RIP, Sunny John? Here's why a House floor vote on a clean minimum-wage bill should be an urgent priority

If it works for Sunny John, it works for me.

by Ken

As I've had frequent occasion to note, Howie and I tend to respond to remarkably similar stories, and so it is that while I was still thinking about the hoped-for suicide of Housa Speaker "Sunny John" Boehner, Howie was already asking: "Will Boehner Commit Suicide Over The Minimum Wage? Or Just Retire To His New Florida Condo?"

Howie is intrigued by the possibility that the Sunny John of 2014 doesn't have to worry about maintaining his fortress-like opposition to a straight vote on a minimum-wage increase because he doesn't expect to be hanging around the Capitol much longer. That Florida condo he just bought is taken as highly suggestive evidence.

My take is a little different. I'd like to focus on the possibility that Sunny John is a man of his word. He was chairman of the House Republican Conference back in 1996 when he uttered those immortal words:

"I'll commit suicide before I vote on a clean minimum-wage bill."

I take it as significant that Sunny John didn't talk about voting "for" a clean minimum-wage bill, but merely voting "on" such a bill. which I take to mean participating in a floor vote on such a bill. Of course who ever would have thought, back in 1996, that Sunny John would one day be the person in more or less complete charge of what bills reach the floor of the House for a vote? Why, the very idea of a Speaker Sunny John would have been ludicrous.

Of course, the idea is still pretty ludicrous, but the fact is that the son of a bitch actually stuck it out and slithered into the speaker's chair. Which puts him in about as good position as you can image to make sure he won't ever have to "vote on" a clean minimum-wage bill. But even if, somehow, such a vote were to come about, I suppose that technically he could get around his 1996 vow by not voting -- or perhaps simply not being present at the time of the vote, so he could be recorded as "not present," and never mind that he's now the speaker of the House.

But that would be pretty weaselly, and we know that Sunny John is the very soul of say-it-and-mean-it straightforwardness, so I like to think that, if it came to that, he would honor the spirit of that old pledge, even without regard to whether it's legally enforceable. (I'm going to guess that he didn't make the pledge under oath.) But again, I don't think he would fall back on such a technicality, or claim that he had his fingers crossed when he took the pledge.

No, either Sunny John is a man of principle or . . . well, I don't rightly know what the alternative would be. As Daily Kos Labor's Laura Clawson writes of the stand he took back in 1996:

He wouldn't just die before doing it, he'd actually kill himself. Take his own life rather than lift hundreds of thousands out of poverty by requiring businesses to pay a minimum wage that a small family can come somewhere close to living on. It's almost like he's not the moderate figure trying to balance the demands of his party's teabagger extremists with responsible governance that so many political reporters have painted him as.

It's true that, as Laura C points out, "People can change in 18 years." However --

[S]ince Boehner shows no signs of having done so, the only reasonable answer is to fight, as hard as possible and with whatever tools are at hand, to make it too politically painful for him to block a vote, bring a discharge petition that goes around him ... or win a Democratic House majority.

Finally, there's even a "plus" in the matter of the pet Republican issue of job losses. You may question whether job losses can fairly be called a "pet Republican issue," given the astonishing lack of concern Republicans have shown about joblessness since the GOP-sponsored Crash of 2008. But it's only fair to point out that they can show full-out fervor on the subject anytime detect a propaganda opportunity (as with their recent blatant misrepresentation of the CBO report on the effects of the ACA) or they find it ideologically opportune, as is always the case when they can make noise about the supposed job-killing effect of a minimum wage -- any minimum wage.

However, in this case it should be noted that a Sunny John suicide would create a job opening, and what's more, that job would be of the unskilled variety. I mean, if Sunny John has been able to do it all these years, how much skill can be required?

I DON'T THINK IT'S TOO SOON TO START
CONSIDERING THE MODE OF SUICIDE

Surely Sunny John would want an event like this to be public, which raises obvious questions about the mode of dispatch to be used. There are tried-and-true means, of course. Poison, for example. But that doesn't really lend itself to dramatic public staging. A gun self-snuffing might sound appropriately Republican, and would certainly be dramatic, but that frankly sounds rather more active and enterprising than we usually expect from this particular source.

Luckily, we have a whole repertory of state-devised methods of sending designated individuals off to the Great Beyond. Maybe we can find something suitable here. I think we do need to be on the lookout for something dramatic, since after all if we want maximum exposure for the great event, the TV networks are likely to need some prodding, or they're apt to fall back on poll numbers showing that 45 percent of Americans have never heard of Sunny John and another 30 percent have heard of him but don't know what field he's in.

Right off the bat I think we have to turn thumbs down on lethal injection, even though it has become the most popular form of state offing. It's just that we've been hearing an awful lot recently about a host of glitches besetting lethal injection, which makes it seem awfully risky for a live telecast. Do Americans have the fiber to endure the messy spectacle of Sunny John squirming in agony while the executioners try to get their "death cocktail" drug dosages right?

Hanging can be messy too, if the practitioners don't know their stuff, and how many expert hangmen -- or hangwomen -- are there available in the here and now? Plus there are reasons why those oldtime favorites the gas chamber and electric chair have gone out of fashion.

A tough call, and I don't claim to have the answer. But given Sunny John's evidently strong feelings about doing himself in before voting on a clean minimum-wage bill, perhaps he already has a preference for how he would like to accomplish it. Within certain limits, I could support honoring his preference.

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