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What an asshole.
— House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), quoted by Texas Monthly, after Rep. Steve King (R-IA) compared young undocumented immigrants to drug mules.
I like John Boehner. I do feel sorry for him.
— Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), quoted by the New York Times, on the problems the GOP House leader has with his caucus.
I wish I could tell you it was going to be pretty and polite, and it would all be finished a month before we’d ever get to the debt ceiling. Sorry, it just doesn’t work that way.
— Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), quoted by the Idaho Statesman, vowing to Republican supporters that he would cut entitlement spending as part of this fall’s budget fights.
Protecting the full faith and credit of the United States is the responsibility of Congress, because only Congress can extend the nation’s borrowing authority. Failure to meet that responsibility would cause irreparable harm to the American economy.
— Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, explaining in a letter to House Speaker John Boehner sent Monday, Aug. 26, the consequences of not extending the debt ceiling.
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.
House Republicans are failing even by their own metric. They’ve replaced virtually nothing. So by the speaker’s own admission, they’re not getting anything passed and by his own analysis, they’re getting nothing repealed. So they’re doing nothing.
— Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), responding to Speaker John Boehner’s weekend comment that the GOP-dominated House of Representatives should not be judged on how many laws it passes but on how many laws they repeal, Politico reports.
We should not be judged on how many new laws we create. We ought to be judged on how many laws we repeal. We’ve got more laws than the administration could ever enforce.
— Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), in an interview on Face the Nation.
If he were a woman, they’d be calling him the weakest speaker in history.
— House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), quoted by the Huffington Post, on Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).
The speaker is the captain of a mutinous ship.
— Rep. Bill Keating (D-MA), quoted by the Martha’s Vineyard Times, on the divided House Republican caucus.
