Ambrose: Republicans in Congress seem bent on electoral suicide
By Jay Ambrose
Published: October 4, 2015, 5:59am
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Things were shaping up for Republicans in 2016 until the party decided on electoral suicide instead. First, there has been Donald Trump, with too many in the party thinking his big-bucks accumulation and vague assurances of someday knowing something qualify him to be president. And then there is John Boehner. Trump is still coming on. Boehner is leaving. The why of his decision is what’s scary.
Boehner is getting out as the Republican speaker of the House and resigning from Congress because his reasonably calm, cool, clear-eyed style of politics is not what one relatively small but powerful group of House Republicans wanted. They favor turmoil and ballyhoo achieving nothing except maybe making a statement that could prevent their party from making a greater statement: keeping control of the House and Senate and capturing the White House in the upcoming elections.
Boehner was not without his shortcomings, yet they were not that he was “a terrible, very bad, no good speaker” under whose leadership “Republicans pursued an unprecedented strategy of scorched earth obstructionism.” That terrible, very bad, no good observation came from economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who clearly did not win his Nobel Prize for keeping up with the news.
With more attention to reports by the knowledgeable, he would have known that Boehner did often reach for compromise and that the precedent for Krugman’s inflamed imaginings was former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. To thwart credible legislation on behalf of the president and political advantage, this Democrat did far more than Boehner to block important votes, sometimes causing members of his own party to cringe.
Boehner’s aforementioned shortcomings? More creativity could maybe have led to better answers to the other side’s dream of a society ever more controlled by fiscally zany, big-government leftists. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell could maybe be coming up with more inventive tactics to advance what he himself believes in, too. Yet the party is split, leadership authority is not what it used to be, the Democrats have lots of Harry Reid types in their midst and Congress has been confronting a president who’s had it with the division-of-powers concept.
The answer is hardly for the leadership to acquiesce in such futile gestures as government shutdowns generally portrayed as the work solely of ding-a-ling Republicans, even though Democrats have sometimes been part of the show.
Practicality lacking
After the moment’s drama would come the voting down the road, and while House members from solidly Republican districts would not need to fear, the party as a whole would, as would those concerned about a decimating debt crisis, regulatory overkill, endangering fumbles on foreign policy, shrinking freedoms and economic growth gone poof. While an immediate shutdown was itself seemingly shut down by Boehner’s saying goodbye, other chances will come up. And then there’s the desire of some Republicans in the GOP-controlled Senate to end the filibuster rule that can require some Democratic votes to move forward on a measure. The mistake in principle is a lack of institutional respect and deliberative caution. The mistake in practicality is what happens when Democrats come to power again.
It’s still a long way from November 2016, and anything can happen. Trump has finally come forth with a researched, honest-to-God, interesting policy proposal, but for the most part has won wide support by playing a dunce wearing a strange haircut instead of a cap. That’s hardly capitalizing at a time when the Democrats have botched up so much and have their candidate woes, too.
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