Speaker of the House John Boehner may have taken a forgive and forget attitude toward conservative rebels who tried to unseat him, but that won’t strengthen his position in his own caucus, nor will it assuage the anger many conservative members feel with regard to Boehner’s performance in recent weeks.
One Boehner ally, recently retired Rep. Steve LaTourette, called conservatives “asinine” for trying to oust Boehner, and suggested the rebels should be thrown out of the Republican conference.
“I think it’s ridiculous,” LaTourette said. “They should kick them all out of the Republican conference … I don’t know what their objective is. If it was to deny the speakership to Boehner and hand it to Mrs. Pelosi, I don’t know how their cause would have been furthered. If it’s to force the vote to a second ballot to make some demands, well, who the hell do these people think they are? Twelve out of 233, and they’re making demands? That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
LaTourette said Boehner had resisted the urge to retaliate against members who undermined the legislative process, but he has grown frustrated with lawmakers who don’t appear to have much interest in legislating.
After conservatives defeated Boehner’s “Plan B” tax bill, the Speaker told members they were sending him into negotiations with the Senate and White House “naked.”
LaTourette also said Boehner felt “betrayed” when Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) voted against the final deal on tax rates. The threat of a bigger conservative rebellion prompted him to pull relief funding for Hurricane Sandy off the floor just after the tax vote.
“He had expended a lot of political capital to get the 85 votes [on the fiscal-cliff deal], and he felt a little betrayed that the other members of the elected leadership walked on him,” LaTourette told The Atlantic. “And the last piece was, as you saw during the Speaker election, this sort of insurrection was forming against him. There was a fear that if he put $60 billion, no matter how worthy, of unpaid-for emergency spending on the floor, the insurrection would become bigger than it was.”
Perhaps the most lasting damage done from the attempt to deny Boehner re-election is the appearance of weakness in Boehner’s position. Bottom line: the party leader does not have control of his party. John Podhoretz, writing in the New York Post, explains:
Then came talk that Boehner should be fired as speaker of the House when the time came to vote in the new speaker yesterday afternoon. Yet none of the insurgents was brave enough to stand against him; instead, a bunch of them cast nonsense votes for someone else or refused to vote at all.
In so doing, they came close to handing Boehner a humiliating and entirely destructive defeat — forcing a second ballot and leaving their own party leader critically injured. They seemed to crave disorder.
This is how people who are more comfortable on the margins than in the middle of things behave. This is cannibalism, not political combat. This is unreason, not reason. This is temper, not temperament.
This is anarchism, not conservatism.
Boehner could only convince 85 out of 241 Republicans to vote for the fiscal cliff deal. He couldn’t count on his caucus to vote in favor of an aid package for hurricane victims. True, it was a flawed bill with pork galore stuffed into its $60 billion worth of spending. But a practical, competent party leader would have been able to ram it through anyway in order to avoid the public relations disaster that followed.
His partner in the GOP leadership, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, voted against the fiscal cliff deal. How that will affect their relationship going forward is unknown, although Cantor was very careful not to make the vote a challenge to Boehner’s leadership. Cantor wisely chose not to challenge Boehner’s re-election, but he may be beginning to chafe under Boehner’s uncertain leadership. And with battles over the debt limit and more fiscal cliff votes ahead, cracks in the GOP leadership team will only help Obama and the Democrats.
Conservatives in the House are tolerating Boehner’s leadership at the moment. But the revolt can be reignited at any time if the speaker fails again in standing up to the Democrats on taxes, spending, and the debt limit. At bottom, his performance must improve, else he will be unable to carry the Republican conference with him, making his speakership nearly irrelevant.
“LaTourette said Boehner had resisted the urge to retaliate against members who undermined the legislative process”
I forget–do the Congressmen hold their district fiefs from Boehner in fee simple, Grand serjeanty, or petty sergeanty?
A weak leader is never followed, he is often stalked, however.
The Republican Party is comprised of a number of people who don’t exactly know what they want, who are opposed by the few who do…who are completely incapable of explaining it to the country.
Republicans do their best fighting when they are tearing each other to pieces and airing their dirty laundry in front of a propagandist press in the pocket and as an arm of their sworn enemies.
Republicans run for high office by refusing to hit Obama too hard for fear of a negative reaction by the people who like him…because they don’t know the very things that Republicans refuse to touch upon. The great news is, Republicans have absolutely no such rule when they tear apart other Republicans.
The Republican Party is made up of Republicans in Name Only and those remaining who don’t even want the name associated with them.
According to a small, but very loud segment of conservatives…the 92% of the Republican Party that qualifies as Republicans in Name Only for their stances on a variety of issues…with which voters absolutely recoil…should leave so that the 8% can lose the elections in harmony. At least they know what they want. To give the country completely to the small c communists.
If messaging was sex, Republicans would all be virgins or eunuchs.
After trotting the B Team out onto the field in a humiliating preliminary season, the Republicans got so tired of fumbling that their best play was to take a knee. It’s nice to see that they have now decided to go down on both in order to service the radical leftists who are destroying the country and that the weakest of them are no longer even pretending to protest the act.
Infighting shows the Republicans as “tough” as they butch up with each other. Hitting with their purses is the only thing they can do with them, now that the communists have completely emptied them.
What exactly has John Boehner ever done other than strut around and then
cave. He managed to totally fritter away the 2010 surge.
He may be a swell fellow but the world is filled with wonderful but
incompetent humans. He wept his way into the speakership and will now cooperate
with the President until a monumental financial crisis (hopefully) sweeps our
rulers into oblivion.
John Boehner is, quite simply, a poor leader. Steve LaTourette is a petty tyrant. This isn’t the military, Congressmen aren’t sworn to obey the orders of those appointed over them. They are not vassals. They are sovereign men and women, chosen by other sovereign men and women to represent them. Even in the military leadership by command is difficult, you end up having to outsmart everyone under you lest they do what you told them to do rather than what you wanted them to do, and you make stupid mistakes because those under you with more experience cannot or will not give you the benefit of their experience. Boehner has three choices for dealing with the recalcitrant members of the caucus. He can dialogue with them, convince them why his course of action is best and modify that course based on their input, and recognize that some people simply cannot be convinced; he can simply cave to their demands and become the meat puppet of the caucus; or he can resign and allow the Republicans to find a person who better represents their position.
Cry me a river for Boehner…
The GOP just passed the first tax increases in like 20 years under Boners leadership. Yeah, that’s something we all ought to get behind, right LaTourette?
One thing that the Dems do actually perform better at than Republicans is solidarity, for better or worse…We needed the Republicans to apply the brakes together. Boehner didn’t.
“True, it was a flawed bill with pork galore stuffed into its $60 billion worth of spending. But a practical, competent party leader would have been able to ram it through anyway in order to avoid the public relations disaster that followed.”
Really?
Try a Competent Party Leader would have been able to trim the Nonsense out of the bill BEFORE putting it before his caucus!
…..
There are 2 kinds of Republican Voters
1) Those who will Elect Republicans for the Sole Purpose of Electing Republicans
2) Those who will Elect Republicans for the purpose of Accomplishing Something.
Type 1 are who got us in the mess we’re in in the first place
Thanks to the Tea Party type 1 are finally having to deal with type 2.
“Conservatives in the House are tolerating Boehner’s leadership for the moment.”
What leadership? The right word is capitulation, or better yet, treason. Boehner is worse than useless.
What happened to the collaborators after WWII (or any other war)?
“Conservatives in the House” might want to start thinking about that.
Podhoretz, Boehner and Lincoln are the reason why the Republican Party must be destroyed, then an honorable opposition may be formulated.
– Praised by Press (just for a day), McClintock attacked for not compromising.