I wonder how many voters have considered the implications of the Boehner brokered budget deal beyond the obviation of the factional problems that not having reached a deal would represent. I wonder how many people are asking themselves what his ability to reach a compromise with Democrats on this occasion says about his inability to do so on virtually all prior occasions during his tenure as Speaker of the House. Put concisely, I find myself asking why now and never before. It's a rhetorical question actually because I think I know, but it is a question worth asking because everyone who votes Republican should be thinking about it. Consider the kind of polemics in which Boehner indulged.
Whenever he couldn't get consensus within his party, he found a way to blame either The Senate and Mitch McConnell or the Democrats or President Obama. When he couldn't get bills related to unemployment insurance extensions through, he would deflect criticism of The House by claiming that he and his party had sent more than forty jobs bills to The Senate and they hadn't acted. But he made the mistake of listing them on his website, and none of them were anything but immigration strictures or economic relief for the select few who don't need it. And of course there were the previous attempts to put together budget deals, all of which turned out to cause just as many problems when they elapsed by their own terms as had existed when they were agreed to. But every time there was a struggle over the budget, Boehner blamed it on the Democrats by criticizing their insistence on raising tax revenue rather than balancing the budget on the backs of the poor and the middle class. And of course on immigration, Ryan didn't invent the notion that The Congress doesn't trust The President. That was Boehner's constant refrain after President Obama forewarned him and his party that if they didn't act he would take executive action, and when he finally did, instead of admitting the intransigence of the Tea Party, irrationally conservative wing of his party, Boehner said that Mr. Obama's unilateral act had poisoned the atmosphere for immigration reform and that The President couldn't be trusted anymore. Put concisely, Boehner's priority was his own political career at the expense of governance in the interests of the American people. He could have just allowed votes on all these issues and let the members take the heat for their own intractability, but instead he protected the forty or so well-poisoners in the "Freedom Caucus"--a euphemism for a small mafia of sanctimonious hacks who stand for the principle, "do what we want or we won't let you do anything"--by preventing votes on sensitive issues with parliamentary procedures. The "regular order" of business in The House is that anyone can call a vote on a bill. But through a special rule on a bill, The Speaker can change that rule so that only he or his designee can call a vote, and much like the filibuster in The Senate, that ability kept everything on which the conservatives might lose from coming to the floor for a vote. It was pure politics...nothing to do with principle, and now Boehner's successor, Paul Ryan, is embracing the same rhetorical tactics, and probably will employ the same procedural tactics as well.
In local politics here in Connecticut, town council members are elected at large, meaning that the whole town votes on every seat rather than the town being broken down into districts in which people can vote for only one of two or three candidates. The result is that town councils are populated by the same people over and over again, usually alternating with people of the opposite party, but being elected en masse rather than on their own individual merits...or policy positions. So you get one party or the other being in power with only a small minority of the opposition on the council with them. An individual running against them doesn't really have a chance because the only real change is at the bottom, relatively unpopular end of the ticket for each party. The hacks are in control whether they are Republican or Democrat, and they are in control as a predetermined group. The constituency never changes unless someone dies or gets bored and moves on. This protection of members from bearing the responsibility of votes taken on difficult issues in The House has the same effect. You can vote for Republican policies or for Democrat policies, but you don't get the chance to vote for the individual's policies because they are never manifested in votes taken in The House. No one knows what an individual congressman stands for because he has to vote only when his party is univocal on a subject. That's how they stay in power for twenty or thirty years in individual seats. They shelter themselves within the party fold.
In my opinion, voters should protect themselves from this phenomenon by insisting that the next candidate for whom they vote in congress, either house, favors the elimination of the filibuster in the case of senate aspirants and that special order motions be banned in the case of would-be Congressmen. That way, we would go back to the old precept that all politics is local, and we'd by so much the better for it. Paul Ryan won't be any help in that regard, no matter what he says.
Your friend,
Mike
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