Will Boehner Be The Scapegoat For Republican Nihilism?

Thomas Kean, Sr., the former New Jersey Governor, not the crackpot son ("Jr."), didn't bat an eye last week when he made a point by mentioning that "my party is nuts today." And he was very clear that he was talking about the Republican national party, not the New Jersey state GOP. And it's all about what's happened to the GOP with the back-to-back defeats of mainstream conservatives John McCain and Mitt Romney by [African-American] Barack Hussein Obama. Let's go back-- via Lee Fang's new book, The Machine: A Field Guide to the Resurgent Right-- to the time right after Obama beat McCain in 2008. "Eric Cantor," he reminds is, "quickly flamed out in his own early attempt to establish an organization of conservative leaders." It was a sign of things to come for a floundering Republican Party.

Dubbed the National Council for a New America, Cantor’s group recruited several GOP governors, like Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, and lawmakers who would supposedly rebrand what it meant to be conservative and drop the “nostalgia” for old, failed policies. Social conservatives, including former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and former Ohio secretary of state Ken Blackwell, sharply rebuked Cantor for excluding topics like gay marriage or abortion from the National Council website issue page. Conservative leaders involved in their own conservative movement leadership committees, such as Newt Gingrich and Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, were not initially invited to Cantor’s group. Perkins attacked Cantor for “running scared on the claims of the left and the media that social conservatism is a dead-end for the GOP.” But the true death knell for Cantor’s National Council came when Rush Limbaugh called it a “scam” and a backdoor attempt by “people who don’t believe in conservatism” to “leave Reagan behind.” Cantor mustered only a single public event for his group, a town hall session with former governors Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush at a pizza parlor in suburban Virginia. Shortly after Limbaugh’s comments, Cantor quietly abandoned his effort, which only lasted about a month after it began in the early stages of the Obama presidency. Cantor’s effort at moderation was the only organized attempt for the right to move toward the center after Bush. Its quick death sent a signal that conservative power would remain with activists on the far right.

Four years later, Republicans are thrashing around as incoherently as ever trying, unsuccessfully, to find a message that goes beyond, "the Black guy isn't a legitimate president of the United States." This week Paul Kane asserted in the Washington Post that, in fact, House Republicans have now broken unto fight factions. Keane's "my party if nuts" comment doesn't even begin to tell the story of how extremist anti-American Confederates have infiltrated and taken control of one of America's (formerly) mainstream political parties.

On New Year’s Day, in a cramped room in the Capitol basement, House Republican leaders faced an angry caucus. Democrats had negotiated them into a corner-- virtually every American would be hit with a massive tax increase unless the House agreed to block the hikes for everyone but the wealthy.

A freshman lawmaker seized a microphone and demanded to know how the leaders planned to vote. House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) was a yes, but his top two lieutenants were opposed.

“If you’re for this and they’re against, we’ve got problems,” Rep. Stephen Lee Fincher (R-Tenn.) shouted at Boehner and more than 200 lawmakers present, according to Republicans who attended the closed-door meeting. Sure enough, they had problems. Hours later, Democrats helped Boehner pass the measure over the opposition of more than 60 percent of GOP lawmakers.

That vote, to avert the “fiscal cliff,” marked a breaking point for House Republicans, who had disintegrated into squabbling factions, no longer able to agree on-- much less execute-- some of the most basic government functions.

Ever since, Boehner has cautiously tried to steer his party away from that bitter moment, with varying success. A short-term strategy, which conservatives called “the Williamsburg Accord,” emerged from a bruising mid-January retreat. It restored enough unity to permit the House to dodge a government shutdown, badger the Senate into passing its first budget in four years and open investigations of the Obama White House.

But beyond those limited efforts, the House has not approved ambitious legislation this year. Lawmakers have instead focused on trying to re-brand the party around kitchen-table issues-- although even some of those bills have run into trouble. And the most momentous policy decisions, including an immigration overhaul and a fresh deadline for raising the federal debt limit, have no coherent strategy to consolidate Republicans, much less take on the Democrats.

...The leaders have come under intense scrutiny. Barely 36 hours after the caustic New Year’s Day vote, Boehner faced a coup attempt from a clutch of renegade conservatives. The cabal quickly fell apart when several Republicans, after a night of prayer, said God told them to spare the speaker. Still, Boehner came within a few votes of failing to secure his speakership on the initial vote, an outcome that would have forced a second ballot for the first time in nearly a century.

The coming battles will test Boehner’s power and, many Republicans privately suggested, potentially reveal whether it’s time for him to go.

“This is a big summer and fall, a test for all concerned,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), a close Boehner ally.

At the moment, House leaders have no plan for passing the test.

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, House Republicans filed into the same Capitol basement room, HC5, where they fought on New Year’s Day. They filtered past clearly marked NO SMOKING signs-- which, as always, the Camel-smoking Boehner ignored-- and settled into the same hard plastic chairs that have served as Washington’s toughest ideological fault line of the past 30 months.

The windowless room with two large-screen TVs and a couple of microphones on either side was handed over to rank-and-file Republicans, nearly 40 of whom waited their turn to offer ideas for what the GOP should try to get later this year in return for agreeing to raise the debt ceiling.

Some wanted more energy exploration, some entitlement reform and one lawmaker pushed to attach antiabortion measures to the legislative package, according to Republicans in the room.

This is the price of remaining in charge in today’s House: Boehner must always appear to be working from the bottom up, never seeming to impose his will.

...Many within the party wonder if there’s any approach Republicans will unify behind this time.

Several veteran Republicans, speaking on the condition of anonymity to criticize their colleagues, said they fear there are too many extreme budget hawks to approve a deal with GOP votes alone, further hampering their leverage in negotiations with the Senate.

Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, is trying to rally support for a broad rewrite of the tax code in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling.

But many conservatives consider that insufficient to meet the Williamsburg agreement, which they hold requires a path to balancing the budget within a decade. At Williamsburg, Republicans also agreed to put off the debt ceiling fight until the fall and agreed to fund the government at sequester levels.

Some conservatives are talking about circulating a petition to impose an internal rule forbidding Boehner from advancing legislation that does not have majority support in the Republican Conference, a restriction that would have torpedoed the fiscal cliff bill.

Boehner has ducked specifics about the fall. “We’ve not made any decisions at this point,” he told reporters recently.

He said that Republicans are in a similar spot on immigration, indicating that the rank and file do not understand the issue.

“We’ve got to educate our members and we’ve got to help educate them about the hundreds of issues that are involved,” he said.

...Late last year, leaders finally tried to assert themselves over the restive caucus. They ejected Schweikert and three others from key committees, moves widely viewed as coming from McCarthy, a rare moment when he cracked the whip.

Also, many members of the 2010 class are still sore about the financial quandary that then-Rep. Jeff Landry (R) was in last fall in Louisiana when facing Rep. Charles W. Boustany Jr. (R) in an election caused by redistricting. Landry’s friends said he was rebuffed by influential corporate donors, who believed leadership favored the four-term Boustany. Landry lost badly, outspent by a 2-to-1 margin.

Then came the chairman’s race for the Republican Study Committee, a caucus of conservatives. The most influential lawmakers and activists backed Rep. Tom Graves (Ga.), who had rocky relations with leaders. Yet Rep. Steve Scalise (La.) won the secret ballot-- an outcome thought to be orchestrated behind the scenes by Boehner and Cantor.

If leaders got what they wanted, though, some rank and file still did not come around.

Just past noon on Jan. 3, as the 113th Congress was being sworn in, Boehner faced a rare coup attempt. The normally composed McCarthy stood on the House floor screaming at Rep. Raul R. Labrador (R-Idaho) and Fincher, who had been approached Jan. 1 by other conservatives interested in ousting the speaker. Boehner had pulled Fincher into the speaker’s office that morning for a conversation, several GOP sources said.

The conservatives had decided that Boehner was too overbearing, too top-down. The central gripe was freewheeling backroom negotiations with Obama, talking about trading $1 trillion in new taxes for what they considered modest entitlement reforms.

“It seemed like we did a lot of things without collaboration,” said Rep. Steve Southerland II (R-Fla.), a 47-year-old funeral home operator elected in 2010 whose Capitol Hill townhouse became a regular meeting spot for agitated lawmakers.

About 17 defectors were needed to deny Boehner an outright majority. The hope was that if they could block the speaker on the first ballot, they could convene the GOP conference in HC5 and compel someone else-- maybe Cantor, Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.) or Rep. Jeb Hensarling (Tex.)-- to challenge Boehner. Even if no one stood up and Boehner won on a second ballot, it would have been a humiliating rebuke.

Southerland, who has previously talked about his role only with the conservative Weekly Standard, said he read the Old Testament the night before the vote. He read the story of Saul and David, as the king of Israel tried to kill the future king. David wins and, with a chance to kill the king, decides to spare Saul.

Southerland woke up convinced that Boehner should be spared. Others, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said they, too, prayed before siding with Boehner.

Maybe right-wing sociopaths like Southerland should step away from the Old Testament now and then and try the New one Jesus brought-- the one all conservative loath and fear and only pay lip service to. In any case, Southerland and other teabaggers buckled when the vote came and Boehner was re-elected-- albeit just barely-- by his fractious party.