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Why Boehner Failed

Why Boehner Failed

Nothing so became John Boehner’s tenure as Speaker as his manner of leaving it. Subjectively speaking, he has never appeared to believe very much of the arrant nonsense his position required him to utter. An old-school politician who literally grew up working in the family bar, his conservatism is of the traditional Midwestern kind — more Bob Dole, say, than Ted Cruz.

More process and negotiation, that is, than ideological certitude and visionary schemes to purge the nation of sin. To be blunt about it, very few Roman Catholics and none who grew up in a bar could ever believe such a thing possible. Unafraid to let his emotions show as Pope Francis urged lawmakers to compromise for the common good, Boehner may have, in that moment, recognized his own complete failure.

On CBS’ Face the Nation, Boehner expressed his frustration in theological terms. Asked if the fundamentalist-dominated Tea Party faction, which views him as a sellout to President Obama, was unrealistic, he almost shouted.

“Absolutely they’re unrealistic!” he said. “But the Bible says beware of false prophets. And there are people out there spreading noise about how much can get done. I mean, this whole idea that we were going to shut down the government to get rid of Obamacare in 2013, this plan never had chance.”

“But over the course of the August recess in 2013, and the course of September,” Boehner added, “a lot of my Republican colleagues who knew it was a fool’s errand, really they were getting all this pressure from home to do this. And so we have got groups here in town, members of the House and Senate here in town who whip people into a frenzy believing they can accomplish things that they… KNOW are never going to happen.”

No, and shutting the government down in 2015 to get rid of Planned Parenthood has even less of a chance of accomplishing anything other than pointless melodrama, TV face time for the aforementioned Sen. Cruz, and the near-certain election of a Democratic president.

The late Robert F. Kennedy once told a friend of mine that no particular genius was required to succeed in politics, but you do have to be able to count. It’s because Boehner understands that, yet seemingly lacked the intestinal fortitude to abandon the so-called “Hastert Rule,” that his speakership came to such a sad end.

What with Hastert nearing an ignominious denouement of his own — the former Speaker’s lawyers are reportedly negotiating a guilty plea involving hush money paid to a young man he’d sexually molested as a high school coach — you’d think Republicans would want to avoid the phrase, if not the practice.

The act of refusing to let the House vote on any bill not supported by a majority of Republicans not only placed party above country, it also permitted Tea Party hotheads to paralyze the government. In consequence, The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin points out, a 2013 immigration reform bill favored by GOP leadership that passed 62-38 in the Senate never even came to a vote in the House.

Supported by such luminaries as Senators John McCain and Marco Rubio, the bill would clearly have passed had Boehner allowed a vote — good for the nation, good for the Republican Party. Alas, to keep his job, Boehner caved to Tea Party nativists. In consequence, Toobin writes, “he suffered the fate of all those who give in to bullies; he was bullied some more.”

This year it was the highway bill — another popular, badly needed, job-intensive piece of legislation also opposed by the Tea Party. The tyranny of the minority, you might call it. If they had their way, we’d all have to buy tractors and bush-hog our own roads.

Instead, Boehner permitted the innumerate faction something like 60 votes to repeal Obamacare — each as futile and pointless as the last, and the very definition of “things they know are never going to happen.”

Another consequence of Boehner’s failure, it should be said, is the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, the blowhard billionaire who appears to have convinced millions of voters who failed to master 8th grade civics that he can solve the nation’s toughest problems by yelling at them.

In stepping down, Boehner secured the agreement of his GOP antagonists to vote for a “clean” continuing resolution that would keep the government funded through mid-December with no demands to defund Planned Parenthood — the latest extreme right publicity stunt. After that, all bets are off.

“November and December are going to be like Dante’s Inferno around here,” New Jersey Democrat Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. told the New York Times.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

A new Quinnipiac poll shows that Republican voters oppose shutting down the government over Planned Parenthood by 56-36 percent. Americans overall oppose the idea by 69-23 percent.

All that’s needed is a Speaker strong enough to put country above party.

U.S. Speaker of the House John Boehner exits a Republican caucus meeting in the U.S. Capitol after announcing to the meeting that he will be resigning his speakership and his seat in Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington on September 25, 2015.  REUTERS/James Lawler Duggan

Ebola’s Message: Foreign Aid And Science Funding In A Time Of Global Peril

Ebola’s Message: Foreign Aid And Science Funding In A Time Of Global Peril

Most Americans have long believed, in embarrassing ignorance, that the share of the US federal budget spent on foreign aid is an order of magnitude higher than what we actually spend abroad. Years ago, this mistaken view was amplified from the far right by the John Birch Society; today, it is the Tea Party movement complaining that joblessness and poverty in the United States result directly from the lamentable fact that “President Obama keeps sending our money overseas.”

Actually, spending on foreign assistance has remained remarkably steady for many years in Washington at around 1 percent, a minuscule level compared with what other developed nations spend to improve living standards in the developing world.  But perhaps that is because those other countries have figured out what we may soon learn from the latest Ebola outbreak: Disease vectors do not respect national or political boundaries – and the lack of medical infrastructure in one country can ultimately threaten all countries.

At this very moment, the health systems built by many years of painstaking effort in Africa — inadequate as they are — struggle to prevent the spread of this awful illness beyond the countries already struck. We would be far safer if those systems were more modern and robust.

The likelihood that Africa’s Ebola outbreak will spread to the United States is vanishingly small – and the chances that American medical authorities would be unable to control it is even smaller still. While Americans appear to be terrified by even this relatively minor risk, however, many seem unable to comprehend why we might want to spend money to improve health systems in countries where such threats originate. So Republicans in Congress echo the Tea Party rhetoric about foreign aid, seeking to cut assistance of all kinds from minuscule to non-existent.

In the same vein, the Republican right remains hostile to federal science spending and to science as a public priority, evidently because scientific research on such topics as climate change, health, the environment, and nutrition consistently clash with the priorities of its corporate clientele. The Tea Party constituency increasingly distrusts scientists, whom they regard as elements of a broad conspiracy to control rugged, freedom-loving Americans such as themselves. Presumably that is why Republican budgets in recent years have consistently sought billions of dollars in cuts to important research agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and – yes – even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

You read that correctly: In their endless zeal to cut federal spending, Republicans have demanded substantial spending reductions at the CDC, the frontline agency that is responsible for controlling exotic bugs such as Ebola if and when they should ever reach our shores. If there were an outbreak of Ebola or any other such malady in the United States, those same budget-cutting Republicans would ask in tones of outrage how and why the CDC had failed to prevent it.

In a wealthy nation like ours, citizens are accustomed to a multi-layered defense against pandemic disease, with strong capacity to identify and isolate such threats before they do grave harm. But HIV/AIDS, which almost certainly came here from Africa, told us that our defenses are not impenetrable; now Ebola is telling us again that a menace to Africans can quickly become a potential threat to us as well.

If we want to continue to enjoy the peace of mind and quality of life that Americans regard as our birthright, we would be well advised to reject the Tea Party’s ideological hostility to aid and science. We ought to fully fund our scientific institutions, rebuild our public health infrastructure, and devote much more money to improving the health systems of the world’s poorest nations – or else live to regret our stupidity.

House Republicans’ Suicide Pact

As America lurches toward new and unfamiliar status as a nation that defaults its debts, commentators around the world are wondering how the democratic government that was once the most admired in the world – for many reasons – is now so “dysfunctional,” to use the polite term. But the truth is that the entire US government is not dysfunctional. Much of the government functions well enough or better, and even the members of the troubled US Senate seems to be trying, a little late, to deal with the problem before us.

No, dysfunctional is the too-polite term for the House of Representatives, specifically its dominant Tea Party Republicans, who can be described in far less dainty psychological terms. Even the most extreme Republican partisans in the Senate seem to realize that their House colleagues, seized by some combination of ideology, madness, and pig ignorance, are propelling the country and the world toward economic chaos.

Of course, the Tea Party Republicans insist that no such thing will ever happen – the warnings from economists, business leaders, financiers and public officials are merely so much “scare talk.” When President Obama says that he won’t be able to send out Social Security and Veterans Administration checks or meet the nation’s obligations on Treasury debt come August 2, he is just trying to frighten his opponents into giving up their principles. They don’t accept the idea that we have to pay for financial obligations already incurred – or that the rising interest rates caused by default will make future deficits much deeper.

But they don’t have to believe the president to understand that the threat posed by default is real. They could listen to ultra-conservative Senators like Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), members of the Gang of Six/Seven whose own profound ideological hostility to Obama and the Democrats still leaves space for prudence.

Or they could listen to more than 60 business groups, from the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce to the Telecommunications Industry Association and the American Gas Association, all fearful of the consequences of default.

Now those business lobbyists may find out why it isn’t so smart to fund any bozo running for office who claims to support “free enterprise.”

It is revealing to listen to the Congressional freshmen affiliated with the Tea Party as the debt clock ticks down and panic begins to set in. Many of them have repeatedly vowed to vote down any bill to increase the debt limit, but somehow they’re sure that if those checks don’t go out and that debt doesn’t get paid, it will be the president’s fault and not theirs. Some say there is no reason why the Treasury should miss any of its bond payments. Others have sent a letter to the White House, urging Obama to “prioritize” those Social Security checks if worse comes to worst.

Such outbursts prove that the Tea Party is not only against taxes and spending, but is strictly opposed to arithmetic, which like climate science is probably just another socialist plot. They also prove the utter insincerity of these characters, who just voted this week for the “Cut, Cap and Balance” bill that would gut Social Security, along with Medicare, while erecting a constitutional wall around tax breaks for society’s wealthiest individuals and corporations. They want to pose as defenders of the middle-class and the American dream, even as they promote legislation that would destroy the programs and institutions that are the foundation of that way of life.

There is no need to look too far to find the source of our discontent – our “dysfunction,” if you must. It is in the Congress, which the American people mistakenly turned over to fakers and fools last November. Every poll shows that most voters regret that error now, and wish that Congress would tax the wealthy and preserve social insurance. Now those voters had better make their remorse heard, and loudly, if they hope to avert catastrophe.