Tag: John Boehner

Rules Are for Small People, Speaker Boehner Will Smoke Wherever He Pleases in the Capitol

Jon Ponder

art-boehner-smokeRight-leaning Politico.com ran this item last week about incoming House Speaker John Boehner:

John Boehner isn’t speaker yet, but he already seems to be playing by his own rules.

The Ohio Republican was spotted puffing on a cigarette in the Capitol on Thursday afternoon, smoke billowing around his head, as he presided over a GOP steering committee meeting in the Capitol Visitor Center.

That would be a violation of a House rule that prohibits smoking in public rooms in the building.

A profile of Boehner in the New Yorker suggests that the new speaker smokes around two packs of cigarettes a day. And based on his family history with smoking, it’s unlikely Boehner will quit anytime soon:

[…]

With Boehner’s Pick of ‘Prince of Pork’ to Chair Appropriations, GOP’s Tea Party Base Is Starting to Get It – They’ve Been Had

Jon Ponder

Speaker-Elect John Boehner and the incoming GOP House leadership (which, it should be noted, is the same as the leadership in the current Congress and practically the same as the old “borrow and spend, spend, spend” House leadership under Bush) announced its picks for committee chairmen this week — and one of these in particular — the choice of Kentucky Rep. Hal Rogers, the “Prince of Pork,” to lead the Appropriations committee — is not playing well within the party’s tea bagger base.

In just the last two years, Rep. Rogers has requested $246 million in earmarks for his rural Kentucky district.

And rightly so. The general indictment of the tea parties — their political Achilles heel — is that the entire movement is predicated on rank hypocrisy about government spending.

From the elderly tea baggers who shouted “Get the government out of my Medicare!” at the town hall meetings in 2009 to the Republican pols who voted against the Stimulus but then rushed home to pose for photo ops handing out giant Stimulus checks to fund projects in their districts — and from the incoming tea bagger members of Congress who spewed spittle about the evils of “Obamacare” to get elected but who are now eagerly bellying up for their taxpayer-funded Cadillac health insurance plans to the tea parties’ current support for the GOP’s billionaires’ tax break even though it will blow a $700 billion hole in the deficit over the next ten years — tea baggers don’t have a lot of credibility left.

If they want to keep up the pretense that they really are for fiscal thrift, they should get up off their couches and work up some of their trademark poorly spelled signs to protest Boehner’s appointment of a guy like this to run the most influential House committee on spending:

[…]

After Bellowing ‘Where Are the Jobs?’ for Weeks, Now Boehner Can’t Say When He’ll Create Jobs, How Many

Jon Ponder

Swing voters in the South and the Heartland who gave Republicans their majority in the House on Tuesday have gotten a rude awakening in the 48 hours or so since results were announced.

These voters elected the Republican candidates in their districts based on the candidates’ promises to make fiscal responsibility and job creation their top priorities.

But the swing voters should have been listening more carefully to the men back in Washington who will be their local reps’ leaders.

For example, in the final days before the vote, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell made it clear in his campaign stump speeches that the Republicans’ real objective had nothing whatsoever to do with the economy:

[…]

House GOPTers Boehner, Cantor, Pence, Sessions, Bachmann Voted with Pelosi over 50% of the Time

Jon Ponder
Top GOP Pelosi Votes
Leader Boehner 52%
Whip Cantor 57%
Chairman Sessions 57%
Chairman Pence 52%
Michele Bachmann 58%

The House Republicans’ “Party of No” strategy to obstruct legislation and drive up negatives for the Democratic leadership and the president certainly appears to have been successful. Every pollster out there is predicting that the GOP’s lazy, boozing, schmoozing leader, John Boehner, is set to become Speaker of the House in January.

On every issue that made news, the top GOPTers have hurtled themselves in front of any available camera to bellow, “NO, no, no and HELL no!” But, according to a new metric compiled by the Democrats, when it came time to register their vote, some of the most vociferous Republicans voted with the House Democratic leadership more than half of the time:

[…]

Poll: Speaker Wanna-Be Boehner’s Approval 11 Points Lower Than Speaker Pelosi’s

Jon Ponder

See minute 0:55

Buoyed by polling and the media narrative that the GOP will win control of Congress in a wave election this November, House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, the next putative speaker, and other Republicans in Congress have been caught in the act of measuring the drapes in the Capitol.

The fact that 39 percent have never heard of Boehner — who is known in the Capitol for boozing, schmoozing and playing golf with lobbyists — offers Democrats the opportunity to introduce him as what he is: the ultimate Washington insider.

If Boehner and his party win, it appears they won’t get much of a honeymoon with voters, however. A Wall St. Journal/NBC poll last month found that congressional Republicans had just a 24 percent approval rating, the lowest rating they had ever received.

Now a new CNN Opinion Research poll [PDF] finds that Boehner has a lower approval rating than Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who has been the object of unrelenting demonization on the GOP-Fox channel and right-wing radio for years.

Boehner received a 22 percent favorable rating, with 23 percent unfavorable. Thirty-nine percent had never heard of him and 16 percent had no opinion.

Speaker Pelosi’s favorables were 33/51, with just 9 percent saying they’d never heard of her and 7 percent having no opinion.

[…]

NBC Poll Also Had Results That Bust Media’s Pro-GOP Election Narrative, Including 43% Split on Who Should Run Congress

Jon Ponder

If you listen to cable news and read corporate-media political sites, it’s all over for the Democrats. Why bother waiting for the vote on Nov. 2? Dems should just quietly step aside and let Speaker John Boehner and the Republicans move in, drapes and all, to their new digs at the Capitol.

The NBC poll found that 58 percent falsely believe Boehner and the Republicans have an economic plan that is different from their policies under Bush. What Democrats must show voters is that, simply put, Boehnernomics is just Bushonomics warmed over.

Case in point was, as we noted yesterday, the five days that the media flogged away at a Gallup generic congressional poll that gave the GOP a 10 point advantage — a first for either party in the history of the poll. Today, in the wake of a new edition yesterday of the same poll showing that the GOP’s 10 point lead has vanished — the parties are tied at 46 percent — discussion of the Gallup generic poll has also disappeared. Funny how that works.

At TPMDC, Evan McMorris-Santoro has a piece up on yesterday’s sudden turnaround in the Gallup generic under the headline, “Narrative-Busting New Gallup Poll Excites Dems Briefly”:

[…]