On the other hand, he became Speaker in the wake of the 2010 Tea Party wave. Tea Partiers hate Boehner almost as much as they do President Obama, probably because he's coloured, too. The House freshmen, working closely with Majority Leader Eric Cantor (who has been openly lusting after the speakership himself) have frustrated virtually everything Boehner has wanted to do.
His rhetoric aside, John Boehner comes from a pre-Tea Party era when Washington wasn't completely insane. He's an operator who knows that the most effective way to get things done is to cut deals, especially when the opposition party controls the White House. But because the freshman class is so large, he's effectively at its mercy, much like Newt Gingrich was before him. If Boehner makes deals that he believes are good for the country, he faces the prospect of the same kind of revolts that Gingrich did in mid-1997 and late 1998.
If you ever wondered why he's crying all the fucking time, now you know. John Boehner might be the first Speaker to effectively not have any real power. And don't think that the Obama White House hasn't noticed this. Over the last year they've learned that deals with Boehner are meaningless because he can't sell them to his own caucus, so they ignore him completely.
One of the most powerful actors in the Tea Party effort to undermine Boehner has been Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan. Ryan Lizza helpfully detailed that in The New Yorker a couple of weeks before Ryan was selected to be Mitt Romney's vice presidential nominee.
Whatever benefit the White House had seen in raising Ryan’s profile, his increasing power, and his credibility as the leading authority on conservative fiscal policy, soon made his imprimatur essential for any Republican trying to reach a compromise with Democrats. Ryan helped scuttle three deals on the budget. He had served on the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission but refused to endorse its final proposal, in December, 2010. When deficit negotiations moved from the failed commission to Congress, Ryan stuck with the extreme faction of the G.O.P. caucus, which withheld support from any of the leading bipartisan plans. In the summer of 2011, when a group of Democratic and Republican senators, known as the Gang of Six, produced their own agreement, Ryan’s detailed criticism helped sink it. And, also that summer, during high-level talks between the White House and Republican leaders, Cantor and Ryan reportedly pressured Boehner to reject a potential deal with President Obama.Say what you will about Paul Ryan, but he's an incredibly canny politician. Even as Tea Partiers increasingly look at Cantor with suspicion, they can't get enough of Ryan's insane supply-side economics,"aw shucks" charm, angel blue eyes and dynamically cut abs. Ryan made a very deliberate bet early on that the future of the GOP was with the Tea Party, and if Boehner had to be humiliated to usher that future forward, well, you need to break some eggs to make an omelet.
Ryan had aligned himself with Cantor and the self-proclaimed Young Guns, who made life miserable for Boehner, their nominal leader. They were the most enthusiastic supporters of the Ryan plan, while Boehner had publicly criticized it. Cantor’s aides quietly promoted stories about Boehner’s alleged squishiness on issues dear to conservatives, and encouraged Capitol Hill newspapers to consider the idea that Cantor would one day replace Boehner. As the Republican negotiations with the White House fizzled in the summer of 2011, Barry Jackson, Boehner’s chief of staff and a veteran of the Bush White House and Republican politics, blamed not just Cantor, who in media accounts of the failed deal often plays the role of villain, but Ryan as well.
“That’s what Cantor and Ryan want,” Jackson told a group of Republican congressmen, according to Robert Draper’s recent book, “Do Not Ask What Good We Do.” “They see a world where it’s Mitch McConnell”—as Senate Majority Leader—“Speaker Cantor, a Republican President, and then Paul Ryan can do whatever he wants to do. It’s not about this year. It’s about getting us to 2012, defeating the President, and Boehner being disgraced.”
It's impossible for anyone, including the Speaker, to ignore the ball-washing that Ryan has received from the national media over the last five days. Everyone's been told that young Paul worked at McDonalds and drove the Oscar Meyer "weinermobile" after the death of his father, but it isn't often pointed out that he comes from a very wealthy family. Running relentlessly on Obama's "You didn't build that" gaffe, most people would be shocked to learn that the Ryan family business was heavily dependant on government contracts. Fox News and even CNN haven't reported that Ryan repeatedly sought Obama stimulus money, even as he voted and vigorously demagogued against it.
Then there's Chairman Ryan's dissonance with Mitt Romney's own positions, none of which are being touted by the Goddamned Liberal Media. Just three months ago, Romney seemingly
endorsed a constitutional amendment requiring the president to have at least three years experience "in business."
Carefully left out of the narrative by almost everyone is the fact that Paul Ryan has a grand total of one year's experience in business, with his family firm, which he only took as "resume padding" after he'd already decided to run for Congress. Yes, Ryan is only running for vice-president, but Romney's own metric for his running mate is whether he's "ready to be president on Day One."
Romney is on the record as saying that the Simpson-Bowles Commission as the model for deficit and debt reduction. What isn't widely reported is that Ryan was on the commission and was singularly responsible for killing it.
Explaining that takes some getting into the weeds, so forgive me.
The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform was originally supposed to be a creation of Congress. A majority vote on its findings would then be introduced for a "clean vote" - without amendments and bypassing a Senate filibuster. But then even the six Republicans who sponsored the creation of the commission (including John McCain) voted against it in final passage. Obama responded by creating it by Executive Order.
The Romney campaign has repeatedly tagged Obama for "killing" Simpson-Bowles. While it's true that Obama didn't send the report to Congress on his own, there's very little reason that he should have. Firstly, it wouldn't have been a clean vote and would've been tied up for months and loaded down with poison pill amendments. Second, the final Commission vote - engineered largely by Ryan - telegraphed that there would be no Republican support for it. Why then would the President tie up his agenda for months on an item that he was destined to be humiliated on? Does any president knowingly do that?
Ryan's voting record on the Bush programs that created the massive debt America faces and are, even today, driving forces of the deficit is being studiously ignored by conservatives. From 2001 through the end 2008, if something cost a shitload of money and wasn't paid for, Paul Ryan voted for it. Like the overwhelming majority of Republicans, he only became a fiscal hawk on January 20, 2009. It was only on that day, precisely at noon, that people like Ryan determined that America was in a fiscal death spiral.
I've been arguing about the Troubled Asset Relief Program with Tea Party types for almost four years now, which is entertaining because what they don't know about the 2008 financial panic is virtually all-encompassing. The Tea Party, as a general rule, blames the Great Recession on Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. This displays an impressive level of either ignorance, dishonesty, or both.
Fannie and Freddie date back to the Depression and the CRA was 30 years old when everything went to shit. Truly bad things didn't start happening in the real estate market until about 2002. Furthermore, the government didn't create NINJA (No Income, No Job or Assets) loans, the banks did. Nor did the government force the investment banks to buy those loans from commercial banks and mortgage brokers and securitize them into highly complex financial instruments, which they subsequently traded among themselves, sold to the wider market and (in some cases) bet against with credit default swaps even as they sold them.
Having said that, Alan Greenspan did encourage poor folks to buy adjustable-rate mortgages ... months before raising the prime rate in 2004. But Greenspan hadn't previously been painted as the Voice of Liberal America and a stalwart of government intervention. Unless, that is, investment banks and hedge funds needed bailing out, as they repeatedly did during Clinton Administration and the many Mexican, Asian and Russian currency crises. Greenspan was a driving force behind those bailouts.
The financial sector would have taken a huge hit in the event of a mortgage meltdown, but it wouldn't have faced the possibility of a complete meltdown absent their own trading and leveraging practices.
Lehman Brothers went down on September 15, 2008. By then it was clear that AIG, which issued the credit default swaps that the banks used as a hedge on their wildly over-leveraged trades, was on the brink of collapse. Merrill Lynch was within days of falling apart, which would have precipitated a systemic annihilation of the banking sector. As it is, even Iceland was bankrupted by that mess, almost entirely due to banking practices pioneered in the United States.
I couldn't agree more with the premise of "the creative destruction of the marketplace" but to this day, no Tea Partier has been able to adequately explain to me how you maintain a modern civilization without a financial services industry. And everyone who knows anything about anything has said that the entire market would have been utterly destroyed absent TARP. It was just like the domino theory of communism, except that it was actually real and imminent.
In the most backhanded way possible, John Boehner wants to remind the Tea Party base just how responsible Paul Ryan was in voting for TARP.
VAN SUSTEREN, FOX News: People think of him as hawkish on the budget, on expenses, but he voted for TARP. He voted for the auto bailout, voted for two stimulus in '08, voted against the '09 -- February '09 President Obama stimulus. How does -- I mean, how does he explain those, or I mean, how does -- politically, how does he sell that?Turns out that Boehner isn't as politically helpless as I thought. This is a truly impressive use of a strategically-placed sharp elbow that I seriously didn't think that John had in him.
BOEHNER: I mean, I think that he's a practical conservative. He's got a very conservative voting record, but he's not a knuckle-dragger, all right? He understood that TARP, while none of us wanted to do it, if we were going to save -- save our economy, save the world economy, it had to happen. I wish we didn't have to do it, either, but he understood that.
As a matter of fact, it's brilliant in that it places Ryan (and by extension, Romney, who was also for TARP before he was against it) in the very bad place of having to explain to his knuckle-dragging base why he voted for TARP, while delicately trying to rationalize why they aren't knuckle-draggers for opposing it.
Within hours of making that remark, it was clear that Boehner had pissed off all the right people.
The fact is that you can't rationalize Ryan's pre-2009 record with his current status as Tea Party messiah, any more than you can Romney's. Yes, the pandering and whorish Republicans at the top of the ticket are going to make every effort to make whatever twists and turns of logic they deem necessary to do so, but Speaker Boehner isn't going to make it easy for them.
Like Obama, Boehner seems to have finally understood that you just can't work with these people. And if you can't work with them, you need to destroy them before they destroy you. Romney said as recently as this past Sunday that Ryan would be his Man on the Hill, and interesting idea given that the Chairman has passed a grand total of two bills in his thirteen years there. Don't get me wrong, if you want a post office renamed or philosophically like the idea of cheaper arrows, Paul Ryan is your guy. Otherwise, making him your de facto legislative affairs director can be construed as nothing less than a diminishment of Boehner's role as Speaker.
Tea Partiers, without any substantive evidence whatsoever to back them up, believe that the selection of Paul Ryan is the beginning of the Obama presidency's Götterdämmerung.
The Speaker pretty clearly believes otherwise. In my opinion, he knows as well as I do that Romney is going to lose, and quite possibly lose badly. While Ryan won't likely be held responsible by the public (or even the Tea Party movement, who would joyfully blame Mitt) for that loss, it will almost certainly diminish his influence in the House, particularly since this election is now going to be fought entirely on his ideas. Once Ryan gets taken down several notches by a doomed campaign, Eric Cantor - the real threat to Boehner's continued tenure - becomes much easier to contain.
The Romney and Ryan budget plans are a sad fucking joke. They blow giant multi-trillion holes - even bigger than the ones Bush and Obama did - into the budget over their first decade and neither approaches balance for decades afterwards. The fact that the Tea Party believes so strongly in them tells you everything you need to know about the Tea Party.
Boehner isn't going to say this out loud, but I think he knows (as I do) that he's much more likely to get a rational plan that balances the budget in a much shorter time frame from Obama than he is from Romney and Ryan. The same is true of meaningful tax reform. If the Ryan plan is seen among the professionals in the House as being instrumental to losing this election, it becomes much easier for Boehner to move him out of his chairmanship.
You know why Obama-Biden 2012 has very carefully avoided mentioning John Boehner by name? Because they know it, too. They know that while the Romney ticket was almost born to lose, the Democrats' chances of winning back the House are almost zero. It would therefore stand to reason that they would prefer a Speaker Boehner to a Speaker Cantor in the aftermath of the election. And discrediting the fiscal fantasies of the Tea Party are in the interest of Obama and Boehner.
This might be an overly broad and possibly racist assertion, but it might just be that orange people have a built-in survival mechanism that other humans lack. Lindsay Lohan clearly has it, and so apparently does John Boehner.
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