Posts Tagged ‘John Boehner’

One of the more entertaining political figures over the last year was possible witch and masturbator hater Christine O’Donnell. Thankfully, she looks like she’s going to keep herself in the headlines. Her new plan is to start ChristinePAC so she can counter those damned liberals that run the GOP establishment.

Huh. I wonder if she thinks Boehner is a GOP establishment liberal, because he thinks he should be considered a member of the Tea Party. But make no mistake, he’s either in the Tea Party or liberal. The world is that black and white, as someone like O’Donnell would want us to believe.

Enjoy more O’Donnell quotes.

Adam Feser

The Hill has a strong article on the challenges facing John Boehner. The Republican majority in the House has been strong and unified, making Speaker Boehner’s job easy. They all wanted to repeal health care reform. They all wanted to make cuts. But now he’s faced with the vote to raise the debt ceiling, and the new guys may not go along.

If we don’t raise the debt ceiling and the government defaults, things could get ugly. Tim Geithner warns that interest rates will rise, house values will fall, and payments will stop for military salaries, Medicare, and Social Security. Some Republicans think he’s being melodramatic, but even Boehner said not acting is not an option:

That would be a financial disaster not only for our country, but for the worldwide economy. Remember, the American people on Election Day said we want to cut spending and we want to create jobs. You can’t create jobs if you default on the federal debt.

The period of agreement will end, as Michele Bachmann and some number of members of the Tea Party Caucus will refuse to vote to raise the limit, regardless of spending cuts attached to it.

There could also be another disagreement between some Democrats. Those that don’t want huge cuts because they worry about the affect of such cuts on the economy will likely be unhappy if a deal similar to the Bush tax cut extension is made that gives Republicans a lot of cuts.

Boehner called this an “adult moment.” I think that sums up what this is going to mean for many of the Republican newcomers that had huge ideas of saying no to any debt and spending. It sounds good, but in practice it just isn’t that easy.

I think it’s similar to how Boehner promised $100 billion in spending cuts then proposed $32 billion in spending cuts. If they’re talking about getting the debt under control, this is a feeble attempt. It seems well and good to say, “Let’s cut $100 billion” (with pinky to mouth), but once you set out to do it you see it is a very difficult process.

Following through on bold talk isn’t always the best move, and we’ll see if the newbies are adult enough to realize this.

Enjoy what should be an interesting amount of showdowns.

Adam Feser

Conservative writer David Frum has an interesting article on the passage of health care reform entitled “It’s Waterloo All Right: Ours.” His position is that Republicans screwed themselves.

They could have decided to compromise in the beginning, but they put all their chips on health care failing. They decided that if Obama and Democrats failed, 2010 would be looking pretty good. And now they’re in a pickle.

As Frum puts it:

At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.

On the possibility of a deal:

Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.

You wouldn’t know that this plan isn’t much different from conservative plans if you listened to Republicans, but the damn Heritage Foundation (more…)

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) has an interesting opinion piece in the Onion entitled “My Constituents Care Way More About Political Gamesmanship Than Jobs, Health Care, And The Economy.”

I can’t do the whole thing justice here, so you should probably just read it, but here are some highlights:

Trust me: If you talk to an unemployed, uninsured mother of two in Greenville, she’ll tell you that jobs and reliable medical coverage come a distant second to the crafting of meticulous talking points that deftly omit the facts and reduce what should be honest discourse about our country’s future to a series of contrived, easy-to-digest sound bites designed to sway crucial independent voters.

Take the folks I represent in Dayton. They’ve seen unemployment skyrocket to 13.2 percent. Now, here is what I did for them: Even though the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts that the stimulus bill will ultimately save or create 2.5 million jobs, I came out and said that the dismal performance of the “stimulus” demonstrates the danger of letting Washington take more control of our economy.

My constituents had to be proud. They must have loved the way I blatantly ignored the truth and put quotation marks around “stimulus” so as to delegitimize the whole project. And I bet they noticed that, with just one sentence, I slyly preyed on America’s inherent distrust of big government. Pretty good, huh? It’s all bullshit of course, but it’s a great political play: slimy, deceitful, and downright irresponsible—the kind of no-nonsense, no-actual-help-for-anyone-but-myself strategy that the struggling voters in Butler and Mercer counties rely on.

But in the end, of course, I can’t take full credit for the Republican Party’s utterly undeserved yet all-too-depressingly-real resurgence. That would be unfair to my Democratic colleagues, who, in their unwillingness to act like grown adults with any kind of backbone and exercise the largest majority any party has seen in decades, have let us get away with all of it.

Enjoy the candidness, even if it is imaginary.

Adam Feser

There’s been a lot of talk about the health care summit set to take place on February 25. On the surface, it looks like an attempt to have a televised, public forum for Republicans to discuss their ideas with President Obama. A public conversation with Republicans seems like a good idea since there have been complaints about partisanship and closed door dealings (whether or not they are warranted is questionable).

But that’s the obvious/not paranoid way of looking at the health care summit. If you truly know what’s happening, you know it’s a secret trap being set by Obama to ruin Republicans. It will be accomplished by… um… getting them to openly state and discuss their ideas with President Obama with ample time to prepare? This hardly sounds like some killer trap, but guys like Lindsey Graham and John Boehner aren’t so sure.

I guess maybe they are just setting up an excuse. If it doesn’t go well, they can just claim they were trapped.

Jon Stewart has a nice little clip about the “trap,” and John Oliver also filed a report on health care. He was discussing government-mandated health care with some RNC folks attending their meeting in Hawaii. He had already discussed wasteful spending with them as they remained in the dark about the irony of having a ton of people fly to Hawaii to discuss wasteful spending, and they were no less in the dark when discussing Hawaii’s health care plan.

You see, since 1974 Hawaii has required employers to provide health care benefits for all employees working 20 hours a week. Everything in Hawaii is expensive, except health care, which is nearly the lowest in the country.

John Oliver hears the regular talking points from some RNC attendees and asks a few questions. They did not disappoint. I’ll let you watch Jon on the trap and John on Hawaii:

How funny was it when that lady says some ridiculous platitude and John shuts it down?

Enjoy one of the better Moments of Zen ever:

Adam Feser