Dog catches car: Boehner will resign in October
Well, the frustrated conservative base got what it wanted: John Boehner, Speaker of the House, will resign in October, not only from his post but from Congress as well.
The tea leaves are somewhat murky; it’s hard to read them. Reports are that he’d wanted to resign last year but stayed because of the ouster of the person who he thought would have been his natural successor, Eric Cantor.
It is also reported that his move—at least, coming at this time—was to avert a bitter fight over a possible government shutdown, which now will not happen. Of course, he was also being challenged for the Speakership and perhaps thought he would lose or be irreparably weakened.
My guess is that he was already irreparably weakened.
At any rate, he’s going, and most conservatives are very very glad. For me, it’s modified rapture. I don’t see Boehner as the heart of the problem, nor do I see that his replacement can work the wonders conservatives are hoping for. The title of this post refers to the old adage about the dog who chases and chases the car; what does he do when he finally catches it?
That is the heart of the matter. Who replaces Boehner? And what will that person be able to accomplish that Boehner couldn’t? The split in the Republican Party is very real and very deep, and the realities of not having enough power in the Senate (and McConnell’s weakness on that) are real as well, and IMHO the latter was more important to overcome than anything that was happening in the House. After all, the House kept passing bills (such as the ones repealing Obamacare, and the ones against the Iran deal) because, unlike the Senate, it could do so with a simple majority. It was in the Senate that more of the blockage occurred, and that was for structural reasons and would have required an ending of the cloture rule to change that situation.
What’s more, as I’ve written many times, none of it would (or will) change the fact that President Obama can veto anything and an override will not be possible.
I’m not a “burn it down” nihilist type who thinks all destruction is necessarily good because something better will replace it. Boehner’s resignation could be good, though; it depends. In particular, the possible benefit I see is in rhetoric and leadership and tone, depending on his successor. Boehner has been a lousy “Speaker” in the sense of failing to speak with force and clarity on major issues. He never sounded like a leader or a man who meant what he said—nor does McConnell, for that matter. Rhetoric can’t accomplish much, but it can accomplish something if it has conviction and will behind it.
The Speaker’s job is hard. Good luck to Boehner’s successor. He (or she, I suppose, but I assume it will be a “he”) will need it.
“I’m not a “burn it down” nihilist type who thinks all destruction is necessarily good because something better will replace it.”
Me neither. I’m for accentuating the positive with sixteen drone strikes on congress with high explosive warheads followed by large bulldozers smoothing down the rubble followed by three thousand illegal mexicans sowing salt on the rubble.
Call me a cock-eyed optimist….
Seemed like a good enough guy; maybe too nice to deal with the vile Dems.
Went out on top. From altar boy and Jesuit college alum to having the Pope putting his arm around him and the Pope asking John to pray for him.
Now if only Mitch would wake up. Get rid of that 60 vote rule.
Good man. Good time to resign. Not a good Speaker. He consistently failed to play hard ball, unless the times he did with his own side.
There is a way to lose the fights, but still appear to win, to be valiant in defeat. He never did that.
He let the other side create the narrative, and he accepted its terms.
The new Speaker should have a daily public event on the steps of Congress wherein he or she berates this disastrous President and his entire party all across the nation in no uncertain terms. Let them respond. He should go “Trump” every day with the Dems, the Media, the American People! He should call out actual Dem voters and say “Shame on your party!”
Every
Freaking
Day.
Teach them some manners as it used to be said.
Then we can talk.
Leading Wapo’s ad pages tomorrow: Cat herder wanted. Experience not necessary. Health insurance will cover all scratches and bites.
He is not a good man and has not been a good Speaker. We have no objective basis for asserting the former, and plenty of basis for asserting the latter.
Forgive my cynicism but I strongly suspect this is just another ploy to placate the base. In the face of polls showing that 62% (only 62%?) of Republican voters feel betrayed by the GOP… the leadership had to come up with something. But little to nothing will change. Nor will it without sweeping that cesspoll clean. This is more lip service. RINOs don’t change their spots.
He worked WAY too much with the left. I never liked him. Glad he’s gone. We need a hardliner who is not afraid to be tough and stand up to the press. No golf with Obama. No arm around Pelosi.
Being ‘nice’ has turned our country into a European state. The House has the ‘power of the purse,’ but yet they have done NOTHING to stop the spending. And what little spending they think they’ve cut has all been for show. Nothing substantial. No hard choices for Obama.
I’d be totally fine with ‘shutting down the government’ and taking the hit for it. Because we all know it is not really ‘shutting’ important stuff down.
We need a Speaker who will be more Trump-like, in that he won’t care to listen to the press, pushes back on declarations of hurting ‘the poor and the elderly’ and actually stand for something again.
Will. Not. Miss. Boehner. One. Bit.
OK, I will voice some alternative views. Speaker Boehner wasn’t doing the job the Republican base wanted him to do, which was to be a partisan hardballer like Nancy Pelosi (and as Newt Gingrich was at times). Mr Boehner was trying to be a good Speaker, and fulfill his responsibilities to the institution of the House as well as advance as best he could his party’s interests.
Ideally the Speaker tends first to the healthy function of the institution and its place in the constitutional order. The Majority Leader needs to be a strong leader of the Party’s agenda and interests, and the Leader’s team needs to have both tactical and strategic sense to advance their bills.
Speaker Boehner can justly be criticized for inadequate and insufficient pushback against President Obama’s aggressive actions against Congressional authority, and Executive tyranny. To do that he would need cooperation from his entire Party caucus, because the Democrats were in lockstep with the President. And he would have to accept that the rules of the Senate would mean only a few actions could generate enough support in that body to overcome a cloture vote or filibuster by the united Democrats.
Some of the conservative activists in the House have unrealistic expectations of legislative success against determined opposition, and they don’t know how to use the few tools available to them in divided government effectively. Or they don’t really want to, but would rather register protest votes, LIKE COMMENTERS WHO ONLY USE ALL CAPS!! and exclamation points. Sadly, some of the conservative caucus are that detached from the realities and don’t grasp the need for subtle, long-term thinking in advancing their agenda.
I wish Speaker Boehner well, and hope the new leadership team is wisely chosen, and that they lead wisely as well.
Individual republican politicians in DC are petrified of the threat that the national media will crush them. As Instapundit and many others have noted, the news media is working hard as the propaganda wing of the Democrat party. The GOP cannot move forward until they publicly make the case that the MSM is the enemy and deal with them as enemy agents. As long as the GOP goes along with the pretense that the media is fair, they will get kicked in the teeth.
As individuals, the instinct for self-preservation makes sense. No one, not even most presidents, is likely strong enough and talented enough to take on the MSM and win. Reagans are rare. Better to go along, avoid taking on the liberal behemoth and keep getting re-elected.
Collectively, however, the cowardice of the individuals is killing the GOP. It is why the GOP always loses the shutdown argument.
Attack the MSM. Take away their legitimacy as honest arbiters. Force the fight. Go straight to the voters and bypass the enemy propagandists. Will the screams be loud? Sure. But there is no victory until this fight takes place.
Until the GOP in Congress and its presidential candidate attack the legitimacy of the news media, they will keep losing. Get some leaders willing to fight.
Speaker doesn’t have to be a member of the house….
Hmmm …
I was not a Boehner fan, but I do not blame him for the feeble gop response to the mannish boy after the 2014 elections. Mitch McConnell is the real culprit for the failure of congress to act as a co-equal branch of government (as neo notes). However, the defeat of Cantor and Boehner’s resignation must be troubling a few heads in the gope.
Boehner will return to DC as a well paid lobbyist and will miss only a few beltway cocktail parties.
Frog: We do have an objective basis for asserting he is a good man. Check out his family background; check out his religion, check out his charity work.
It is possible to be a good person and a lousy Speaker. That he was.
It is impossible to be a good Democrat Pol though. Objectively, you start with killing babies you never overcome that. No charity, no amount, no religion, nothing gets you out of that sin against babies and against humanity itself.
No one, not even most presidents, is likely strong enough and talented enough to take on the MSM and win. Reagans are rare. Better to go along, avoid taking on the liberal behemoth and keep getting re-elected.
Reagan was rare in another sense, as well, in that he was himself a creature of the media, movies and TV to be exact. As such, he already had a well-established and well-liked persona, and was able to build on that.
The GOP needs a Speaker that is an ‘outside man.’
Boner was an inside the beltway man.
The Majority Whip and Majority Leader can run the routine of the House.
The Speaker needs to use his office as a bully pulpit to counter the narrative that BHO is spewing.
He can do that and STILL keep tabs on the House — since the Leader and the Whip will be his pals.
A Speaker that uses the new social media can be extremely effective.
Trump tweets.
Boner ? Nope.
Boehner did a phone interview with Politico.com just a few days ago in which he said some interesting stuff that, to me, indicated he was just plain tired of it all:
More at the link.
If you really want to be depressed about the future of the country, read the comments in this article.
Slashdot has a mostly young audience who also tend to be pretty well educated, at least in technical fields, but every time the topic goes to politics, the discussion is overwhelmingly from a leftist point of view and inevitably there are choruses about how the left in this country is gone and in this set of comments Bernie Sanders is claimed to be about as left as Eisenhower.
http://politics.slashdot.org/story/15/09/25/1546229/speaker-of-the-house-boehner-announces-resignation
These people are brainwashed, there’s no other word for it, by the left and the media. They literally see the world as almost completely opposite of what the informed commentary around here and elsewhere sees.
The general consensus of the young people that I seem to get is that the country is marching relentlessly rightward. I have no idea how they can justify this, and I suspect most are just parroting what they hear. Sure, there are a few conservative voices in the crowd, but while I read Slashdot quite a bit, I avoid the political discussions like the plague because it’s a pure nightmare.
And who happened to remove Eric Cantor in order for the vacuum to be filled?
Strategy is a matter of planning and execution, not mere coincidences.
I have no idea how they can justify this, and I suspect most are just parroting what they hear.
Same reason why homos think they are being persecuted by Christians, instead of vice a versa. Same reason why blacks think whitey is out to get them, even though LEOs kill more whites than blacks in “mysterious accidents”.
Same reason why women think there’s War on Women by Republicans, not Muslim brown rape gangs.
Should check out what the SPLC did that contributed to Waco 2, where the police executed some citizens without a criminal record, then covered it up using gag orders. Similar to Wisconsin unions, their police unions are the same alliance after all.
It has gotten to the point that, for me, getting rid of Boehner was an end in itself. What follows can’t be worse and his departure may be a lesson for the others.
The only people the current Republican leadership had the courage to attack were those who were most zealous in their support of the party and most likely to vote. You never see Democrats being that stupid. They stand up for anyone who casts a vote (or several) for them.
Boehner isn’t as bad as McConnell. He even did a couple of good things, but he was thwarted by TPTB in his own party. The CoC is a 5th column, and they support McConnell.
All of Boehner’s attempts to do anything (as few as those were) were stopped in the Senate.
Still, I don’t hire employees for excuses. If he couldn’t “get the job done,” Boehner deserved to lose his job.
I expect that if the establishment promotes McCarthy, and he doesn’t immediately prove he’s better than Boehner, this will be another piece of evidence for the base that the GOP doesn’t deserve to survive.
It’ll be 3rd party after that.
Finally.
He might have been good at running the general day to day business, but political strategy, making a point, and dealing with a bad hand were not his strong suits.
His opposition to doing anything that would result in a veto was the source of most of conservative frustration. Take a swing and miss, but take a swing. Sometimes you get lucky.
Boner’s fatalistic approach — don’t do anything unless you have an assured victory seemed unimaginative and lazy. But most frustrating, he appeared determined to prevent confrontation as his main objective. And he was not at all good with the media. The continual crying didn’t really exude an air of confidence and tough mindedness either, and as much as it was unspoken, I’m sure Obama and his cronies thought him to be weak – he was out of his league dealing with Obama, and it was kind of obvious.
He talked about collaboration and finding common ground, but he was unable to find any with either conservatives or Obama.
One can debate all day if it was his fault or not, but the point was he didn’t have many successes. Blaming the conservative wing was silly; a good leader can bring a diverse and fractured team together. Boner failed at that in spades.
Maybe there is another leader with some ideas; if not, a change of faces isn’t always a bad thing. People lose their jobs all the time for being ineffective whether they were soley to blame for their poor performance, or not.
There are arguments to be made about whether he was capable of a lot of the things that people expected of him. But I don’t think it’s too much to ask that the new Speaker be someone who doesn’t repeatedly try and push for amnesty.
First make sure the New Speaker isn’t being blackmailed by the Left. Might want to check that first.
Until the Right fully and collectively adopts the full-spectrum Marxist-method activism that’s necessary to solve social preconditions at minimum, political action that’s confined to electoral politics will be insufficient.
“I came to Washington to fight for a smaller, less costly and more accountable government.”
He failed on all three counts.
“I’m not a “burn it down” nihilist type who thinks all destruction is necessarily good because something better will replace it.”
Wait. What?
Nihilists aren’t hopeful.
Also:
““I came to Washington to fight for a smaller, less costly and more accountable government.””
To be fair, he did say fight for, not accomplish.
An accountant isn’t paid to fight for a smaller, less costly and accountable government. An accountant is paid to obey his orders and deal with the books the way he is told to deal with it.
Someone who thinks he is fighting while kissing up to Demoncrat traitors is more an accountant than a warrior.
Exhibit A:
Exhibit B:
Exhibit C:
Paging Mr. Whittle … Mr. Bill Whittle … Red, white, and blue courtesy phone…