Boehner Betrayed His PartyWhy the Speaker's resignation is great news for conservatives.By MICHAEL A. NEEDHAM
September 25, 2015
"We want to give Boehner a governable majority so the crazies you hate will be irrelevant."
This is how the Washington Republican Establishment talks to its K Street allies. It's a quote from last October when a Republican campaign operative told the business community why it was important for Republicans to capture 245 House seats. The establishment isn't focused on marginalizing liberal lawmakers trying to grow the size and scope of government. They want to marginalize conservative lawmakers fighting to keep the reasonable promises they have made to their constituents.
The friction of the last several years has not been about differences in tactics. It has been about deep and irreconcilable disagreements over the goals the GOP should pursue. It has been a dispute over how much the center-right should try to disrupt the status quo. Armed with his 245-seat majority, Speaker John Boehner opted against pursuing any reform agenda. He ignored the hopes and dreams of those Republican voters who delivered the GOP control of the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014 and instead pushed the agenda of Washington's ruling class.
The legislative history validates this thesis.Those within Speaker Boehner's tight-knit circle will point to the "accomplishments" of the past nine months as reasons why he'll be missed. But take a look what the House has done this year and it's not hard to understand conservatives' frustrations with the Speaker's leadership: a permanent ?doc fix? that increases Medicare spending over the next two decades by $500 billion and took crucial leverage for Medicare reform off the table forever; a House-passed reauthorization of No Child Left Behind despite the objections of conservatives advocating reforms to eliminate Department of Education mandates. Not a single Republican ran on these priorities in 2014, yet aside from small-ball bills addressing business community concerns like authorization of the Keystone XL pipeline, they've been the central pillars of the Republican agenda.
But it could have been worse. Despite his best efforts, the Speaker wasn't able to roll conservatives on some of his biggest priorities. For years, he hoped to cut a "grand bargain," trading spending cuts for hundreds of billions of dollars in tax increases. Conservatives would not let him, and pressure from the grassroots forced the House instead to work toward the 2011 Budget Control Act, a package of cuts-only reforms that the Speaker has only tried to undermine ever since. And on comprehensive immigration reform "
code-talk for amnesty"the Speaker never hid his views: "I think a comprehensive approach is long overdue. And I?m confident that the president, myself, others can find the common ground." As recently as last September, Speaker Boehner told Hugh Hewitt that he was trying to "create an environment where you could do immigration reform in a responsible way next year." It's taken years of dedicated opposition by conservatives to prevent the Speaker's push for amnesty from coming to fruition.
These were the fights John Boehner wanted to pick. Yet when conservatives have pressed Speaker Boehner to advance their own priorities, they have faced resistance from leadership every step of the way.
After President Obama's reelection, Speaker Boehner told ABC's Diane Sawyer that "the election changes" the GOP's approach to Obamacare. "It's pretty clear that the president was reelected, Obamacare is the law of the land," Boehner said. While he might have been previewing the Chamber of Commerce's new strategy, he certainly wasn't echoing the sentiment of his rank-and-file members or the party's conservative base.
In the aftermath of the president's unlawful executive amnesty, Speaker Boehner rightly condemned President Obama for his "legacy of lawlessness" and declared that "Republicans are left with the serious responsibility of upholding our oath of office." Less than three months later, after giving up the fight, the Speaker adopted President Obama's talking points about funding for the Department of Homeland Security and said that "with more active threats coming into the homeland," Congress could not use the power of the purse to fight for the Constitution.
Republican lawmakers and their constituents are watching the same disinclination to uphold their oath of office and use their constitutional prerogatives play out on Planned Parenthood. Although Speaker Boehner himself was remarkably cautious in his public statements, one his aides suggested any real attempt to defund Planned Parenthood could "damage the pro-life cause." It was a polite and delicate intimation of agreement with Senator Mitch McConnell, who said earlier this month that President Obama "made it very clear he's not going to sign any bill that includes defunding Planned Parenthood, so that's another issue that awaits a new president."
The Speaker and his allies consistently criticize the conservatives who demand these fights and dismiss their complaints as tactical objections, not policy disagreements. But when leadership in Congress consistently chooses to expend its energy primarily on achieving non-conservative policy over the objections of conservatives and to do all it can to avoid picking conservative fights?the disagreement isn't about tactics. It's a conflict of strategy born of a conflict of policy visions.
Here's the reality: In the past, politicians could afford to tell their constituents one thing and do something else entirely in office. The rapid advance of technology, however, has made that far more costly. Politicians and lobbyists no longer hold a monopoly on information. In fact, the ability of constituents all across the country to connect with one another and disseminate information means they can be more informed on both policy and process than some lawmakers.
In other words, the balance of power is starting to shift. The challenge for the Washington establishment in which Speaker Boehner was firmly entrenched is how to adapt to such a radical and empowering change in the political landscape. In the long run, the last year of turmoil in the GOP will prove to have been immensely positive. You had a Speaker who decided he was going to ignore the decentralizing influence of digital communication and try to govern with an iron fist ignoring the will of his voters. And that model has proven to be a complete failure.
Speaker Boehner's decision to step down empowers rank-and-file lawmakers to embrace the conservative grassroots and increases the likelihood the party will actually fight for conservative policy priorities and our Constitution. But that will not happen through inertia. It will take the concerted effort of lawmakers, staffers and conservative constituents to ensure the meaning of the moment is not lost.
No one should need an army of lawyers, lobbyists and accountants to succeed in this great nation. We have a chance to take back America, but it will require the Republican Party to fight for all Americans, not the powerful and well-connected.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/09/boehner-betrayed-his-party-213191
