The Weaker Speaker
John Boehner’s quick with a mean-spirited quote,
Though it’s rare he says anything of real note.
But when it comes to legislating,
Lately he’s been hesitating —
Pulling bills ’cause he just can’t get the votes.
Tag: John Boehner
Boehner’s Boozy Republicans-As-Bar-Flies Analogy in Convention Speech Backfires – Romney Said ‘Big Business Is Doing Fine’ Just Last Week
In his speech to the Republican Convention last night, House Speaker John Boehner, who also serves as the convention chairman, deployed a boozy analogy in which Republicans are bar flies and the president is a drunk, presumably, who says something that the bar fly hive mind collectively finds offensive:
Boehner’s Got a Problem with the ‘C’ Word
First Read reminds us of House Speaker John Boehner’s 60 Minutes interview with Leslie Stahl last December which revealed he knew his caucus would not let him compromise with Democrats. Or else he just can’t bring himself to pronounce, you know, c-c-c-c-com-com-comp-compost …
BOEHNER: We have to govern. That’s what we were elected to do.
STAHL: But governing means a — compromising.
BOEHNER: It means working together. It means find…
STAHL: It also means compromising.
BOEHNER: It means finding common ground.
STAHL: OK, is that compromising?
BOEHNER: I made clear I am not going to compromise on — on my principles, nor am I going to compromise …
STAHL: What are you saying?
BOEHNER: … the will of the American people.
STAHL: And you’re saying I want common ground, but I’m not going to compromise. I don’t understand that. I really don’t.
BOEHNER: When you say the — when you say the word “compromise”…
STAHL: Yeah?
BOEHNER: … a lot of Americans look up and go, “Uh-oh, they’re going to sell me out.” And so finding common ground I think makes more sense.
Boehner’s Story on Debt Deal Changes: Tells Caucus ‘Deal Was Never Reached,’ Then Tells Media Obama Walked away from Deal
This sequence of events from Friday night puts the lie to Speaker Boehner’s assertion that it was Pres. Obama, not Boehner, who shut down negotiations on the debt ceiling crisis:
Boehner to House GOP at 6 p.m.: “The deal was never reached.” Boehner to media an hour or so later: “It’s the president who walked away.”
“It’s the president who walked away from his agreement and demanded more money at the last minute,” [Boehner said, during the news conference he called around 7:15 Friday night.]
The speaker has said that he needs a bill in hand by Monday to ensure House action by midweek and still leave enough time for the Senate to act before the Treasury runs out of money. Prior to the breakup, discussions were already underway among Senate leaders Friday about how to proceed with a fallback, and there has been speculation of a four to six week extension to get past the immediate crisis.
But this short term approach faced united Democratic opposition after the collapse, with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid saying flatly Friday night that it would be “unacceptable.”
“The deal was never reached, and was never really close,” the speaker wrote in a letter to House members released at 6 p.m. — after the financial markets had closed. “In the end we couldn’t connect. Not because of different personalities but because of different visions for our country.”
Jonathan Chait reacts:
House GOPer Predicts 2012 Electoral Debacle Caused by the Boehner-Ryan Kill Medicare Bill: ‘Oh My God, It’s Coming’
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Rachel Maddow started her MSNBC show last night with a pull quote from this article in The Hill newspaper — “Oh my God, it’s coming”:
The Tea Party’s Job-Killing Budget Bill
The House tea party caucus put its dominance over Speaker John Boehner on display last week when it pushed him and his hapless leadership team to the edge of the political ledge on the issue of budget cuts.
Here’s the Economic Policy Institute’s analysis on Friday of the ramifications of the tea party cuts were they to be enacted:
After the House Appropriations Committee detailed $74 billion in cuts last Wednesday, a number of conservative members demanded $26 billion in additional cuts to make good on the “Pledge to America,” bringing the total level of cuts relative to President Obama’s FY 2011 budget request to $100 billion. A full $100 billion cut to discretionary spending would likely result in job losses on the order of 994,000, using OMB’s GDP projections (CBO’s projections are based on current law) and assuming a fiscal multiplier of 1.5.
The new GOP budget proposes cutting non-security discretionary spending by $81 billion relative to the president’s $478 billion request for 2011. Non-security discretionary cuts of this magnitude would likely result in job losses of just over 800,000. (2/15/2011)
But over the weekend, looking at the bill as passed, the Associated Press reported that it called for $60 billion in cuts, which, if so, would represent a significant defeat for the tea party caucus. Even at that level, the cuts will likely produce direct job losses of 650,000 in government layoffs, which would likely trigger to another 325,000 layoffs, mostly in the retail and service sectors — nearly 1 million jobs altogether — according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress.
Boehner Caught Lying about the Number of Federal Jobs Created in the Past Two Years – So Be It
One of the Republicans’ most often-repeated “big lies” — the Goebbels-Rove tactic of repeating a falsehood over and over until it is perceived to be true or, as Rove put it, until a “new reality” has been created — is that the government cannot create jobs.
Boehner won control of the House last year by haranguing the president about “jobs, jobs, jobs,” now he says that if adding 200,000 federal employees to the unemployment rolls would please his tea partyist base, well, “so be it.”
This is, of course, demonstrably untrue. Just for starters, there are hundreds of thousands of contractors in aerospace, defense, transportation and elsewhere who owe their jobs to the federal government and no one else.
Notably, the federal government paid, and is still paying, the salaries of tens of thousands of employees of Halliburton and Blackwater in Iraq and Afghanistan.
On the other end of the spectrum, the federal government contracts out nearly all the construction work on new roads, bridges, tunnels, harbors and the like. State and local governments do the same.
Beyond the contractors, the federal government also has direct employees — about 2.8 million of them. Federal employees use their salaries the same way everyone else does. They pay mortgages or rent and other bills. They buy groceries, clothing, appliances and electronics. They go out to restaurants and on vacation. They even pay taxes.
Something to Cry About
The Valentine’s Day 2011 issue of the National Enquirer features a story alleging that GOP Speaker John Boehner has had adulterous dalliances “with at least two different women” in Washington.
Frankly, the article, which was leaked by the website Boy Culture, seems pretty thin. There’s a rehash of the story broken by Mike Stark, an openly liberal D.C. journalist, after Labor Day alleging that Boehner, 61, had had an ongoing affair with a printing industry lobbyist, Lisbeth Lyons, who appears to be in her late thirties or early forties.
The speaker and his wife Debbie, a real estate agent in Ohio, have been married for 37 years and have two children. But there may be more here than a politician breaking a pledge to his wife. If the allegations are true, it appears Boehner’s affair smacks of corruption, according to Stark:
Boehner’s Alleged Affair – and Gingrich’s Confirmed One – Go Unmentioned by the New Yorker – Yes, the New Yorker
Peter Boyer’s nearly 9,000 word profile of Speaker John Boehner in the New Yorker last month filled in a few gaps in what is commonly known about Boehner’s biography, but there was a notable item missing — the fact that just four months ago the Capitol was aswirl with rumors that Boehner was having an extramarital affair with a (female) lobbyist.
Similarly, in describing events that led to the ouster in 1998 of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Boyer omitted one of the central reasons — some would say the real reason — Gingrich was forced out: At the same time he was driving efforts to impeach Pres. Bill Clinton over a perjurious cover-up of an affair with a staffer, Gingrich was himself engaged in an affair with a congressional staffer, his current wife, Callista Bisek.
