Tag: GOP House

Most Americans Think a GOP-Controlled House Is a Bad Thing

Buck Banks

54%


Of Americans say it’s a bad thing that the Republican party controls the House of Representatives, up 11 points from last December, soon after the 2012 elections when the Republicans kept control of the chamber, a new CNN/ORC poll finds. Only 38% say it’s a good thing the GOP controls the House, a 13-point dive from the end of last year.

Chait: Boehner a ‘Trembling Child Monarch’

Buck Banks

Yesterday, the House of Representatives pulled a bill from the floor for lack of votes — the sort of scrambling chaos that occurs routinely in the chamber where John Boehner presides like a trembling child monarch. But this defeat was different. The bill concerned the funding of housing and transportation programs, though its failure represented more than just a programmatic setback, or even a setback for the Republican economic strategy writ large, but the potential ruin of its entire posture toward Obama. Since taking control of the House two and a half years ago, Republicans have fomented a series of crises that seemed to have no end in sight, explicitly refusing to negotiate with Obama and implicitly denying his legitimacy as president. The crumbling of that wall is far from certain, but yesterday a wide crack opened up.

— Jonathan Chait, writing in New York Magazine.

When It Comes to Replacing Obamacare, Republicans Have Got Nothing – Which Is Not Surprising Since the ACA Is Based on the Conservatives’ Own Plan

Jon Ponder

Rep. Phil Gingrey, a physician, promising to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act
Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.), a physician, promising to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act
As Republicans in the House prepared to vote for the 33rd vote — we said it was only the 31st vote earlier and apologize for the error — the Los Angeles Times interviewed leading lights in the congressional GOP and have confirmed the obvious.The Republicans’ campaign promise in 2010 to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act was bogus. They don’t have the votes in the Senate to repeal it — and the president would veto it, even if they did — and when it comes to replacing Obamacare, they simply do not have a plan.

That fact becomes clear when you read the laughable excuse-making in these quotes from Republicans in Congress:

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Flashback 2008: Watch Boehner Lead Republicans off House Floor During Contempt Votes Against Top Bush Staffers Who Refused to Testify Before Congress

Jon Ponder

With some House Democrats planning to walk out today when House Republicans vote to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt for no good reason, it’s instructive to look back to a similar moment in 2008, when then-Minority Leader John Boehner led a walk out over a vote to hold Bushies Harriet Miers and Josh Bolton in contempt for a legitimate reason: they refused even to show up for a hearing about Bush-Rove firing U.S. attorneys who refused to play along with Rove’s bogus voter fraud campaign.

To Boehner’s credit, at least did not cry, via Dave Weigel:

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Daft & Spurious: A Regular American’s Guide to the Tea Party’s Bogus Election-Year Scandal

Jon Ponder

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If you are as confused as other regular Americans about the “Fast & Furious” controversy that roiled the capitol yesterday, you should watch Rachel Maddow’s backgrounder from her MSNBC show last night — see above or click here.

“Very clearly, they made a crisis, and they’re using this crisis to somehow take away or limit people’s second amendment rights.”
— Rep. Darrell Issa of California, one-time arson and grand-theft auto suspect, now the Republican Party’s chairman of the House Oversight Committee.

Maddow points to the bogusness of this controversy as just the latest example of the divide in the country today between the vast majority of normal Americans who are not compulsive Fox News watchers and those whose are.

The conspiracy theory had been incubating on Fox and in right-wing media world for over a year, she says, until yesterday when Republicans “tried drag it out into the mainstream to see if it could survive in the mainstream — see if it could survive outside the right-wing world in which it was incubated.”

The Fast & Furious conspiracy originated in March 2010, Maddow said, which was not coincidentally the same time that the Affordable Care Act passed in Congress. The passage of Obamacare sent tea baggers into fits of rage. They were most enraged about the law’s central feature — and its most conservative, pro-business element — the individual mandate.

The mandate — which was invented by the Heritage Foundation, a thimk tank so right-wing that it is a sponsor of Rush Limbaugh’s show — would require every American to buy insurance, thereby delivering as many as 40 million new, paying customers to giant health insurance corporations.

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