Tag Archives: John Boehner

Politics, United States

Speaker John Boehner Set To Leave Congress

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Some huge news this Friday morning out of Washington.  Just one day after Pope Francis I made an historic speech before a Joint Session of Congress, Speaker of the House John Boehner has plans to not only relinquish his Speakership, but exit Congress altogether. Here’s the story from Jennifer Steinhauer of the New York Times…

WASHINGTON — Speaker John A. Boehner, under intense pressure from conservatives in his party, will resign one of the most powerful positions in government and give up his House seat at the end of October, throwing Congress into chaos as it tries to avert a government shutdown.

Mr. Boehner made the announcement in an emotional meeting with his fellow Republicans on Friday morning.

The Ohio representative had struggled from almost the moment he took the speaker’s gavel in 2011 to manage the challenges of divided government and to hold together his fractious and increasingly conservative Republican members.

Most recently, Mr. Boehner was trying to craft a solution to keep the government open through the rest of the year, but was under pressure from a growing base of conservatives who told him that they would not vote for a bill that did not defund Planned Parenthood. Several of those members were on a path to remove Mr. Boehner as speaker, though their ability to do so was far from certain.

John Boehner has represented Ohio’s Eighth Congressional District since 1990.

From an interesting statement from one of the Speaker’s spokesmen, it appears that the Fringe Right in Congress was already trying to force him out.

Whether one agrees with Bohener on most issues or not, there’s little doubt that having him in charge of the Republican majority was likely the best possible scenario to avoid a government shutdown. Congress has until September 30th to come up with a fiscal plan that will carry the Federal Government through to the next year.  As we know from past experience, most of the GOP members of Congress love to shutdown the government, and even consider it an accomplishment.  At least, until their constituents show up with pitch forks demanding to receive their hard-earned paychecks.

Hold on to your seats folks.

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Houston Politics

Coalition EXPOSED: Post Cliff, The House GOP’s new reality

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Well, now we know. Thanks to tireless work on behalf of Vice President Biden, President Obama, and Congressional leaders, the big bad Fiscal Cliff was officially averted. After a rousing show of Senate Bi-Partisanship, the ‘Fiscal Deal’ was also approved by the House 257-167.

Most pundits today are talking about the deal, and about how “disappointed” they are, or about how “terrible it was for the country. But I’m actually very VERY happy about last night’s House vote. It may have been the best gift ever delivered to the Obama administration, and to the country. Here’s why…

All but 16 Democrats voted for the bill, and that’s as expected because Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has a great relationship with her caucus. We all knew that Speaker John Boehner’s caucus was split, with a majority of them oppsing him at every turn. But what we didn’t know until last night, was exactly where those fault lines lie.

Now we do.

Boehner’s decision to cave and bring the bill to a clean vote was a total game-changer for the White House and for Democrats. Of the 257 yes votes, 85 of them were Republicans. This is it!! This is the group of people that actually listen to the Speaker, and most importantly, are willing to listen to others and put country before party. The official roll call tells this tale like the best of political novels. For the first time since the “Hastert rule” was enacted, a party caucus was knowingly split up by its leadership. As a result, we now see the House GOP for what it really is… a two-party coalition in which John Boehner is actually part of the minority. On one side, you’ve got roughly 150 members that grab all of the attention, and on the other side you have 85 members that want to WORK. 85 members that are (at least briefly) capable of putting the interests of the country above the sanctity of their party.

Many of those members are what you’d expect… blue state Republicans like New Hampshire’s Charlie Bass, or those that have their eye on future offices like Illinois’ Aaron Schock, knowing that bipartisanship is a necessary step were he to run for Governor or Senator of a bifurcated state. And some of them were just people that actually respect Speaker Boehner’s leadership and trust the decision of the caucus… the “old school” politicians. After 3 years of the Tea Partiers hogging the spotlight, we were suddenly reminded that the GOP isn’t completely over-taken… at least not yet.

Now sure, out of those 85 some of them would never do this again. They would never join up with Democrats to help the President. But there’s likely a good 40 to 50 of them that the public can now target to get our government in the right direction again. And as long as Boehner keeps his Speakership in the 113th, Congress will be able to pass important things like Immigration reform and simplification to the tax code.

Republicans and Democrats will always have differences, but we shouldn’t be so far apart that we would allow our country to go to ruins. Sadly, that faction is alive and well within the GOP… some of them care nothing more for the well-being of the United States as long as their narrow viewpoint is advanced. But what we learned on the first night of 2013? That’s not all of them. There are still reasonable, hard-working, SANE people in Congress that want this country to succeed, and are willing to compromise even if they don’t always agree with the views of others. There’s still people in the House of Represenatatives that want to legislate, and not just waste people’s time.

In normal voting procedure, the Speaker of the House does not actually cast a vote. But sometimes, when they think it’s needed (like then Speaker Nancy Pelosi casting a vote for the Affordable Care Act), they will vote. Last night, Speaker Boehner cast a vote, eventhough he knew that enough of the other members of the caucus would join Democrats. He knew the bill would pass, but he voted anyway. Why would the Speaker do that?

If I were a betting man, I’d say that Boehner’s vote was a signal. He’s communicating to the President and Senate that he’s one of the “good guys”. Or at least that he’d like to be.

But in order to be a truly good guy, Mr. Boehner needs one other thing… COURAGE. One vote is simply not enough to save the reputation of the 112th Congress. And letting bills like the Violence Against Women Act and vital aid for Hurricane Sandy victims die in the House is not courageous. It’s wrong. I hope the Speaker finds more courage in the 113th Congress, and FAST.

Houston Politics

Obama’s Fiscal Cliff Opener: Game ON

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My only advice for Liberals when the Conservative blogosphere starts their crowing and whining about the Fiscal Cliff negotiations… GET USED TO IT.

After President Obama delivered his “opening bid” in the Fiscal Cliff negotiations, Republicans naturally became upset over the fact that there was not much for them to like. Conservatives from sea to shining sea will continue to feign outrage and disgust with this in an effort to scare the Left and the President into submission. They want the country to forget the 2012 elections ever occurred.

This is a test for Congressional Democrats and everyone that cares about our causes. This is ONLY a test. No matter how many threats they try to spin, Obama and Democrats are playing a new game right now. A game that is weighted by public opinion, inflated by an improving economy and mandated by the votes on November 6th. Before those on the Left consider cowering, let us be reminded of some very important facts…

1) On November 6th, the GOP lost the election. They lost eight net seats in the House. They lost 4 net seats in the Senate. They LOST the Presidency. And not only did they lose the Presidency, but they lost it on the very same issue being presented in the Fiscal Cliff talks. All polling shows that Americans want taxes for the wealthy to go up, and they don’t want to cut benefits on MedCare, MediCaid or Social Security. In other words… we want a balanced approach. So why is it an insult for the President to do what we’ve asked?

2) House Republicans may have retained control of the chamber, but only after the most aggressive gerrymandering plans in US history. Let them claim a mandate if they wish, but one can argue its strength quite easily by looking at the numbers. 3) If the House GOP feel “insulted” by Obama’s opening bid, it’s high time. The President has gotten little more than insults from this caucus since he was first sworn in… from the infamous shouting of “You Lie!” during a State of the Union address, to the constant conspiracy theories from Birthers, Truthers and whoever else-ers, to the all-out persecution of current Cabinet members Eric Holder and Susan Rice, this group of legislators have shown nothing short of contempt for the Obama Administration.

4) The clock is still ticking. The GOP now have 32 days to come to a deal, or the Bush Tax Cuts expire… never to return. If that happens, they lose all leverage on a bargain for lowering tax rates. As was said yesterday, the writing is on the wall.

For Democrats, this is the time to let the Right crow about insults and being unfair. And when the opportunity arises, simply remind them that if they really cared about insults, maybe they should have thought of the ones they started hurling in January of 2009.

New Game. New Rules. GAME ON.

Houston Politics

The ABCs of the GOP: Q is for

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Quagmire

To paraphrase from the great William Shakespeare…

Bush Tax Cuts, or Obama Tax Cuts? That is the question.

What’s in a name? That which we call a tax cut By any other name would smell as sweet.

But unfortunately for one political party, it simply doesn’t work that way. The “Bush Tax Cuts” are now much more than a name for the Republicans… they are are a legacy, and a philosophy. For the Republican party in the twenty-first century, the BUSH Tax Cuts have really been the central orb around which all Conservative fiscal policy gravitates. Lest we forget that Democrats now have greater advantage as the party of the new, more diverse America, the party of foreign policy, and the party of defending minority and women’s rights. Fiscal Conservatism is the only real game Republicans have left. Never mind that President Obama has already cut government spending by 1.5 Trillion Dollars and continues to argue for a balanced approach, proving more fiscally Conservative than his GOP predecessors. Hell or high water, Republicans believe in tax cuts. It is their Raison d’etre.

Which is why it may surprise some that House Republicans have continued to be so adamant against the President’s plan to preserve tax cuts for ALL Americans on their first $250,00 dollars of income (that’s right… EVERYONE still gets a tax cut!!). It is quite literally a chance to preserve the GOP’s false identity as the party of lower taxes and cutting spending. This is what’s important about having the name BUSH associated with TAX CUTS.

Here lies the ultimate quagmire for Republicans in the House… come January 1st, that legacy of the BUSH TAX CUTS and of Republicans being exclusively known as “the tax cut party” dies. If they don’t reach a deal to extend the BUSH Tax Cuts, they lose the name Bush forever from the measure. Any tax cuts they pass in 2013 would then be forever known as the OBAMA TAX CUTS. Talk about a tough pill to swallow… do Republicans in this really want to be remembered as the ones who created the Obama Tax Cuts??

As lawmakers, we should expect that Republicans and Democrats don’t care about nomenclature… they care about doing what’s right for the American People. But sadly, this has not been the case at all during the Obama era. The GOP fought this President’s agenda at every chance. They crippled the Senate with filibuster abuse, held the country hostage over the debt ceiling, and basically prolonged the economic Recession by refusing to make any public sector contribution to the Recovery… all in the hope of weakening President Obama, and his chances for re-election. None of it worked.

For all of that malice, November 6th was their reward. There will be no President Romney, and (barring an unprecedented catastrophy that none would hope for) no chance of any Republican taking the White House before January of 2017.

So Democrats… if you want a deal to happen before the beginning of the year that raises tax rates on the wealthy and does not cut social programs, pressure the GOP with their impossible choice. Do they extend the Bush Tax Cuts now for 98 percent of the country, or do they erase the Bush/GOP legacy and CREATE the Obama Tax Cuts later?

For the GOP, it has come to this.

Houston Politics

Change has come to “R-merica”

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Last night’s election was the culmination of a very bitter fight for survival. The GOP spent tons of capital… both political and monetary… in the hopes of destroying President Obama’s agenda, and decimating his long list of first-term accomplishments. After four long years of being a party defined by divisiveness and obstruction, they received their mandate from American voters.

CHANGE NOW, OR GET OUT.

Eventhough Republicans retained a comfortable majority in the House of Representatives, they were decisively clawed back in the Senate. And of course, President Obama roared back into the White House.

For Mitt Romney, the coming weeks will likely bring much criticism of how he ran his campaign and what all went wrong, but in reality, the GOP owes him a tremendous bit of gratitude. As the party has fractured so deeply between the idealogues and the Pro-Business wing, Romney stepped up to the plate and made the ultimate sacrifice for his party. He was the only man willing to steer the ship into what we all saw as an inevitable crash course in 2012… FAILURE.

But in doing this, he’s also helped to save Republicans from themselves too. Countless shifting political positions aside, Romney is a decent man, and he ran a good campaign. He conceded to the President with grace and helped to unite our country after a bitter fight. And most importantly, he sacrificed his time and energy so that future candidates (like Chris Christie, Paul Ryan or Marco Rubio) wouldn’t have to go down with the ship… at least not this year.

Finally now, the GOP has come face-to-face with the real change that President Obama helped to accomplish. They now have to wake up to the new realities of a more diverse nation than what they represent. This time, change is sure to happen, because the GOP no longer has a choice.

So today is a new day, and already we are seeing small signs of a new mood in Washington. Here are tweets from retiring Senator Olympia Snowe and House Speaker John Boehner.

Change indeed. Let’s just hope it lasts and that President Obama and Congress have a more productive relationship… starting with the Lame Duck session.

Houston Politics

The ABCs of the GOP: P is for…

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Partisanship… Nothing “Bi” About it

Election season is tough. Tough on the candidates, of course, but it’s also tough on everyone else. We have to deal with the barrage of political advertising, get into all sorts of vigorous discussions with our friends, watch nail-biter debates, and delve into all of the particular inner workings of government that most of us would just rather do without. But the reason that we must endure through November 6th is because this election year is just too important. Since 2010, the top priority of the Republican Party has not been to improve the lives of their constituents, but to deny President Obama a second term. No seriously!! You don’t have to take my word for it… just listen to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell…

This is the political climate which defined President Obama’s first term in office. On one side you have the Democrats, whom behaved mostly as politicians are expected to. They didn’t always vote as a block on the issues… Each Legislator brought their own personal opinions and constituent needs to influence the way they voted. And of course, Democrats were plagued by the usual scandals, which this time befell outspoken Congressman Anthony Wiener and former Governor-turned-inmate Rod Blagoyevich. But when it came to big things, Democrats were able to get some of them done, despite massive GOP roadblocks… Healthcare reform, the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, unprecedented consumer protections against bank and credit card fraud, and significant reforms for students to make paying their student loans back less of a life-long burden.

But all along the way, Democrats had to fight tooth-and-nail against an unplanned adversary… Republican partisanship. In 2009 and 2010, the Senate GOP launched an attack never seen before in all of American history. They filibustered EVERYTHING… even many bills that members once themselves sponsored and supported. The purpose of these filibusters weren’t because they believed the legislation was bad, but because any legislative accomplishment would be viewed as a positive for Barack Obama and the Democrats. So on legislation like the Dream Act… Something that has long held bi-partisan champions in the Senate, was killed as they sold their souls to the political devil to prevent any notion of American progress. They put party over country in the ultimate display of partisanship.

Finally in 2010, Republicans were able to reap some benefit from making the Democrats look bad. They won historic victories in the House, and now have a say in the legislative agenda. This historic tide came from a skilled combination of economic frustration, Anti-Democratic messaging and partisan-fueled hostility. But when Speaker John Boehner and his Republican colleagues took control of the House, the gridlock didn’t end… not by a long-shot. They wasted the time and money of the American people on useless repetitive votes, and crafted legislation that they knew would not pass the Senate. It was then that the inner workings of the GOP were exposed, and that all of the partisan firewalls were taking an immeasurable toll.

Well immeasurable in one sense, but others see the price they are paying quite clearly. President Obama even believes, as revealed in a recent Des Moines Register interview, that the careful coalition that the GOP created to win the 2010 election is the same one that could cause them to lose in 2012. The party has gone so far to alienate Hispanic voters, that it may very well help the President get re-elected. And if that happens, the coalition will surely fracture. Why? Because they realize that there is nowhere else they can go without getting serious about Immigration reform, and appealing to a more diverse America. So in a way, the perils of Republican partisanship have produced a silver lining for Democrats. They improve the President’s chances for re-election, help Democrats to pick-up House seats, and almost guarantee an important legislative victory for the President in his first year back.

But one important question remains… if Mitt Romney is elected, what becomes of the GOP? Would it still fracture and regroup for 2016? In short, the answer is no. Whether they’d like to admit it or not, the GOP of 2012 is in desperate need of some changes. As Obama said, they can’t continue down a path to total exclusion. A Romney victory means that many Republicans will have to stick to their guns. They’d be forced to keep up the infighting between the Tea Party and the establishment wings of the party. They’d be forced to answer for the massive, outlandish promises Mitt Romney has made about his “magical” tax plan, self-deportation and repealing many of the GLBT rights advances that we’ve lived with over the last four years. They’d be forced to support Mitt Romney’s candidacy during 2016 and prevent a whole slew of much more “exciting” new candidates from running until 2020. They’d face the possibility of Mitt Romney facing off aganst Hillary Clinton, whom the Democrats would surely flock to if she chooses to run. Essentially, if Mitt Romney wins, GOP lawmakers are going to be asked to do the impossible. See that’s the unintended consequence of partisanship… it’s a short-term fix, but in the long-run it leads to more destruction. As crazy as it sounds, the best thing for those that truly care about the Republican Party’s future may be to re-elect President Obama. Of course, I don’t think Democrats would complain either!!

In two short weeks, we’ll have many of these answers. But for now, we have to wait and see just how thick the GOP’s partisan firewall is.

Houston Politics

The ABCs of the GOP: D is for

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Distraction

The careful art of distraction has been a central tenet of the GOP campaign strategy. Modern Democrats aren’t as good at the “slight of hand” techniques, but Republicans have it down to a science. So let’s take a look at some of the more popular political distractions waged by the GOP.

Over the course of the Obama Presidency, this tactic has been used with tremendous success.

Believe it or not, Contraception used to be a widely supported issue among both parties. Many Republicans have been openly supportive of Planned Parenthood and family planning… including George H.W. and Barbara Bush, Richard Nixon, and yes, Ronald Reagan. We all know that Mr. Romney is a far cry from the days when he “sustained and supported” not only Contraception, but ABORTION(like the over-sized font there? Distracting, huh?). It wasn’t controversial at all, and candidates like Rick Santorum have always been considered “fringe” political forces. Mitt Romney was at one time in his life a Centrist, and occasionally he’s forgotten this. When asked about his views on a bill that would limit Contraception funding, this was his answer…

“I’m not for that bill, but look, the idea of presidential candidates getting into questions about contraception within a relationship between a man and a woman, a husband and wife—I’m not going there,”

Sounds like a pretty sane thing to say, right? Not anymore, at least by Republican Party standards. The GOP leaders decided that this year, despite decades of voting records to the contrary, Contraception was going to become a mainline distraction. Suddenly people are changing their positions and running to the Right. It leaves voters having to make a choice based on values, and not who would do a better job. They have been willing to sacrifice their own personal opinions or the dynamic views of their 21st century constituents in favor of that all-important directive… DEFEAT OBAMA.

Here’s why we just can’t get rid of Donald Trump. As Lawrence O’Donnell commented on his show, Trump is being used by Romney and the GOP to do the party’s “dirty work”. After all of the talk of birtherism in 2008, the GOP has revived it to be a distraction in 2012, knowing full well that Americans who voted for Obama last time think the whole thing is ridiculous. But the GOP needs racist and suspicious voters to stay on their side and be active. So instead of engaging on our nations most important issues, they continue to divide and distract by questioning the President’s legitimacy. Of course Mitt Romney’s father ran for President in the 60s and he was born in Mexico. Maybe Mr. Romney would like to explain why he thinks his father should have been President.

Wait, sorry, how did I drift over into that? What were we talking about again??

Perhaps the most controversial of distraction politics is the debt-ceiling debate… you remember right? The one where the GOP held the full faith and credit of the United States hostage unless Democrats agreed to near Draconian government cuts. It seemed ludicrous at the time, but the GOP fought hard and got much more of what they wanted than Democrats. Now this debate was and will be a distraction on a grand scale, but it has absolutely NOTHING to do with the American people. It’s actually about a debate within the Republican party itself. 20 years ago, there were too many level-headed people in Washington to be able to do something like this. Remember that most of the contention over the debt-ceiling in the final hours was between House Republicans. Boehner actually brought the bill up for several votes, only to have it fail by his own Caucus. When you have defeats on that large scale, it’s understandable that the party would rather wage massive distractions so that voters spend more time looking at the President’s faults, and maybe, hopefully forget how much of a mess the GOP has become.

But of course all of these distractions are much more than just insults lodged via Twitter or the latest fodder for Fox News. They are occurring among the 536 most powerful people in our country. If Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling, millions of people will lose money, some people will lose their job, and endangered seniors will have even harder choices to make as they near retirement. When you’re a nationally elected official, even the distractions could have major consequences. And in the case of the GOP, that is their intention. The debt ceiling distraction was designed to make our government operate at a continuous crisis point in order to weaken Obama’s ability to govern. It is MUCH more than ideological disagreements at play here. What the Republicans want us to believe is that the Democrats are unreasonable, but in reality they are the ones holding the government gun to our heads. Brilliant political strategist Dick Morris designed this playbook. He has experience on both sides of the political aisle, and back in 2011 he calculated the results of these fights with distinct accuracy. BTW, the BEST thing Liberals can do for themselves? Watch Newsmax TV…

There you have it… the exact motivations behind the debt-ceiling debacle, and why we’re about to fight it again. BRILLIANT.

So why do they even need all of these distractions in the first place? Do they really hate President Obama as much as they say they do??

The answer is coming up with letter “E”