Category: John Boehner

REPORT: Deal Struck, Averts Shutdown (Insert ’30 Pieces of Silver’ Joke Here)

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I’d been planning to go to bed early but stayed awake long enough to catch this:

President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said tonight that lawmakers have agreed on a temporary extension of government funding, averting a government shutdown while Congress considers a longer-term budget agreement.
Boehner made the same announcement during a very brief statement on Capitol Hill, little more than an hour before the midnight expiration of the continuing resolution that is currently funding the government; Boehner said the House will vote on the extension later tonight.

So now I guess I’ll stay up late enough to figure out how many magic beans Boehner got for the family cow.

UPDATE: Knife, back, some assembly required:

House Speaker John Boehner said he had reached agreement with the White House to avert the shutdown with barely more than an hour to spare, officials said.
“I am pleased that Senator Reid and I and the White House have been able to come to an agreement that will in fact cut spending and keep our government open,” he told reporters.
“I expect the House will vote tonight on a short term resolution into next week to allow some time for this agreement to be put together in legislative form and be brought to the floor of the Senate and the House for a vote.” . . .
The overall accord removed what Democrats had characterised as the biggest stumbling block – a Republican-crafted measure stripping federal funding from the Planned Parenthood clinics that provide abortions.

GOP Leaders: Standing Firmly for Our Lack of Principles!

UPDATE II: This irritated me:

OK, fine: Then show me one important liberal criticizing Obama and Democrats for giving up too much on this “compromise.” You can’t, because the Democrats gave up exactly nothing.

It is therefore not a “compromise” in any meaningful sense of the word, which is why there is not one peep of criticism from, inter alia, Alan Colmes.

Ace shrugs in weary exhaustion, and that’s OK, just so long as nobody expects us to pretend that the GOP has done anything meaningful to live up to its fiscal-conservative rhetoric.

UPDATE III: More details emerge:

After a long day of trading offers, the White House and House Republicans reached agreement Friday night on a budget framework that would cap 2011 appropriations near or below $1.050 trillion while cutting domestic and foreign aid by more than $40 billion from the rate of spending at the beginning of this Congress.

UPDATE IV: OK, thanks to Twitter friends who told me that Ezra Klein is unhappy with the deal:

Boehner’s the political winner here. Managed his caucus. Got dems to agree to more than expected. Averted a shutdown. He was very effective.

And in response to Obama’s speech, Klein says:

Listening to this speech, you’d think Obama was the one arguing for larger cuts.

And Klein doesn’t like Democratic leaders’ spin:

Shorter dems: these cuts we’ve been resisting and denouncing for months are historic and we’re proud to be passing so many of them.

So there we have exactly one important liberal criticizing the deal. I suppose we’ll have 100 more within a few hours, once Klein sends the secret bat-signal to all his JournoList buddies: “You must denounce Democrats as half-hearted weaklings!”

UPDATE V: “Historic” spending cuts, Harry Reid declares. The cuts aren’t as deep as those knives in our backs, but . . .

UPDATE VI: The following really deserves its own post. John Tabin named Ben Adler as one of the liberals disgruntled by the “compromise”:

Did I say it deserved its own post? No, it deserves an entire book: Why It’s Impossible to Discuss Economics With a Keynesian.

Ben Adler, you fucking moron* misguided young person: How does deficit reduction take money out of the economy?

The federal government doesn’t have a Magic Pot O’ Money and, contrary to whatever Ben Bernanke apparently believes, it can’t create money from thin air. Every dime that the federal government spends must come from one of three sources:

  1.  Taxation, which obviously takes money out of the economy.
  2. Borrowing (i.e., deficit spending), which also takes money out of the economy, in the form of drains on investment. Money that is spent by private investors to buy government debt (i.e., bonds) is money not available to private business either as loans or as investment capital (stock).
  3. Inflation, which devalues currency and thereby — yes, you guessed it — takes money out of the economy.

So Ben Adler’s idea that reducing the annual deficit means “taking all this money out of the economy” has no basis in reality.

UPDATE VII: Philip Klein declares this The Best Doggone Compromise in the Entire History of Compromises. Why, it’s even better than the Three-Fifths Compromise, which is to this day beloved by connoisseurs of compromise everywhere.

UPDATE VIII: Fire Andrea Mitchell says, “Boehner caves as expected.”

Here is a simple suggestion: Let Boehner survey the GOP House caucus and find out how many “yes” votes he has for this deal. If it’s not a majority, then Obama and Nancy Pelosi should guarantee enough House Democrat votes to pass it. So if there are 50 Republicans in a mood to vote “no,” that would mean Pelosi has 27 Democrat “yes” votes.

House Republicans who oppose the “compromise” should publicly declare themselves as “no” votes immediately, so that Pelosi is forced to put some skin into this game. Otherwise, just kill the damned deal and let’s start from scratch.

(* — John Tabin criticized my use of “fucking moron” to describe Ben Adler. Because I was once so stupid myself — and didn’t wise up until I was in my mid-30s — I use the term with the avuncular affection of an ex-fucking moron who wishes to discourage young people from persisting in error.)

UPDATE IX: When you get this high into the Roman-numeral updates, it’s serious news. Our friends at Uncoverage comment:

Did John Boehner “cave?” Well, yes, but that assumes that he didn’t plan to do what he did all along. Is $39 billion a significant cut? No. But it’s more than ever done before. In the context of saving America, we need to be talking about trillions, not billions.

I’m less enraged by the dollar amount than by the fact that Republican leaders appear to have used pro-lifers as a bargaining chip whose principles could be bartered away. But my devoutly Catholic friend Da Tech Guy is actually encouraged by Boehner’s Bargain, so maybe I’m misreading this.

Linked by Political Junkie Mom and by Reaganite Republican and, of course, welcome, Instapundit readers!


Never Take Advice from Your Enemies

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For example, Harry Reid:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Monday urged Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to ditch members of the Tea Party and cut a deal with Democrats to avert a government shutdown.
Reid insisted it is those GOP internal divisions that are threatening to shut down the government after April 8, in less than two weeks.
“For the sake of our economy, it’s time for mainstream Republicans to stand up to the Tea Party and rejoin Democrats at the table to negotiate a responsible solution that cuts spending while protecting jobs,” he said.

First point: No Republican is “threatening to shut down the government.” The House of Representatives is controlled by Republicans. The Senate is controlled by Harry Reid and it is he who, by rejecting the House budget plan, is trying to force a shutdown, which he clearly hopes to blame on the GOP.

(Question: Are reporters at The Hill professionally obliged to report Reid’s dishonest rhetoric in this credulous manner, as if they were stenographers or publicists at a p.r. firm? The Hill‘s Erik Wasson “reports” three entire paragraphs quoted directly from Reid’s press release and it is not until the eighth paragraph of Wasson’s article that he begins to permit the GOP to respond.)

Second point: Republicans are doing a piss-poor job of explaining the shamelessly deceptive game being played by Reid and the Democrats, who are not being directly called out on their use of the federal budget as a political hostage. Every day, in every statement, in every public appearance, Republicans should point out that the current negotiations are the result of Nancy Pelosi’s failure, when Democrats held an insuperable majority in the House, to pass a budget for Fiscal Year 2011. Had Pelosi and the Democrats done their job last year, we would not be in our current “crisis” mode, and any attempt to scapegoat the GOP for this situation is nothing but a damned lie.

Third point: If Boehner lets Reid get away with this kind of stuff — driving a wedge into the GOP House caucus — it is Boehner, and not Reid, who is to blame.

The overwhelming Republican victory in 2010 was a clear mandate for reducing the out-of-control deficit spending that has been a deliberate part of the Obama administration’s misguided Keynesian economic policy. In the current budget negotiations, Reid and the Democrats are trying to “win” retroactively an election campaign they lost.

These are self-evident political facts, which are not complex or “nuanced,” and which any taxpayer can easily understand. If Boehner, Cantor and other GOP leaders are unable to articulate these facts, if they let themselves be bamboozled into arguing policy in the phony terms dictated by Democrats, then they do not deserve to be called “leaders,” and deserve the defeat into which they seem to be stumbling.

UPDATE: More stenography from Erik Wasson of The Hill:

Senate Democrats and the White House on Monday were working to finalize a new counteroffer to the GOP on 2011 spending cuts.
The counteroffer would cut an additional $20 billion from 2011 spending on top of the $10 billion already cut by two short-term continuing resolutions enacted this month, sources close to the talks said.

Today is the first time I’d ever noticed Wasson’s byline (he joined The Hill staff in November) and, as in the previous Harry Reid story, here Wasson offers eight consecutive paragraphs of Democrat talking points before making an “oh-by-the-way” gesture toward letting Republicans reply.

Media Decides to Be the Decider

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So, after a couple hours offline, I return to the computer, check Memorandum, and see headlines like these:

What’s going on here is that (a) the liberal media are once again trying to tell the Republican Party what to do, and (b) some Republicans — including a celebrity millionaire trying to promote his reality-TV career — are playing along with this game.

As a conservative, being able to think clearly about politics requires an enormous effort to see through the layers of tendentious bovine excrement smeared across the public mind. Understand, for example:

  • Members of Congress are fully authorized to vote their consciences without regard for how their votes would be portrayed by a hostile press.
  • When a reporter asks a question, “no comment” is an acceptable response.
  • Anonymous “insiders” are a dime a dozen in politics, and every time you see an anonymous source quoted in a story, you have every right to ask yourself, “What’s his agenda? What’s in it for him? Whose ox is this anonymous source trying to gore?”
  • Polls taken many months in advance of an election are a dubious predictor of the actual result, otherwise Charlie Crist would be a Republican senator and Martha Coakley would be a Democratic senator.

I’m not saying that people should ignore the news. I’m saying that people need to keep in mind that the media have their own agendas ( including trying to gin up readership and TV viewership) and that this imposes on news-consumers the burden of ignoring the hype and spin to find the actual facts buried beneath the bovine excrement.

And Republicans who try to advance their own narrow interests by playing along with the liberal media’s game — to the general detriment of the conservative cause — do not deserve admiration as “leaders.”

Dreams of a Government Shutdown?

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Republicans in the House have been pulling long hours to enact a continuing resolution that would extend funding for the rest of the fiscal year. And if they fail to get it passed before the current continuing resolution runs out, they plan to pass a stopgap short-term measure to prevent a government shutdown. Meanwhile, it appears, Democrats hope Boehner fails:

A high-ranking aide to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told chiefs of staff of Democratic lawmakers that a government shutdown is more likely than not, according to attendees.
Speaking at a regular meeting of the top aides to House Democrats, Pelosi’s floor director, Jerry Hartz, offered, unprompted, his assessment that the odds favor inaction before the government runs out of money, sources said.

This is almost certainly wishful thinking on Hartz’s part. Even the most ideologically rigid of Tea Party freshmen know the history of how Clinton (with the assistance of the media) demonized Gingrich’s Republicans over the 1995-96 shutdown, and are eager to avoid a repeat.

Furthermore, given their campaign mantra of “jobs, jobs, jobs,” the GOP freshmen want to be seen as working pragmatically on fixing the economy. It’s possible that the Democratic majority in the Senate could, by obstinate resistance, create a “no deal” standoff with House Republicans — but that wouldn’t cause a shutdown, just a resort to more short-term continuing resolutions while the impasse was negotiated.

And, at some point, President Obama might have the chance to cause trouble by wielding the veto. But again, that just takes us back to short-term continuing resolutions, and leaves Obama exposed to the accusation that he’s refusing to cut spending.

Some conservatives will be disgruntled by Boehner’s desire to avoid a dramatic showdown with Obama. For example, Ace of Spades was enraged by yesterday’s vote against an extra $22 billion in cuts, and Dave in Texas rages again today. But the GOP House leadership has to be thinking three moves ahead in this chess game, and a “reasonable compromise” now — however much it enrages conservatives — will put Boehner in a stronger position when he’s negotiating with the Senate and the President.

To my enraged and disgruntled friends: Chill.

Once they’ve got the continuing resolution in place for the rest of the fiscal year, House Republicans will immediately begin the budgeting process for the next fiscal year, and that’s when the real fun starts rolling. All you’ve got to do is wait a few weeks, OK?

At any rate, Pelosi’s fantasies of a government shutdown — giving her a chance to claim that House Republicans are a bunch of wild-eyed fanatical extremists — are almost certain to remain a fantasy.

If John Boehner’s Lost Nick Gillespie …

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. . . well, he’s lost libertarians in leather jackets:

Memo to Speaker Boehner: If You Won a Congessional Majority Because You Pledged to Cut Spending and You Can’t Think of a Single Program to Cut Now, Please Go Home

That’s the headline on a Gillespie post at Reason magazine’s Hit & Run blog after Boehner’s interview with NBC’s Brian Williams:

WILLIAMS: Name a program right now that we could do without.
BOEHNER: I don’t think I have one off the top of my head.

Yeah. Kinda troubling. You know what’s also kinda troubling? The way Nick’s rattling the tip jar for Reason:

Dude, they’ve got Koch money and they’re shaking their tip jar.

I ain’t got no Koch money. You really ought to hit my tip jar. You don’t want me to get all choked up, do you?

UPDATE: Wow, you can’t say those Koch people aren’t Internet-savvy. As soon as I posted this, I noticed a Google ad in the sidebar: “Learn More About Koch,” with a link to the Web site of the David H. Koch Charitable Foundation.

Evidently they’re a wee bit sensitive about blog criticism, and they want you to know they’re against cancer.

So much for those rumors of them being pro-cancer.

How Much Spending Will GOP Cut?

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Evidently not the $100 billion they promised:

Many people knowledgeable about the federal budget said House Republicans could not keep their campaign promise to cut $100 billion from domestic spending in a single year. Now it appears that Republicans agree.
As they prepare to take power on Wednesday, Republican leaders are scaling back that number by as much as half, aides say, because the current fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, will be nearly half over before spending cuts could become law.

More at Hot Air. I’m not sure that anyone will be outraged over this. The important thing is for Congress to move in the right direction and stop the kind of out-of-control deficit spending by which Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats increased the national debt by $5.2 trillion in four years.

Excerpts from Speaker Boehner’s opening speech today:

“The American people have humbled us. They have refreshed our memories as to just how temporary the privilege to serve is. They have reminded us that everything here is on loan from them. That includes this gavel, which I accept cheerfully and gratefully, knowing I am but its caretaker. After all, this is the people’s House. This is their Congress. It’s about them, not us. What they want is a government that is honest, accountable and responsive to their needs. A government that respects individual liberty, honors our heritage, and bows before the public it serves.”

That’s the written text, which doesn’t include the part where he gets all choked up and starts crying. (It’s OK, Mr. Speaker, we like the crying.) Boehner’s speech — crying and all — will be livestreamed.

Speaking of Congress, by the time you read this, I’ll be in D.C. getting acquainted with the 112th Congress. Or maybe pulled over on the side of I-270 getting acquainted with a Maryland state trooper. Either way, I don’t know how long I’ll be offline. I’ve got some more posts pre-scheduled for later today.

Thanks to Mike in Ardmore, Virginia in Centerville, Jeff in Walla Walla, Will in Dallas, Mark in Spring Valley, Richard in North Hollywood, and Mike in El Segundo for their recent contributions to the Shoe Leather Fund.

Speaker John Boehner’s Swearing-In: Less Glamorous, More Choked Up and Crying

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The Washington Post:

Austerity is the theme of Republican John A. Boehner’s installation as House speaker this week, placing the start of this new Congress in stark contrast to the more lavish festivities that marked Democrat Nancy Pelosi’s swearing-in four years ago.
On Wednesday, following a bipartisan prayer service at St. Peter’s Catholic Church, Boehner will recite the oath and take the gavel from Pelosi with the attendant pomp and no more – except, perhaps, a few tears.
Then the 61-year-old Ohioan will deliver his maiden speech to the new House, which includes a huge cadre of freshmen lawmakers. Many of them are rambunctious Republicans who sailed into Washington with the tea party winds and are determined to use their new majority to undo much of President Obama’s legislative record.

Don’t expect Hollywood celebrities. Do expect some crying. And lots and lots of Ohio people:

John Boehner would have a sizeable crowd in Washington Wednesday to watch him be sworn in as the 61st Speaker of the House if it were only his blood relatives coming.
Boehner is the second oldest of the 12 children of the late Earl and Mary Ann Boehner of Reading; and 10 of his siblings and their families are going to Washington for the swearing-in.
But hundreds of others are coming as well, by plane, automobile and buses – cousins, family friends, campaign volunteers, Republican Party officials from all over Ohio, and tea party activists who supported the West Chester congressman’s “Pledge to America” campaign that led to the GOP taking over the House in the November election.
“There are a whole lot of us here who want to pay tribute to John’s accomplishments,” said David Kern, a Liberty Township trustee who is chairman of the Butler County Republican Party.
“It’s something we are very proud of – that the speaker of the House comes from Butler County, Ohio,” said Kern, who will fly to Washington Tuesday for the Boehner swearing-in and festivities. “That’s something to celebrate.”

BTW, I’d like to go down to Washington to cover Wednesday’s ceremonies opening the 112th Congress, checking in with some of our favorites like Ann Marie Buerkle and Allen West. So if you want to hit the tip jar for $10 or $20 to help with expenses — gas, parking, bribes for Maryland State Troopers who clock me doing 91 mph in a 65-mph zone — that would be appreciated.

UPDATE: Supporters of North Carolina’s Renee Ellmers will celebrate her swearing-in Wednesday at the Hay-Adams Hotel.