Cantor vs Boehner? Or Is It The Ruling Elites vs The Rest of Us That Really Matters?

While working people were finally drawing together into a we are one stance-- which they are allowing Democrats who want to, to tag along on-- the Tea Party has been disintegrating as a grassroots force and the behind-the-curtain-elements are at war with the Republican Establishment over the extent of the nihilism the party-- as vessel-- can adopt. Yesterday, for example, Beltway pundit Charlie Cook, explained how Republicans are putting their House majority in jeopardy by going after entitlements and, in fcat, jeopardizing their hold on older white voters (who are big Medicare fans). And while Martin Luther King III was explaining why his father would have been in the front lines of the pro-democracy battles of the battles raging in Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, Michigan... wherever Republicans are trying to curtain collective bargaining rights, the Republicans in Congress were picking sides for the epic civil war brewing in their ranks.

This week John Heilemann at New York magazine speculates on how long a certain politician with a "perma-tan and a propensity to weep openly at the slightest provocation" will be able to last as Speaker. Last week Boehner wasn't getting any substantial resistance from a spineless Democratic Establishment already in their favorite defensive crouch as he put together a compromise to further benefit the ruling elites at the expense of the working and middle classes. Across the board surrender by conflicted Democratic Party cowards-- or worse-- would be viewed by anyone rational as a major Republican victory and a major Boehner victory. "Rational" is the key word. Boehner's GOP allies were "behaving like a spastic finger jabbing him in the eye."

At the base of the Capitol, the tea-party faithful staged a rally aimed at pressuring House conservatives to brook no compromise. Boehner’s former mentor Newt Gingrich met with GOP freshmen and urged much the same, arguing for spending cuts billions deeper than what the speaker regards as politically feasible. Then there was the House majority leader, Eric Cantor, openly distancing himself from, and positioning himself to the right of, his boss Boehner-- a maneuver that struck some as odd, some as shifty, and others as downright treacherous.

Navigating the impasse over the current year’s budget is widely and correctly seen as the first major test of Boehner’s speakership. The choice before him seems stark: strike a deal and risk splintering the new Republican majority in the House or hold his caucus together and risk the political fallout from a shutdown. Will Boehner prove deft enough to find a way to slice this Gordian knot? Quite possibly. But it may provide him little joy, for the past two months have been but a mild preview of the hellish dynamics he will be contending with-- times ten and with a vengeance-- in the vastly bigger, more dramatic, more consequential budget battle that lies ahead.


Boehner’s preferred outcome in the immediate skirmish is clear enough: He wants a deal. And the reasoning behind that preference is equally crystalline. Having witnessed firsthand the political fallout that buried his party the last time it imposed an extended and unpaid holiday on the federal workforce, in 1995, Boehner is all too aware of the dangers lurking down that path. More to the point, he recognizes a good deal when it falls into his lap. In February, please recall, the House leadership put on the table its opening bid in the negotiations over how much to slash from the remainder of 2011 spending-- $32 billion. Two months later, after much haggling, the White House and Senate Democrats have made their counteroffer-- $33 billion. What do you call getting even more than you asked for in a negotiation? Unless you’re insane, stoned, or stupid, you call it a big-time win.

I’ll reserve judgment on which category (or categories) the hard-line House freshmen and the tea-party militants occupy. But in any case, they see the nascent deal instead as a gutless capitulation. In February, those forces, spearheaded by the archconservative Republican Study Committee, compelled the leadership to nearly double its proposed cuts to $61 billion. In the House, that package easily passed on a party-line vote, but in the Senate, it was—and remains today, and will forever be-- D.O.A. Yet the House hard-liners continue to insist on nothing less.

For Boehner, the route around this problem is the same as the one he used to pass the last short-term continuing resolution to keep the government’s lights on: construct a coalition of mainline Republicans and conservative Democrats. But the cost for Boehner would not be inconsiderable. On that last CR vote, 54 Republicans defected. About as many would be likely to do so again. And one of them, according to Republicans on the Hill, might well be Eric Cantor-- a turn of events that would be highly interesting, to say the least, and also potentially portentous.

Indeed, the specter of a Boehner-Cantor split over a budget deal was the talk of Washington last week, fueled by the majority leader’s conspicuous efforts to put space between himself and the speaker. At a moment when Boehner was leaving open the possibility of another CR, Cantor loudly slammed his foot down: “Time is up here,” he said. And even as Boehner was privately moving toward agreeing to the $33 billion figure being offered by the other side, Cantor firmly insisted that $61 billion “is the House position-- that is what we are driving for.”

Now, it’s not inconceivable that what was happening here was a classic bit of good cop, bad cop. But given the overt pressure already coming from the tea party and the freshmen, it’s not as if another snarling law dog was needed on the beat. A more Machiavellian-- and, to my mind, more plausible-- explanation is that Cantor is seeking to bolster his credentials with the tea party as a replacement for Boehner should an insurrection arise against him. Already Judson Phillips, the founder of Tea Party Nation, has called for a primary challenge to the speaker in 2012. (“Charlie Sheen is now making more sense than John Boehner,” Phillips wrote in a recent blog post.) And that threat was echoed at last week’s tea-party rally.

President Obama and his team fully expected this sort of internecine squabbling to erupt within the GOP, and they predicated their approach to the budget fight on it. For many congressional Democrats, that approach has been a source of frustration: too disengaged, too passive. But the president, like the speaker, is intensely wary of the political consequences of a shutdown; though 1995 provides some comfort, the folks at 1600 would be the first to tell you that John Boehner is no Newt Gingrich. By first remaining above the fray and then offering a reasonable compromise, however, White House officials believe they have gone a long way toward inoculating Obama from blame if things blow up. “Look at them, then look at us,” says an administration official. “Voters know a shit show when they see it.”

But even if there is no shutdown, the Obamans see their approach as paying dividends. By meeting Republicans more than halfway on spending cuts, they curry favor with the deficit-minded independent voters with whom Obama is currently suffering. (A new Quinnipiac poll puts his approval rating at just 39 percent with them.) And by, in effect, partnering with Boehner to put together a bi-partisan deal, they are sowing seeds of dissension within the Republican ranks that may flower into something rather lovely in the larger fiscal clash around the corner.

And the 87 House freshmen don't know who to side with-- bad mommy or bad daddy. (Remember, both Cantor and Boehner, as well as Ryan, forced dozens of Republicans to vote for the TARP bankster bailout after it was initially rejected by the House. Savvy teabaggers-- that would be something like 5% of them-- know that with Boehner's and Cantor's bribes, arm-twisting and threats, there would have been no bankster bailout.) Not the smartest or best educated batch of congressmen to have ever come along, this is causing them a great deal of confusion and consternation.

The freshmen began the spending skirmish as the instigators: their demand for deeper cuts sent Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and GOP leaders back to the drawing board, resulting in a House bill that would slash $61 billion from federal spending-- nearly twice the amount leadership had initially proposed.

Six weeks later, the stalemate goes on, delivering a sobering reality check to the increasingly frustrated insurgents.

“I had hoped we would be finished with this debate by now,” Rep. Kristi Noem (R-S.D.), one of two freshman representatives in the leadership, said in an interview.

“I didn’t come here to play patty-cake or to do business as usual in Washington,” added Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.).

“I have been very patient in learning the ropes,” he said. “And what I see is exactly what my constituents warned me about, and that is business as usual is counterproductive.”

Members such as Reps. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.) and Allen West (R-Fla.) have vowed to oppose a final deal that does not defund Democratic priorities such as the healthcare law or Planned Parenthood.

Yet the past weeks have also exposed splinters in the freshman class, showing that the notion of a cohesive bloc is a myth. In many cases, the drive for deeper spending cuts has been led by veteran GOP conservatives such as Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Mike Pence of Indiana and Michele Bachmann of Minnesota.

While some freshman lawmakers have veered closer to the Tea Party, many others have fully embraced the leadership’s strategy and message. Boehner’s repeated reminders about the limits of Republican power, for example, have seeped into their own talking points.

“I know that Republicans only control one-half of one-third of government,” said Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), as he walked out of a freshman meeting with leadership, “so it’s very hard when we’re still in the minority in general to try to enact the cuts that the American people have sent us here to do.”

And what's it all really about-- all the Sturm und Drang. Economist Joseph Stiglitz probably sees it a lot more in depth, in perspective and more clearly than anyone inside Washington political circles. His essay on Inequality, Of the 1%, By the 1%, For the 1%, in the new Vanity Fair is more important than a phony food fight between Republicans... or between the corporate shills who call themselves Democrats and the Republicans.

The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided. While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous-- 12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades-- and more-- has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.

Economists long ago tried to justify the vast inequalities that seemed so troubling in the mid-19th century—inequalities that are but a pale shadow of what we are seeing in America today. The justification they came up with was called “marginal-productivity theory.” In a nutshell, this theory associated higher incomes with higher productivity and a greater contribution to society. It is a theory that has always been cherished by the rich. Evidence for its validity, however, remains thin. The corporate executives who helped bring on the recession of the past three years-- whose contribution to our society, and to their own companies, has been massively negative-- went on to receive large bonuses. In some cases, companies were so embarrassed about calling such rewards “performance bonuses” that they felt compelled to change the name to “retention bonuses” (even if the only thing being retained was bad performance). Those who have contributed great positive innovations to our society, from the pioneers of genetic understanding to the pioneers of the Information Age, have received a pittance compared with those responsible for the financial innovations that brought our global economy to the brink of ruin.

Stiglitz goes on to explain how the wealthy are killing the goose that's been laying their golden eggs-- even with causing a violent backlash against them and the political shills they own. "An economy," he points out, "in which most citizens are doing worse year after year-- an economy like America’s-- is not likely to do well over the long haul. There are several reasons for this. America is now a land of shrinking opportunity, filled with the kinds of inequality that undermines efficiency, and incapable the kinds of serious investments in infrastructure, basic research, and education that can guarantee a successful future. Conservatives don't care about the future. Their world is about the quarterly bottom line. As Stiglitz patiently explains, "None of this should come as a surprise-- it is simply what happens when a society’s wealth distribution becomes lopsided. The more divided a society becomes in terms of wealth, the more reluctant the wealthy become to spend money on common needs. The rich don’t need to rely on government for parks or education or medical care or personal security-- they can buy all these things for themselves. In the process, they become more distant from ordinary people, losing whatever empathy they may once have had. They also worry about strong government-- one that could use its powers to adjust the balance, take some of their wealth, and invest it for the common good. The top 1 percent may complain about the kind of government we have in America, but in truth they like it just fine: too gridlocked to re-distribute, too divided to do anything but lower taxes."

This top 1% is who the political elites work for. Paul Ryan showed that clearly in his budget proposals-- featuring the dismemberment of Medicare-- yesterday. And Obama? Good fucking luck; he's busy raising a billion dollars from this 1%.