I don't know if John Boehner is smart enough to have engineered the position in which he finds himself today--frankly, I doubt it--but after Kevin McCarthy's withdrawal from the election for the next Speaker of The House, Boehner is top dog, not just in name this time, but in reality...or perhaps more aptly the top cat...the one in the catbird seat. McCarthy, who was Boehner's chosen successor, demonstrated his unworthiness almost immediately by confessing for his party the cardinal sin that the Democrats had been accusing them of committing collectively for a couple of years now: prurient intentions. McCarthy confirmed that the Benghazi hearings in particular, but by implication the email "scandal" as well, were designed to take Hillary Clinton down...McCarthy never mentioning some other higher purpose to legitimate the effort. The public hectoring of Hillary Clinton so as to deprive her of the inevitability of nomination as the next Democratic presidential nominee, not to mention election to the office, was one of those unsavory, sub rosa political enterprises that is as plain as the nose on Pinnochio's face but none-the-less impossible to prove. And if they were to be honest (not a likely prospect no matter what the issue) they would admit that they don't really think they can beat her if she prevails in her party, so all this Benghazi breast beating over...I don't know what it's over to tell you the truth...was a sort of cabalistic scheme, but they don't have to know. Their ostensible presumed successor to Boehner did it for them. With McCarthy gone, the two next most likely prospects-- and neither of them is particularly likely--are Jason Chaffetz, who is himself one of the Machiavellians tormenting Clinton, and a guy ironically named Daniel Webster who is even deeper entrenched in the Tea Party movement than Chaffetz. One of those two guys will be the choice of each of the forty or so members of the rebel alliance within the Republican Party, which means that neither has a chance in hell of winning because there are at least enough rational Republicans to prevent it, though not enough to prevail with regard to a choice of their own. And in light of this shambolic advent that is like a beacon illuminating the dysfunction of the Republican Party, who emerges? Well it seems that John Boehner's 'da man now. What an opportunity for both the Republican Party and Boehner, who probably would like to leave behind at least one accomplishment about which he can brag to his golfing buddies. So the important question isn't whether he was smart enough to create the chance to do something significant, it is whether he is smart enough to conceive of that significant something and make it happen.
Even Republicans are now admitting that for a Republican Speaker of The House to be elected, Democratic votes are going to be needed. But as everyone knows, the Democrats aren't going to cast those votes out of largess. They want a two year budget deal...as do those in the Republican establishment who see that crippling government, even spendthrift government, only hurts them. And before they vote on the latest trade deal, the Democrats are going to oppose President Obama's attempt to make nice with the countries of the Pacific rim by sending them some of the jobs that NAFTA didn't already send packing to Mexico. Both sides have leverage if they can find a way to work together, and with a common purpose and their purpose in pursuing it being service to the nation (my tongue is in my cheek now) the ancillary benefit might just be the routing...once and for all...of the rebellious palace guard that thinks it comprises the de facto junta that is running the nation, refusing to admit that the only way they are running us is into the ground. Think about it. If by submitting to real pragmatism, rather than condemning it as the capitulation that became the political slur by which the vipers in their bosom rose to an absurdist kind of control, a temporary palliation of a bad situation...well, a strategy could be born here that would genuinely serve the nation by becoming the template for consensus formulation for the foreseeable future. We might see laws being passed because votes will be allowed. People who wouldn't dare now to admit their true motivations for fear of the Republican guillotine coming down on their heads courtesy of the irrational reactionary constituency of the Republican Party might give in to the realization that they are not nearly in the national main stream and vote with governance in mind. We could have the kind of working majority that admits of the possibility that no one knows or gets everything, and from that might come the reemergence of honesty as a salient political credential. Go get em' John. Win one for the guy who played The Gipper.
Your friend,
Mike
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