John Boehner, House Speaker, Will Resign From Congress

NY TIMES

Speaker John A. Boehner, an Ohio barkeeper’s son who rode a conservative wave to one of the highest positions in government, said Friday he would relinquish his gavel and resign from Congress, undone by the very Republicans who swept him into power.

Mr. Boehner, 65, made the announcement in an emotional meeting with his fellow Republicans on Friday morning as lawmakers struggled to avert a government shutdown next week, a possibility made less likely by his decision

His downfall again highlighted the sinewy power of a Republican Party faction whose anthem is often to oppose government action. It also made vivid the increasingly precarious nature of a job in which the will and proclivities of a politically divisive body must be managed. No House speaker since Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., who held the gavel from 1977 to 1986, has left the job willingly.

For Mr. Boehner, who has been pressured throughout his tenure to push for deeper spending cuts and more aggressive policy changes than were possible with President Obama in the White House, seemed both exhausted by the fight and yet at peace with his final move: to leave rather than face a potentially humiliating fight within his party.

Most recently, Mr. Boehner was trying to devise a solution to keep the government open through the rest of the year, but was under pressure from conservatives who told him that they would not vote for a bill that provided funding for Planned Parenthood.

Mr. Boehner’s announcement lessened the chance of a government shutdown because Republican leaders joined by Democrats will almost certainly go forward with a short-term funding measure to keep the government operating, and the speaker will no longer be deterred by those who threatened his job.



Mr. Boehner said he would leave at the end of October. The leading candidate to replace him is Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the majority leader, [above] who is viewed more favorably by the House’s more conservative members both for his willingness to bend to their will and for his cheerful manner. The preferred candidate among many Republicans, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, has said he does not want the job.

Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader in the House, learned about Mr. Boehner’s resignation when she read a breaking news alert on a staff member’s phone. “God knows what’s next over there,” she told staff members. Ms. Pelosi, who had been privately negotiating on a plan to keep the government open, told reporters that Mr. Boehner’s resignation was “a stark indication of the disarray of House Republicans.”

With antigovernment fervor helping to prompt Mr. Boehner’s decision, several candidates for the Republican presidential nomination were quick to try to capitalize on the animus. At the Family Research Council’s Values Voter Summit, which was taking place a few blocks from the Capitol, many jumped to their feet and cheered when Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, announced that Mr. Boehner was resigning.

Addressing reporters after his remarks at the conservative summit meeting, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas spoke harshly of Mr. Boehner.

“If it is correct that the speaker, before he resigns, has cut a deal with Nancy Pelosi to fund the Obama administration for the rest of this year, to fund Obamacare, to fund executive amnesty, to fund Planned Parenthood, to fund implementation of this Iran deal, and then presumably to land a cushy K Street job after joining with the Democrats to implement all of President Obama’s priorities, that is not the behavior one would expect from a Republican speaker of the House.”

THE SHUTDOWN & DEBT CEILING: CRACKS I/T PAVEMENT?

N.Y. TIMES

House Republicans, increasingly isolated from even some of their strongest supporters more than a week into a government shutdown, began to consider a path out of the fiscal impasse that would raise the debt ceiling for a few weeks as they press for a broader deficit reduction deal.

That approach could possibly set aside the fight over the new health care law, which prompted the shutdown and which some Republicans will be reluctant to abandon.

In a meeting with the most ardent House conservatives, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, laid out a package focused on an overhaul of Medicare and a path toward a comprehensive simplification of the tax code.

“We’re more in the ideas stage right now,” said Representative Jack Kingston, Republican of Georgia and a senior member of the Appropriations Committee. “There is a developing consensus that this is a lot bigger than an Obamacare discussion.”

 

At the same time, Congressional leaders from both parties began some preliminary discussions aimed at reopening the government and raising the statutory borrowing limit. And President Obama, who invited House Democrats on Wednesday, asked all House Republicans to the White House on Thursday, an invitation Speaker John A. Boehner whittled down to a short list of attendees he wants to negotiate a compromise.

Democrats showed their own cracks. Twenty-six House Democrats planned to attend a bipartisan event on Thursday morning with the group No Labels, calling for negotiations to start immediately, a challenge to the president and to Democratic leaders who say they will not negotiate until the government reopens and the debt ceiling is lifted.

In the meeting with House Democrats on Wednesday evening, Mr. Obama held firm to his stated intention to negotiate with Republicans only after the government is reopened and the debt ceiling is raised. He told Democrats that if he gives in now, Republican demands would be endless. “The only thing not on their list is my own resignation,” he told Democrats, according to a lawmaker in the room.

With the impact of the shutdown starting to intensify, House Republicans were taking criticism from some of their longtime backers. Business groups demanded the immediate reopening of the government, and benefactors like Koch Industries publicly distanced themselves from the shutdown fight.

Republicans acknowledged the pressure is mounting on them. On Wednesday, the National Retail Federation joined other reliably Republican business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers in asking House Republicans to relent.

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Members suggested they could get behind a lifting of the debt ceiling for several weeks to allow Republicans to unite around a deficit reduction and tax overhaul package.

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But, [the conservative Republican Study Committee leader, Representative Steve Scalise, Republican of Louisiana ] said, even that should have spending cuts attached. He also said that a debt-ceiling increase of even three weeks should include a measure passed by the House denying federal subsidies to congressmen, White House officials and their staff members, who already must buy health insurance on the Affordable Care Act’s new exchanges. And, he suggested, conservatives might insist on another House bill that would allow the Treasury to borrow enough money to pay off debts as they become due, taking away the threat of a government default.

All of those measures would be stiffly resisted by Senate Democrats and the White House.

 

Still, lawmakers did appear to be looking for a way forward after days of simply staring at one another....Mr. Obama invited all House Republicans to a get-together on Thursday. Mr. Boehner saw a meeting between the president and 232 Republicans as a photo opportunity with no chance of producing substantive discussions. So he reduced the invitation list to 18. That will at least give the appearance of negotiations if it fails to prompt actual substantive talks.

REBOOBLICAN SABOTAGE

Chuck Todd

GREG SARGENT WASHINGTON POST

It’s not unusual to hear dirty hippie liberal blogger types (and the occasional lefty Nobel Prize winner) point out that today’s GOP has effectively abdicated the role of functional opposition party, instead opting for a kind of post-policy nihilism in which sabotaging the Obama agenda has become its only guiding governing light.
But when you hear this sort of argument coming from Chuck Todd, the mild-mannered, well respected Beltway insider, it should prompt folks to take notice.
That’s essentially what Todd, along with Mark Murray and the rest of MSNBC’s First Read crew, argued this morning. It’s worth quoting at length:

Here’s a thought exercise on this summer morning: Imagine that after the controversial Medicare prescription-drug legislation was passed into law in 2003, Democrats did everything they could to thwart one of George W. Bush’s top domestic achievements. They launched Senate filibusters to block essential HHS appointees from administering the law; they warned the sports and entertainment industries from participating in any public service announcements to help seniors understand how the law works; and, after taking control of the House of Representatives in 2007, they used the power of the purse to prohibit any more federal funds from being used to implement the law. As it turns out, none of that happened. And despite Democratic warnings that the law would be a bust — we remember the 2004 Dem presidential candidates campaigning against it — the Medicare prescription-drug law has been, for the most part, a pretty big success.
But that thought exercise has become a reality 10 years later as Republicans have worked to thwart/stymie/sabotage — pick your word — the implementation of President Obama’s health-care and financial-reform laws.
Recently, the top-two Senate Republicans — Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn — wrote a letter to the NFL and other major sports leagues warning them not to participate in any campaign to promote implementation of Obamacare. The Koch Brothers-backed Americans for Prosperity is in unchartered waters running TV ads to help prevent the law from being implemented, while the Obama political arm is also on the air promoting implementation. And Senate Republicans have vowed to filibuster any nominee (no matter how qualified) to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under the financial-reform law. [...]
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And this all raises the question: What’s the line between fighting for your ideology and ensuring that the government that pays your salaries actually works — or even attempts to work? At some point, governing has to take place, but when does that begin? We know what opponents will say in response to this: These are bad laws, and we have to do whatever it takes to stop them. But at what point does an election have a governing consequence?
For more on that effort by top Republicans to warn the NFL off of participating in any campaign to promote Obamacare, see Jonathan Bernstein’s piece



This from MSNBC’s First Read crew is very well said. But I’d take it further; it goes well beyond Obamacare implementation and the relentless blockading of Obama nominees for the explicit purpose of preventing democratically-created agencies from functioning. We’ve slowly crossed over into something a bit different. It’s now become accepted as normal that Republicans will threaten explicitly to allow harm to the country to get what they want, and will allow untold numbers of Americans to be hurt rather than even enter into negotiations over the sort of compromises that lie at the heart of basic governing.

Sam Stein’s big piece today details the very real toll the sequester cuts are taking on real people across the country, and crucially, it explains that the sequester was deliberately designed to threaten harm in order to compel lawmakers to act to reduce the deficit. But Republicans will not consider replacing those cuts with anything other than 100 percent in cuts elsewhere, which is to say, they will only consider replacing them with 100 percent of what they want.



Meanwhile, Republicans are drawing up a list of spending cuts they will demand in exchange for raising the debt limit, even though John Boehner has openly admitted that default would do untold damage to the U.S. economy. Indeed, even if default doesn’t end up happening, the threat of it risks damaging the economy, yet Republicans still insist they will use it as leverage to get what they want, anyway.

As Todd and the First Read crew hint at, the GOP campaign against Obamacare is straying into this mode of governing. Indeed, on Meet the Press this weekend, Todd made this even more explicit, accusing Republicans of “trying to sabotage the law.” The current GOP campaign isn’t just about opposing the Affordable Care Act or arguing for its repeal. It’s about making it harder for uninsured Americans to gain access to coverage under a law passed and signed by a democratically elected Congress and President, and upheld by the Supreme Court, in service of the political goal of making it a greater liability for Democrats in the 2014 elections (the law, after all, isn’t going to get repealed)

.This is not typical opposition, and its good to hear this stated outright by someone as respected inside the Beltway as Chuck Todd. The only mystery is why more journalists aren’t willing to point it out. After all, Republicans are making this basic reality harder and harder to ignore

OBAMA SAVED BUT BOEHNER MAY NOT BE IN REBOOBLICAN IMPLOSION

With his customary shrug and a grin, Mr. Boehner plainly acknowledged what the world already knew — he had failed to get enough Republicans to sign off on a deal to avoid automatic tax increases and spending cuts, and his members once again had left him standing nearly alone, like a man without a date to his own wedding, and at the crossroads of his career....Mr. Boehner risked his speakership with the vote this week, something he professed to be unconcerned with.


PAUL KRUGMAN, NY TIMES   12/20/12

A few years back, there was a boom in poker television — shows in which you got to watch the betting and bluffing of expert card players. Since then, however, viewers seem to have lost interest. But I have a suggestion: Instead of featuring poker experts, why not have a show featuring poker incompetents — people who fold when they have a strong hand or don’t know how to quit while they’re ahead?

 

On second thought, that show already exists. It’s called budget negotiations, and it’s now in its second episode.

 

The first episode ran in 2011, as President Obama made his first attempt to cut a long-run fiscal deal — a so-called Grand Bargain — with John Boehner, the speaker of the House. Mr. Obama was holding a fairly weak hand, after a midterm election in which Democrats took a beating. Nonetheless, the concessions he offered were breathtaking: He was willing to accept huge spending cuts, not to mention a rise in the Medicare eligibility age, in return for a vague promise of higher revenue without any increase in tax rates.

 

This deal, if implemented, would have been a huge victory for Republicans, deeply damaging both programs dear to Democrats and the Democratic political brand. But it never happened. Why?

 

Because Mr. Boehner and members of his party couldn’t bring themselves to accept even a modest rise in taxes. And their intransigence saved Mr. Obama from himself.

 

Now the game is on again — but with Mr. Obama holding a far stronger hand. He and his party won a solid victory in this year’s election. And the legislative clock is very much in their favor, too. All the Bush tax cuts are scheduled to expire at the end of the month.

 

A brief digression: I’ve become aware of a new effort by the G.O.P. to bully reporters into referring only to the “Bush-era” tax cuts, probably in the hope of dissociating those cuts, which they want to preserve, from a president voters now regard with disdain. But George W. Bush and his administration devised those cuts and rammed them through Congress, and it’s deceptive to suggest otherwise.

 

Back to the poker game: The president doesn’t hold all the cards — there are some things he and fellow Democrats want, like extended unemployment benefits and infrastructure spending, that they can’t get without some Republican cooperation. But he is in a very strong position.

 

Yet earlier this week progressives suddenly had the sinking feeling that it was 2011 all over again, as the Obama administration made a budget offer that, while far better than the disastrous deal it was willing to make the last time around, still involved giving way on issues where it had promised to hold the line — perpetuating a substantial portion of the high-income Bush tax cuts, effectively cutting Social Security benefits by changing the inflation adjustment.

 

And this was an offer, not a deal. Are we about to see another round of the president negotiating with himself, snatching policy and political defeat from the jaws of victory? Well, probably not. Once again, the Republican crazies — the people who can’t accept the idea of ever voting to raise taxes on the wealthy, never mind either fiscal or economic reality — have saved the day.

 

We don’t know exactly why Mr. Boehner didn’t respond to the president’s offer with a real counteroffer and instead offered something ludicrous — a “Plan B” that, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, would actually raise taxes for a number of lower- and middle-income families, while cutting taxes for almost half of those in the top 1 percent. The effect, however, has to have been to disabuse the Obama team of any illusions that they were engaged in good-faith negotiations.

 

Mr. Boehner had evident problems getting his caucus to support Plan B, and he took the plan off the table Thursday night; it would have modestly raised taxes on the really wealthy, the top 0.1 percent, and even that was too much for many Republicans. This means that any real deal with Mr. Obama would be met with mass G.O.P. defections; so any such deal would require overwhelming Democratic support, a fact that empowers progressives ready to bolt if they think the president is giving away too much.

 

As in 2011, then, the Republican crazies are doing Mr. Obama a favor, heading off any temptation he may have felt to give away the store in pursuit of bipartisan dreams.

 

And there’s a broader lesson here. This is no time for a Grand Bargain, because the Republican Party, as now constituted, is just not an entity with which the president can make a serious deal. If we’re going to get a grip on our nation’s problems — of which the budget deficit is a minor part — the power of the G.O.P.’s extremists, and their willingness to hold the economy hostage if they don’t get their way, needs to be broken. And somehow I don’t think that’s going to happen in the next few days.