That’s the kind of clown that Boehner and Cantor have been trying to humor and placate.
If you want to know why I have been so serene about the threat of default, it’s because John Boehner and Eric Cantor are creatures of big business, and they have almost nothing in common with the Tea Baggers who forced this crisis upon the Republican leadership.
From there, it was easy to game this thing out. Boehner would never get his caucus to pass anything, and he’d be weakened and forced to rely on Democratic votes. He would never default.
And that is what happened:
Senate Republicans knew the House GOP conference was divided, and they knew Boehner’s hold on his conference was shaky, but they were still stunned by the GOP’s utter failure to accomplish anything.
“They are a majority party that wants to be a minority party,” the Senate Republican aide said of the House GOP. “This is not how a majority party acts. The majority party takes the power that it has and puts it to use. And in this case, they refused to use the power they had because they would rather rail against the majority that they should be trying to deal with.”
“They showed they would rather be in the minority than have to deal with a Democratic majority in the Senate and a Democratic president.”
Now, it’s up to Senate Republicans, with no majority, to find a way out. “We’re not going to go into default,” the aide said.
A lot of politically savvy people are “stunned” by this, but I sincerely do not know why. Everything went exactly as I thought it would. I could never see any other outcome being even remotely likely.
