Republican Criminal Behavior-- From North Carolina To Kansas

Have you been wondering how much Mark Harris paid professional Republican Party vote thief Leslie McCrae Dowless to steal the 2018 election for him? It was over half a million dollars, probably a lot over half a million dollars. How slimy is Harris? Watch the sickening video above that he released yesterday through Twitter.

He refers to his scheme to steal the Republican primary from Mark Pittenger and then the general from Blue Dog Dan McCready as "alleged irregularities." He wants to let everyone know that he and his campaign "are cooperating fully with the state Board of Elections investigation." Is he really? What's the alternative? Seeking asylum in Paraguay, which still has a sentimental soft-spot for fascists? And it got sleazier: "I trust the process that's underway, just as I've always trusted the decisions of the voters." That's why he paid Dowless to collect absentee ballots and destroy them?

Here are my favorite lines, which I hope are played for a jury one day very soon:

I trust that this investigation will be full and complete, examining any alleged irregularities that could have benefited either party in this election or in past election cycles. The integrity of our electoral process is the heart of our democracy. And we must protect it.

Though I was absolutely unaware of any wrong-doing that will not prevent me from cooperating with this investigation. I'm hopeful that this process will ultimately result in the certification of my election to Congress before the next House session begins. However, if this investigation finds proof of illegal activity on either side, to such a level that it could have changed the outcome of the election then I would wholeheartedly support a new election to insure all voters have confidence in the results.

Two things I want to say about this. First is that he used "either side" twice when no one is accusing McCready or Pittenger of anything other than being victims of Harris' criminal conspiracy. And, second that it doesn't matter if Harris' crooked employees told ten votes ten thousand votes, he should be banned from participating in any elections and should be tried for a n extremely serious crime and, hopefully, spend the rest of his life in prison.

This is all part of what we've been talking about-- the undermining of democracy by the Republican Party, whether that means state legislators in Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina trying to invalidate their losses in lame duck sessions, Trump and his repulsive family working with the Russians to steal the 2016 presidential election, or characters like Harris hiring a known felon-- Dowless-- to steal ballots from minority voters.

Funny, just as I was finishing up on this post, a McClatchy report popped up on my screen about more GOP criminal behavior, this time by Kanas Congresswoman Lynn Jenkins. She's retiring but hasn’t left Congress yet, and has "already launched a new lobbying firm," which is absolutely illegal.

Jenkins’ term in the U.S. House doesn’t officially end until the first week of January and she still faces major votes on the farm bill, homeland security budget and other legislation. But her new business, LJ Strategies, LLC, has already registered with the state of Kansas.

Ethics watchdogs say the situation makes a mockery of the rules restricting lawmakers from working as lobbyists until they’ve been out of office for at least one year.


“This is an egregious abuse of the revolving door,” said Craig Holman, the lobbyist for Public Citizen, a group which advocates for stricter ethics rules.


“I suspect she’s being coached as to how to dance around the law, but it certainly violates the spirit of the revolving door law itself,” he said.

And, Holman warned, “She’s opened herself up to being bought.”

Jenkins and her firm should be banned from lobbying Congress in perpetuity and she should be banned from entering the Capitol from the moment next month that her term expires. Conservative lawmakers seem to believe that laws are written for "the little people," not for them.

You know what that Harris video reminded me of? That great clip 60 Minutes clip that shows John Boehner's reaction when he was caught red-handed giving out tobacco industry checks on the floor of the House. Like Harris Boehner seemed offended by his own behavior. "it's a practice," he told 60 Minutes, "that's gone on here for a long time that we're trying to stop... It's a bad practice," he said indignantly [about his own behavior]. "We ought to stop this. This is just not something that ought to happen." Watch:

Right-WIng Crackpot Jim Jordan Wants To Get His Hands On The Speakership Before The GOP Loses The Majority

A senior GOP staffer: "They’re not legislators, they’re just assholes. These guys have such a minority mindset that the prospect of getting something done just scares them away, or pisses them off."

Friday morning the Washington Post referred to Jim Jordan as "a prominent and polarizing conservative leader" and noted that he "is strongly considering a run for House speaker in a bid that could upend the race to succeed Paul D. Ryan." The Ohio Republican has been plotting Ryan's downfall for months, even reaching out for help from Democrats! He's been pretending to be whipping votes for Mark Meadows while secretly harboring his own (somewhat absurd) ambitions on the speakership.

A little background: Like Denny Hastert, Jordan was a wrestling coach. A career politician, he was in the state legislature from 1994 'til 2006 when he wormed his way into Congress, representing a deep red, poorly educated, nearly 90% white district (PVI is R+14) with no cities. McCain won the district with 54.4%. Romney took it with 56% but Trump crushed Hillary 64.3% to 30.7%. Jordan was one of the founders of the extremist House Freedom Caucus and in 2017 John Boehner summed up his career in politics very simply: "Jordan was a terrorist as a legislator going back to his days in the Ohio House and Senate… A terrorist. A legislative terrorist."

CNN reported he's being "encouraged to consider a run for House speaker." Its his own ego that's doing the encouragement-- and his insane ideology. He's made it clear that he hates Ryan as much as he hated Boehner. "A House member, asking for anonymity, told CNN that Jordan informed him that he was considering running for the top job." He's been surreptitiously encouraging Democrats to move in for the kill and force Ryan to retire early.

The House Freedom Caucus is viewed among rank-and-file members as a trouble-causing faction within the House GOP. The chances of Jordan running and successfully winning would be slim, but if he were to enter the race it could make the job tougher for someone else to unite the conference and win the votes.

So far, the often-cited candidates for the job continue to be the No. 2 House Republican, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, and the No. 3 House Republican, Majority Whip Steve Scalise, but the effort to encourage Jordan reveals that a bitter leadership race may yet still unfold within the fractured GOP conference. Scalise has said he does not plan to run directly against McCarthy, but a leadership source told CNN earlier in the week that Scalise plans to be ready in case McCarthy declines to run for the job or struggles to find the votes as he did in 2015.

Time To Rehabilitate John Boehner? Not So Fast

Tim Alberta did an exhaustive piece on post-congressional Boehner for Politico over the weekend, based on 3 interviews he did with him over the summer. Boehner, he wrote, has fucked up his golf game horrible since he resigned from the Speakership and Congress. He just can't concentrate anymore. But he hasn't lost his mind. 'Fuck Jordan. Fuck Chaffetz," he told Alberta. "They’re both assholes."

To outsiders, Boehner might just be the happiest man alive, a liberated retiree who spends his days swirling merlot and cackling at Speaker Paul Ryan’s misfortune. The truth is more complicated. At 67, Boehner is liberated-- to say what he spent many years trying not to say; to smoke his two packs a day without undue stress; to chuckle at the latest crisis in Washington and whisper to himself those three magic words: “Not my problem.” And yet he is struggling-- with the lingering perception that he was run out of Congress; with his alarm about the country’s future; and with the question of what he’s supposed to do next. After leaving office, Boehner says a longtime family friend approached him. “You’ve always had a purpose-- your business, your family, politics,” the friend said. “What’s your purpose now?” Boehner says the question gnaws at him every day.

...[T]he story of Boehner’s 25 years in Washington is also the story of the Republican Party, the Congress and American politics in the post-Ronald Reagan era: an account of corruption and crusading, enormous promises and underwhelming results, growing ideological polarization and declining faith in government. The same centrifugal forces that made Boehner’s job impossible have bedeviled his successor, Ryan, and kept the GOP majorities in Congress from passing any landmark legislation in 2017. Now, as the revolutionary fervor that swept Boehner into the speakership degenerates into a fratricidal conflict centered around Trump, the former speaker’s frontline view of the Republican civil war is essential to understanding what went wrong.

...To Boehner and his allies, [Jim] Jordan was the antagonist in the story of his speakership-- an embodiment of the brinkmanship and betrayal that roiled the House Republican majority and made Boehner’s life miserable. Although he would tell me in later conversations that he holds no grudges against anyone, today Boehner unloads on his fellow Ohioan. “Jordan was a terrorist as a legislator going back to his days in the Ohio House and Senate,” Boehner says. “A terrorist. A legislative terrorist.”

If he sounds exasperated, it’s because this is the central irony of his career: A quarter-century before the conservative insurgency stormed Washington and derailed his speakership, John Boehner was the conservative insurgency.

...The year 1994 didn’t just usher in new leadership to the House and the GOP; it marked a profound shift in Washington’s partisan relations. Gingrich, a master messenger with a zero-sum approach to ideological warfare, perfected the art of launching poll-tested attacks on Democrats as “radicals” who threatened liberty. With a penchant for turning personal disagreement into political Armageddon, Gingrich weaponized the speakership as never before.

“The beginning of the scorched-earth policy really began with Gingrich winning in the mid-’90s, the Gingrich revolution, and the enormous pressure put on moderate Republicans to walk away from anything remotely approaching a compromise,” says former Vice President Joe Biden, who was then a senator from Delaware.

Another change, one that would later inform some of the opposition to Boehner’s speakership, was the consolidation of power at the expense of committee chairmen and rank-and-file members. “Gingrich basically created a process where the speaker was the epicenter of the House,” says Joshua Huder, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute.

As the fourth-ranking House Republican-- behind Gingrich, Majority Leader Dick Armey and Majority Whip Tom DeLay-- Boehner could see the toll these institutional transformations took on GOP members, who felt disempowered by Gingrich’s imperial style. After Clinton won reelection in 1996, Republicans grew restless. The GOP had suffered terribly from Gingrich’s handling of a lengthy government shutdown from December 1995 to January 1996-- a lesson that informed Boehner’s aversion to such tactics years later-- as well as his constant public feuding and a barrage of ethics charges against him. In January 1997, Gingrich became the first speaker ever reprimanded for an ethics violation.

“When I saw that Boehner was becoming speaker, I thought that was a positive thing,” Biden tells me. “I thought there could be actually some work together, some collaboration together, and we could actually get some things done. But I thought, most of all, he was going to treat the president with more respect than some of his colleagues had.”

The class of 2010 wasn’t interested in collaboration. These rowdy freshmen lawmakers saw Boehner’s “Hell no” speech as a blueprint for their slash-and-burn strategy. When they realized after arriving in D.C. that he would not lead accordingly, dozens of them gravitated toward someone who would: Jordan, the newly installed chairman of the Republican Study Committee. When I ask about those factions forming in 2011, Jordan cites the “Hell no” speech and shrugs. “That’s the John Boehner we were hoping for.”

The Republicans Party's incipient civil war moved quickly from the campaign trail to Capitol Hill. The fundamentally irreconcilable approaches of Boehner and Jordan, and the members who followed them, produced an increasingly volatile series of intraparty collisions during the new GOP majority’s first term in 2011 and 2012.

Some of this owed to Boehner’s not taking the campaign rhetoric of his new colleagues at face value. “These were people who ran against Washington and planned on voting that way,” explains Tim Huelskamp, who was elected in the 2010 wave and then lost his Kansas district’s Republican primary in 2016. Boehner rejects the notion that he was ill-prepared to deal with these rookie legislators, but his allies concede there was a blind spot. “He thought of himself as someone who was of the Tea Party mentality before the Tea Party was a thing … so I think there were some assumptions made that he got these people, and that they would see he was one of them,” says Anne Bradbury, Boehner’s former floor director. “But that really never came together.”

Some of the freshmen took one look at Boehner-- the golf-tanned back-slapper who wore handsome, tailored suits and rented his D.C. apartment from a registered lobbyist-- and saw the embodiment of everything they were sent to destroy. “They never gave him a fair shake,” says Kevin McCarthy, the California congressman who was then Boehner’s majority whip.

...The fiscal cliff further diminished Boehner’s standing on the right. When the new Congress convened in January 2013, some two dozen House conservatives plotted to overthrow him. Any speaker needs a majority of votes cast on the House floor on the first day of a new Congress; Huelskamp and others concluded that if 17 Republicans voted against Boehner, that would force a second ballot-- and he would step aside out of shame. Huelskamp says the coup participants “signed their names in blood” the night before the vote-- not literally-- and he was stunned the next day to see just 12 of them follow through. Boehner survived, but was embarrassed by the revolt. It was the first attempt on his speakership, though not the last.

...The Freedom Caucus has begun to squeeze Ryan, much as it did to Boehner-- warning him that without changes his tenure could be similarly endangered. And Ryan, as Boehner did, is telling friends that he’s losing patience with the job. When I tell Jordan about Boehner’s description of him-- “a legislative terrorist”-- and ask about whether he’s holding the speakership hostage, he flashes surprise and eventually irritation. “Oh, my goodness. I feel sorry for the guy if he’s that bitter about a guy coming here and doing what he told the voters he was gonna do. Wow. I feel bad for him,” Jordan says. “But in the end, we were not doing what the voters elected us to do and what we told them we were going to do. We just weren’t. And I would argue the same thing is happening now.”

Jordan’s veiled threat only partially explains the frustration written all over Ryan’s face when we meet: Earlier that day, after Ryan scoffed at a Democratic proposal to pass a short-term extension of the debt ceiling, Trump met with Pelosi and Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer and gave them exactly what they wanted. “Um, yeah, that one-- yeah, that’s kind of par for the course these days,” Ryan tells me, his tie loosened and a sense of resignation in his voice. “This is a presidency that offers some surprises.” Weeks later, when I ask Boehner about Trump’s deal with the Democrats, he erupts into a cough-laugh. “My guess is that he thought he was doing everybody a favor. He had no idea he was cutting off McConnell and Ryan’s legs.”

Trump himself is less a source of apprehension for top Republicans than what he represents: a fracturing of the party and a corollary decline in its ability to govern. “We basically run a coalition government without the efficiency of a parliamentary system,” Ryan complains.

When I ask Boehner whether the Republican Party can survive this, he cuts me off. “There is no Rep...” He stops himself. “You were about to say, ‘There is no Republican Party,” I tell him. He shrugs. “There is. But what does it even mean? Donald Trump’s not a Republican. He’s not a Democrat. He’s a populist. He doesn’t have an ideological bone in his body.” So who, I ask, is the leader of the party? “There is nobody,” he says.

I ask Boehner what he thinks historians will make of his speakership. “They’ll be talking about the end of the two-party system,” he replies.

In our months of conversations, Trump was the lone subject about which Boehner seemed reluctant to speak freely... [W]hen I raised the matter of this summer’s march in Charlottesville, and Trump’s equivocations. “I do not believe that he is a racist. I do not believe that he is a white supremacist,” Boehner tells me. “He has clearly done some things to lead people who never liked him to say those things about him.” So, I ask, how can Trump fix that? Boehner arches an eyebrow. “Is it fixable?”

Boehner worries about the deepening fissures in American society. But he sees Trump as more of a symptom than the cause of what is a longer arc of social and ideological alienation, fueled by talk radio and Fox News on the right and MSNBC and social media on the left. “People thought in ’09, ’10, ’11, that the country couldn’t be divided more. And you go back to Obama’s campaign in 2008, you know, he was talking about the divide and healing the country and all of that. And some would argue on the right that he did more to divide the country than to unite it. I kind of reject that notion.” Why is that? “Because it wasn’t him!” Boehner replies. “It was modern-day media, and social media, that kept pushing people further right and further left. People started to figure out … they could choose where to get their news. And so what do people do? They choose places they agree with, reinforcing the divide.”

He continues: “I always liked Rush [Limbaugh]. When I went to Palm Beach I would always meet with Rush and we’d go play golf. But you know, who was that right-wing guy, [Mark] Levin? He went really crazy right and got a big audience, and he dragged [Sean] Hannity to the dark side. He dragged Rush to the dark side. And these guys-- I used to talk to them all the time. And suddenly they’re beating the living shit out of me.” Boehner, seated in his favorite recliner, lights another cigarette. “I had a conversation with Hannity, probably about the beginning of 2015. I called him and said, ‘Listen, you’re nuts.’ We had this really blunt conversation. Things were better for a few months, and then it got back to being the same-old, same-old. Because I wasn’t going to be a right-wing idiot.”

Boehner believes Americans are ill-informed because of their retreat into media echo chambers, one of two incurable causes of the country’s polarization. Another is inextricably related: the unwillingness of lawmakers to collaborate across the aisle, for fear of recriminations from the base. Boehner says the fact he and Obama golfed together only once-- and agreed that it was usually better for him to sneak into the White House-- speaks to how the two parties punish compromise. He doesn’t foresee this toxic political climate improving, ticking off potential fixes-- term limits, redistricting reform-- that he says won’t make a bit of difference. “It’s going to take an intervening event for Americans to realize that first, we are Americans,” he says. An intervening event? “Something cataclysmic,” he responds, gazing upward.

...Boehner’s 25 years in Washington saw the dissolution of a party, the vandalizing of a government and the splintering of a nation. That Boehner watched as the GOP transformed from the party of George H.W. Bush into the party of Donald Trump. That Boehner funded and helped recruit a class of majority-makers who ended up driving him from office and destabilizing the Congress he cares deeply about. The triumph of John Boehner is that he achieved reform and ascended to the speakership and often rose above the uncompromising dogma of both parties; the tragedy is that he came to Congress an insurgent only to be swallowed by the insurgency, and that he wasted key opportunities, as with the shutdown and immigration battles of 2013, to lead in a way that might have quelled it. “At times,” Sommers admits, “we fed the beast that ate us.”

I'm not weeping for Boehner. Meet Rich Iott, an actual Nazi he tried getting elected to Congress from Ohio in 2010. Watch Anderson Cooper interview him:



Boehner's favorite Nazi, who liked dressing up like an SS Officer on weekends used to pretend to be a U.S. military veteran. The GOP made him a Young Gun and Boehner put money into his campaign. The video above shows him defending "valiant" SS volunteers as defenders of "freedom" and "liberty," exactly the same twisted way some people-- basically Republicans-- claim Republicans are defenders of freedom and liberty. Freedom and liberty for the rich and powerful to exploit the vulnerable? Oh, yeah-- that's just what a normal person thinks of when they think about freedom or liberty! Marcy Kaptur saved Boehner further embarrassment by beating Iott 117,890 (59%) to 81,876 (41%).

John and Grover

Feel sorry for "Miss Mitch" McConnell? Huh? Well, maybe if he's standing in the path of the Falling Anvil of Orange

If Looks Could Kill Dept.: Naturally in the above photo it's the World's Blowsiest Blowhard bloviating, while Senate Majority Leader "Miss Mitch" McConnell, er, sits silently by -- of course it could be that he's just thinking about the fun of going home to the company of Transportation Sec'y Mrs. Miss Mitch. (Note: If you have a suitably Photoshoppish imagination, feel free to visualize Miss Mitch with a hatchet buried in that odious head. Either odious head, actually.)

by Ken

Miss Mitch is one of the last people on the planet I would normally expect to be sticking up for. Nevertheless, that's kinda what I found myself doing the other day.

It all started when I noticed this link in a DailyKos roundup:

NYT: Trump yelled at McConnell for not protecting him from Russia investigations

That's not when I found myself feeling sorry, kinda, for Miss Mitch. Not yet. Oh, I suppose I was commiserating with him, kinda, but mostly I found myself seeing Trump, and maybe even kinda sorta feeling sorry, or something, for a poor horrendously damaged boy buried under infinite layers of crud. I dashed off an e-note I to the gang, in which I took care to note first:

I've never bothered to inform myself about our Donald's family history, since I've never wanted to know any more about those hateful people. I've always wanted to know LESS about them -- really, as little as possible. Just hoping they would all go away and I wouldn't have to think about them any more.

So I was surprised when The Donald not long ago rambled publicly about his druggie brother Fred. Then today I noticed this link in a DailyKos e-mail.

"Suddenly," I went on to explain:

this image of Trump yelling at McConnell gave me an image of Little Donnie growing up being persistently abused verbally by Big Fred. In the pictures of Fred I've seen he looks like a total wienie, but even the wimpiest guy wouldn't have much trouble bullying his kid for at least a certain number of years. And then, just maybe, there's a fleeting image of Little Donnie being abused who-knows-how by Young Fred.

I realize this isn't a deep thought, and of course merely a speculation rather than a fact. And even if it were an established fac, it wouldn't be an especially surprising one, since we know that men who engage in domestic abuse are overwhelmingly likely to have been victims of abuse. Still, for me something clicked into place here.

This is pure thumb-sucking, of course. I have no inside knowledge, no particular expertise, just a heap of instincts piled on by grizzled experience -- activated, I suppose, by some morbid curiosity as to how a human mind becomes this perverted.

Some of the response, though, targeted Miss Mitch, and included some skepticism about a possibly staged feud between these two pillars of the revered, harmoniously functioning U.S. federal government. What follows is a somewhat cleaned-up version of my reply. Again, it's all pure thumb-sucking.

A SOMEWHAT CLEANED-UP AND REJIGGERED
AND AMPLIFIED VERSION OF WHAT I WROTE

It's all so preposterous and unbelievable, I'm pretty much speechless. [Okay, the "pretty much speechless" part proved a faulty prediction. Is anyone really surprised? -- Ed.]

I don't have much trouble, though, believing that Trump is screwing with Miss Mitch, partly because showing people who think they're hot stuff that he can screw with them to his heart's content is one of the things he most loves to do and partly because, as people are noting, the Trump Faithful are so clueless that at least on the surface -- which is as far as Trump sees, and as we know he doesn't see that very well -- it looks like a winning face-saving strategy to trick them into believing that it's McConnell and Ryan who've betrayed them and not their messiah.

In my understanding of the situation, Miss Mitch surely understands exactly what Our Leader is doing to him but can't see a play for himself. Miss M, since achieving real power, has taken pride in being a pragmatist, working in the trenches with a good deal of success to make reality align with his wishes and goals. Then along comes Trump, who simply doesn't acknowledge reality, and Mitchie's whole history leaves him bereft of tools with which to counter.

Think back to January 2017, when Mitchie knew he was probably facing two years (at least) of hell, trying to "lead" a majority that had to look completely unleadable, even if the new president behaved sensibly. His "majority," already increasingly hard to deal with in the last Congress, was giving him pretty clear signals that he couldn't count on them for anything if it made the poor dears unhappy, and given the chasm that had opened up in the Republican Party, there were hardly any issues on which he could expect to make 50 of the buggers happy -- let alone find 60 votes where needed.

And then Trump turns out to be . . . TRUMP! All the things Mitchie has spent so many years learning about how the Senate works, and Congress as a whole, and Congress and the president -- it's all out the window, because Trump doesn't care. Fuck reality! Leaving Mitchie in need of some kind of play, any kind of play, and I assume he's discovered that he doesn't have any. By "a play" I mean something, anything, that in some way, shape, or form brings him even the tiniest bit closer to a good outcome for Mitchie -- and there isn't one.

Publicly oppose the president? What does that get him? Except a one-way ticket out of the circles of power. Consult the numerous variants of the proposition: If you try to kill the king, you better make sure he's dead. It's especially true, surely, with this particular imperial wizard.

Do we imagine that Mitchie has forgotten what happened to poor "Sunny John" Boehner, the ex-House speaker, when he merely tried to get the Tea Party crazies in his House GOP conference to be, you know, a little reasonable? Now Mitchie not only has this problem in spades in his conference (after all, his crazies are senators, and each of them knows better than anyone how much more powerful a single senator is than a whole wolfpack of House GOP crazies).

It's not a matter of "policy" as such. Beyond a general far-right agenda, after all, Miss Mitch has no policy, no principles to speak of except what's good for Mitchie. You'd think this might make him just the fellow to deal with Trump, who after all has no principles to speak of except what's good for Donnie, and certainly no policy; he's had so many positions on so many policies that he couldn't keep track of them if he cared. The thing is, though, that "what's good for Donnie" is good only for Donnie and his nearest and dearest. For most everyone else it's a living nightmare.

Take Obamacare repeal-and-replacement. As began to become clear with the dawn of the new administration, Obamacare repeal was going to be a vastly different feat to accomplish than it had appeared in those years when Republicans could ritually vote for repeal, knowing President Obama would veto any such bill. Once Obamacare repeal became a real, live issue, it became clear that it would have been hard enough to manage if all that Mitchie had to deal with was: (a) the House Republican crazies, and (b) the Senate Republican crazies. But Trump showed not the slightest understanding of that process, or seem to feel any more need to than he had any interest in what was actually in any repeal bill.

The one and only thing he cared about was being able to sign a bill that could be called "Obamacare repeal" because of the intense political pressure he felt to not break yet another campaign promise, especially one he'd make such a fetish of promising it to the voters who came to worship him, voters to whom he had lied so persistently and shamelessly. And throughout the process, he did nothing but make it even harder -- whether he was injecting himself into the process or withdrawing from it, lobbing grenades or sulking in his tent, cajoling and hectoring or ignoring and snubbing, everything he did was strategically wrong.

If you're Mitchie, you entered the Obamacare-repeal derby with a legislative position that was impossible, and at every twist and turn Trump did everything in his power to make it harder. At each of those twists and turns Mitchie kept coming up with new stratagems to make the thing doable, and each time Trump managed to make it, if you will, impossibler.

A few months into the Trump presidency, as the Man of Orange made it more and more abundantly clear that yes, this was how he planned to "govern," my sense formed that no, he's not going to be impeached but I also don't see how he serves out his full term. The only course I saw was that eventually enough DC Republicans -- and the people who bankroll them -- might come to come to the realization that the son of a bitch is killing us!!! He's so nuts and so inept that he's going to cost us our positions and whatever finger position we have on the levers of government. At that point the Trump exit I imagined would happen through behind-the-scenes persuasion: having him hear from all the people he trusts that the only way out for Donnie is to get the hell out of that damned White House. This I suspected, and still suspect, may be more possible than it seemed/seems, because by all accounts he's not having the fun time he was expecting.

Which wasn't/isn't an especially glad prospect for me, because it simply leaves us at the mercy of the Unspeakable Pence, who unlike Trump and Mitchie has a whole political agenda he believes deeply in. I've heard people say that a President Unspeakable would occupy the office in a weak position, I think that's nuts. Look how much the Right is accomplishing in Washington changing the nature and structure of the U.S. government even in these times of legislative stasis. Take Trump out of the equation, and I think Pence, in league with all those frothing-at-the-mouth loonies who chair the relevant House and Senate committees, is in a position to set in motion an orgy of legislative craziness.

So yeah, I feel kinda bad for Miss Mitch. It doesn't really matter what exactly the president is yelling at him about. The notion that there's something Mitchie could have done to shield his master from Special Counsel Mueller's investigations is totally nuts to everyone who has even the teeniest-tiniest contact with reality, but that number doesn't include POTUS. It might be suggested that Miss Mitch really doesn't have much to lose at this point, considering that right now the Senate majority leader's powers are pretty much zip, especially if he's going to find himself in the president's crosshairs as designated scapegoat.

Nevertheless, what can Mitchie do? I don't think he can even dare to offer the president a confidential opinion that he'd do well to get going while the going is still good. However incompetent Trump may be at actual constructive achievements, would you want to challenge his ability to make your life a living hell?

PS: IS IT POSSIBLE MUELLER'S INVESTIGATIONS
MAY ACTUALLY PROLONG TRUMP'S PRESIDENCY?

I didn't go into this in my original e-mail, but I've been thinking about it as I reread and tinkered with what I did write.

Remember when I wrote that "I suspected, and still suspect" that persuading Donnie to get the hell out of the White House "may be more possible than it seemed/seems"? Ironically, the apparently growing momentum of Special Counsel Mueller's investigations, with all those grand juries he's had impaneled, may make this persuasion harder, and harder still if Mueller shows signs of having the goods on Donnie.

Donnie, after all, knows why he take the monumental risk of resolutely refusing under any circumstances to release those tax returns. And Donnie surely has a pretty good idea of what looking into his business dealings can turn up. And it's not just the humiliation of being revealed as a lifelong fraud -- far from a master dealmaker and entrepreneur, a bumbling business halfwit who had certain public-relations talents but proceeded to fuck up every deal he touched and would have been a bankrupt and pauper if he hadn't gotten the inspired idea to start courting the world's sleaziest superrich scumbags to keep him afloat in exchange for aiding and abetting their international money-laundering and other fraudulent and/or illegal enterprises.

As desperately as Trump has been trying to sling mud at Special Counsel Mueller and his associates (who include a large number of lawyers and other investigators with a track record of investigating and prosecuting the very kinds of enterprises their current mandate calls for them to get to the bottom of), I can't help feeling that his real terror is that Mueller appears to be -- can you believe it? -- an honest man! And a competent one.

The legal point remains unresolved as to whether a sitting president can be indicted, and nobody has yet pressed the point. An ex-president seems like a whole other president, which could mean that Donnie has a special interest in not being pried out of the White House.

But he has to leave sometime. Doesn't he?


EPiLOGUE: 
NOAH'S VISION FOR THE FATE OF MISS MITCH

I would be remiss if I signed off without sharing Noah's vision of what's to come for our beloved Senate majority leader, shared as we were kicking this around via e-mail. "My version," he ventured, "would have Mitch ending up killing himself but taking out a few people with him at the W.H."

Later he clarified: "Of course my Viking ancestors cry out for the Blood Eagle treatment for all of these lowlifes." And he added this "PS":

According to a new Vanity Fair article, Buffy and Biffy Kushner are very depressed in Washington and feel their self esteem is under assault. I feel soooooo bad for them. It just makes me cry, I tell ya.

Now that's a note I feel utterly comfortable leaving on.

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Hard To Imagine A GOP Leader Getting Caught In A Bribery Scandal And Responding That The Practice Must Stop? Watch The Video

John Boehner took immense sums of money from Big Tobacco over the course of his slimy career-- not just the $464,312 in direct bribes from the industry but far more from them to help him build power by writing checks at his direction to other House Republicans. In the video above 60 Minutes explored the time Boehner got caught handing out tobacco bribes to other members. He never went to prison for his role; instead he was elected Speaker.

If you think Big Tobacco ran off with its tail between its legs after it was proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the industry was deceiving consumers about the health dangers from tobacco, you'd be wrong. Just last year Big Tobacco spent $19,886,360 on lobbying Congress and spent another $2,501,905 on bribing congressmembers. Since 1990 Big Tobacco has spent $39,726,110 on direct congressional bribes-- $26,795,799 to Republicans and $12,502,862 to corrupt conservative Democrats from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party. Among current members of Congress, the dozen biggest recipients of Tobacco blood money:

• Richard Burr (R-NC)- $689,460
• Mitch McConnell (R-KY)- $553,875
• Mark Warner (D-VA)- $228,517
• Walter Jones (R-NC)- $185,375
• John McCain (R-AZ)- $167,682
• Sanford Bishop (Blue Dog-GA)- $160,100
• Lamar Alexander (R-TN)- $156,700
• Jim Clyburn (D-SC)- $153,200
• Hal Rogers (R-KY)- $151,802
• Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)- $142,500

This last cycle the biggest crooks were Burr again ($192,225) plus Paul Ryan ($70,933), Kevin McCarthy ($69,000), Marco Rubio ($54,660) and slimy North Carolina GOP Congressman George Holding ($47,600). Last week Open Secrets used Bug Tobacco as an example of how big money influences policy detrimental to Americans and at odds with what they want from Congress.

This week, the Justice Department moved to delay enforcement of rules the FDA finalized a year ago dealing with tobacco products like e-cigarettes, cigars and hookah tobacco.

It’s been a busy time for big tobacco, as the victory came on the heels of a defeat for vaping (e-cigarette) companies: Sunday night’s omnibus budget bill reportedly did not include the proposed Cole-Bishop Amendment, which would have eased FDA regulations on e-cigarettes.

“Congress delivered a victory for kids and public health by rejecting the Cole-Bishop Amendment and other proposals to weaken FDA oversight of e-cigarettes and cigars,” wrote Becky Wexler, a spokesperson for the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, in an emailed statement. But Justice’s move for a delay in the rules’ enforcement, she wrote, is potentially dangerous. “The FDA made an overwhelming case for why these products need to be regulated when it issued its final rule last year, and no new facts have emerged to change that.”

Reps. Tom Cole (R-OK) and Sanford Bishop (Blue Dog-GA) have also introduced a stand-alone bill, the FDA Deeming Authority Clarification Act of 2017, with the same aims as the amendment. Arguing for the bill, Bishop and Cole have repeated a common talking point of proponents of vaping: That it helps wean smokers off cigarettes.

Unmentioned was the fact that Cole ended the 2016 cycle at No. 10 among the tobacco industry‘s top recipients of campaign contributions, having raked in more than $33,000. Bishop received about half that, $16,000.

...Nine of the industry’s top 10 congressional recipients in the 2016 cycle were Republicans-- and 83 percent of its contributions to candidates and party committees went to the GOP. In fact, the majority of tobacco contributions have consistently gone to Republicans since 1992. Favored Democrats have tended to be those from tobacco country, like Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner-- they received about $31,000 and $26,900 in the 2016 cycle, respectively-- who both represent Virginia, a premier tobacco-producing state.

Big Tobacco was only modestly on-board with the Trump campaign. Altria Group and Reynolds American, the nation’s largest and second-largest producers of tobacco products, together gave the campaign less than $4,000. They must have had a change of heart after Election Day, though. For Trump’s January inauguration, Reynolds donated a cool $1 million through a subsidiary, while Altria coughed up $500,000.

And the industry has other ties to the new administration: Prior to serving as acting assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s civil division, Chad Readler represented R.J. Renyolds while working at the law firm Jones Day; and FDA boss Scott Gottlieb used to be on the board of Kure, a vaping company.

Perhaps sensing opportunity, the industry stepped up its lobbying efforts in the first quarter of 2017, spending more than $4.9 million, up about 9.3 percent from the same period in 2016. Altria has already poured $2.3 million into lobbying, and Philip Morris nearly $1.3 million. Both companies have e-cigarette outfits in addition to their more traditional fare; Altria has lobbied on Cole and Bishop’s bill, and Philip Morris on “modified risk” tobacco products-- an FDA designation, rooted in the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act of 2009, that could benefit the marketing of vaping offerings, but has yet to be granted to any products. The industry’s lobbying outlays have been relatively modest since it spent nearly $73 million in 1998, the year the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement was entered. As part of the massive settlement, which regulated how cigarettes are sold and marketed, top cigarette manufacturers agreed to pay 46 states in connection to the costs of treating tobacco-related illnesses.

The era of vaping, like the settlement, has called the tobacco industry’s reputation into question. In 2015, the CDC revealed some startling findings: From 2013 to 2014, e-cigarette use by middle and high school students tripled, and hookah smoking approximately doubled. Kids are smoking both e-cigarettes and hookah at increased rates-- though the degree to which that is tied to the availability of flavors like gummy bears is difficult to prove definitively.

Still, if ever there was a time for the industry to feel optimistic about getting some relief in Washington, this would seem to be it, with control of both Congress and the White House in GOP hands. The Justice Department’s stalling of FDA tobacco product regulations may be a sign of more good things to come-- as far as big tobacco is concerned.

“[O]ur hope is that the Trump administration dismantles this rule, as it is utterly unworkable in its current form,” wrote Gregory Conley, president of the American Vaping Association, which describes itself as a public health advocacy group, in an emailed statement. He added that it was unclear whether the measure was being re-evaluated or the administration was simply understaffed and needed more time.

But lest vaping supporters feel doubtful about their chances on the Hill, there’s another piece of legislation on the table (along with Cole and Bishop’s bill). Last week, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) introduced the Cigarette Smoking Reduction and Electronic Vapor Alternatives Act of 2017, a bill that would relax the FDA’s approval process for e-cigarettes.

Hunter received more than $16,500 from tobacco PACs in the 2016 cycle.

Duncan Hunter is currently the target of at least one major ethics investigation related to criminal use of campaign funds and bribery from other big corporate donors. But Congress gets to define bribery in a way that generally excludes their own behavior. Otherwise, more than half the members of Congress would be in prison.

The Shameful Pence Episode The Beltway Media Isn't Talking About

There's a dark, ugly chapter in Mike Pence's life that the Beltway media has helped him coverup. I bet Trump doesn't even know about it. Movement conservatives and Hoosiers know who he is but 86% of American voters pretty much never heard of Mike Pence, or at least haven't heard enough about him to have formed an opinion. Starting in 1994 he was a small town Indiana hate talk radio host who referred to himself as "Rush Limbaugh on decaf," which is how he gained visibility and how in 2000, he won a congressional seat after two previous tries. By 2006, the ambitious ideologue was running for Minority Leader. John Boehner beat him 168-27, although two years later his colleagues elected him Republican Conference Chairman, the token Tea Party nut in the House leadership.

In the House he was best known for his desire to go to war against Iran and for his bizarre life-long obsession with homophobia and his anti-Choice fanaticism. He led the fight to turn then-routine appropriation bills into vehicles for his extremist and divisive positions. Almost 7 years ago to the day he led an effort in the House to turn the debate over appropriations for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education into a fundamentalist jihad against Planned Parenthood. He was always crowing how he got 19 Democrats, almost exclusively Blue Dogs, to cross the aisle and join the Republican War Against Women. Subsequently 16 of those 19 Democrats were defeated or forced to retire, the only ones left being garbage fake Dems Dan Lipinski (IL) and Collin Peterson (MN) in the House and right-wing nut Joe Donnelly in the Senate.

But the most sordid episode in Pence's ugly political career was when he ratted out Boehner-- his leader and rival-- for sleeping with Beltway lobbyist Lisbeth Lyons, a kind of revenge for Boehner forcing Pence ally Mark Souter (R-IN) to resign after he was exposed for having illicit sex with a staffer. At the time, to have Mike Pence surreptitiously leak the news to the media about Boehner running around with a female lobbyist wasn't remarkable because of the sex and hypocrisy, it was remarkable because of the motivation inside the GOP caucus to keep Boehner from ever becoming Speaker. At the time Pence was freaking out about being caught ratting out Boehner-- and move that ultimately failed to dislodge Boehner, making Pence's position (and ambition) untenable and causing him to abruptly change his career path as he careened from one idea to another togged him out of the House. The week before the 2010 election, I wrote that "Last night Mike Pence, who wants to run for president, had his flack call me-- and late at night-- to demand I retract my assertion that it was Pence who leaked the story about Boehner and the lady lobbyist. The flack said it isn't true. I asked him how he knows. He said he was '100% certain.' I said that that was impossible and that my informant was 100% certain it was true and that it was a firsthand account. He demanded to know who my informant was. I asked him to put Pence on the phone. He refused and said he would send me a written statement; he didn't." Boehner became Speaker and Pence's House career was over.

Mr. Trumpy-the-Clown might want to watch his back-- and check in with his running mate vetting team pronto. The fact that Pence is a known rat and has always been a fierce advocate for the exact trade bills Trump has built a campaign around opposing is kind of curious... but for all his whining about how hard it is to build bathrooms in skyscrapers, Trump has never been a details man.

Boehner: #NeverCruz

I've always found that establishment politicians are much more relaxed when they're being interviewed outside the strictures and confines of the Beltway and that it makes the interviews more likely to produce something worthwhile and unexpected. Wednesday evening John Boehner was the guest speaker at Stanford University, far from DC and far from Ohio and he was interviewed by a history professor, David Kennedy, rather than a jackel journalist. His responses were far more interesting than anything you'd expect to hear from him on the useless Sunday morning gab-fests.

He called Bernie "a nice guy and the most honest politician in the race" and fell right into the trap Republicans build themselves to alienate women voters. Impersonating Hillary, the former Speaker said "Oh I’m a woman, vote for me." This was early in the evening and the audience started boo-ing him. He babbled some Fox New nonsense about how "the e-mails" could change everything about the race. "Don’t be shocked" he confided, cluelessly, "if two weeks before the convention, here comes Joe Biden parachuting in and Barack Obama fanning the flames to make it all happen." Anyone who doesn't spend the day watching Fox News or listening to Hate Talk Radio must have felt Boehner was drunk again. But he got even more entertaining once he started talking about something he knows more about: Republicans. He kept referring to the members of the GOP's Freedom Caucus as "knuckleheads" and "goofballs."

Much of the discussion-- and laughs-- focused on Boehner’s views on the current presidential candidates. Segueing into the topic, Kennedy asked Boehner to be frank given that the event was not being broadcasted, and the former Speaker responded in kind. When specifically asked his opinions on Ted Cruz, Boehner made a face, drawing laughter from the crowd.

“Lucifer in the flesh,” the former speaker said. “I have Democrat friends and Republican friends. I get along with almost everyone, but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life.”

Boehner described other Republican candidates as friends. In particular, the former speaker said he has played golf with Donald Trump for years and that they were “texting buddies.”

His friendship with Ohio Governor John Kasich, however, was a little more ambiguous.

“[Kasich] requires more effort on my behalf than all my other friends … but he’s still my friend, and I love him,” Boehner said.

Boehner for the most part accepted Trump as the presumptive Republican nominee, though he did express his surprise at the candidate’s success. While he did not praise Trump’s policies, the Speaker did say he would vote for Trump in the general election if he becomes the Republican nominee. The former Speaker said he would not, however, vote for Cruz.

Imagine How I Felt When I Found Myself In One Of Hillary's E-Mails! I Hope I Don't Have To Testify

Friday night there was a news-dump of more Hillary e-mails. For reasons that will be obvious in a moment, one particularly interested me. Longtime Clinton Family retainer Sidney Blumenthal is a really good writer and a very strategic thinker. In September, 2010, in the run-up to the disastrous midterms he sent Secretary Clinton a memo about how the elections could be less disastrous. One of his proposals included turning John Boehner into a piñata. And he included a chunk of a DownWithTyranny post on Boehner's corruption as an example, along with this link for the Secretary. He didn't include any of my signature attacks on the DCCC but he did suggest Hillary read this and the linked post from Digby's blog:

By the end of the day, Boehner was hysterical and backing away-- full throttle-- from his cavalier remarks about letting the taxpayers pick up the tab. Digby thinks he must be drunk on Man Tan and nicotine. "Boehner," she wrote, "is walking back his comments about having the government pay for the BP spill, but let's face facts. He was just on autopilot, echoing the Chamber of Commerce line verbatim and then got caught... Boehner is so out of touch and servile to Big Business that he's making mistakes.

One feisty Member of Congress who read the e-mail, called me last night and told me if Hillary had paid attention to Blumenthal and had shaken up Obama, Pelosi and the inept DCCC Chair, Chris Van Hollen, perhaps the Democrats wouldn't have suffered a net loss of 63 seats, elevating Boehner to the Speakership.

But that was hardly the only e-mail released Friday worth mentioning. There were some that demonstrate-- once again-- why no one trusts her as she lobbies senators on anti-worker trade bills she was pretending to oppose. (No, she didn't evolve on everything since her days as president of the Wellesley College Young Republicans.)

Other emails show Clinton seeming to personally lobby her former Democratic colleagues in the Senate to support free trade agreements (FTAs) with Colombia, Panama and South Korea. She had previously told voters she would work to block the Colombian and South Korean pacts.

An email Oct. 8, 2011, to Clinton from her aide Huma Abedin gave notes about the state of play in Congress on the proposed trade pacts. The notes provided Clinton “some background before you make the calls” to legislators.

Two days later in an email titled “FTA calls,” Clinton wrote to aides indicating she had spoken to Sens. Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Jim Webb of Virginia, both Democrats. She told the aides she had talked with “Webb who is strong in favor of all 3” trade agreements, and then asked, “So why did I call him?”-- indicating she was otherwise phoning  to try to convince wavering lawmakers to support the deals.

Only three years earlier, Clinton wooed organized labor during her presidential campaign with promises to oppose those same deals. She called the South Korea agreement “inherently unfair.” She also said, “I will do everything I can to urge the Congress to reject the Colombia Free Trade Agreement.” Clinton has lately courted organized labor’s support for her current presidential bid by pledging to oppose the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, a deal she repeatedly touted while secretary of state.

Saturday, the most progressive member of the Colorado state legislature, Joe Salazar, made the courageous (and dangerous) decision to break free of the Machine and endorse Bernie, saying "I think (Sanders) has a better vision, and he's been talking about it the past 40 or 50 years. He's not the politician who accepts campaign contributions from the wealthiest of America. I have a high degree of respect for Secretary (Hillary) Clinton, but I think Sanders best represents what is needed in Colorado... We have to dream big because America is built off big dreams," he added. "I'm not hearing that from Secretary Clinton. What I hear from her is typically what I hear from the other side of the aisle: 'You may have big dreams, but they're not realistic.'"

And that brings us to our favorite ex-Reagan/ex-George W. Bush advisor, historian Bruce Bartlett. Over the weekend he penned a kind of open e-mail to Hillary via The Atlantic, Jack Kemp's Power Lesson for Hillary Clinton. "Lately," he wrote, "Hillary Clinton and her supporters have been criticizing Bernie Sanders’s proposals not so much because they are wrongheaded, but because they are too utopian to pass Congress. I find this to be a curious line of attack because, in effect, Clinton is playing by Republican rules-- saying that Democrats should only propose things that could be enacted by a Republican Congress. Economists would call this an example of static analysis, assuming that circumstances will not change or that leadership is incapable of altering political possibilities. If Republicans had held this same point of view, Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cut never would have been enacted and, very likely, they would never have gained control of Congress. The 1981 tax cut fundamentally altered political dynamics. This was not a result that anyone would have predicted when the Reagan tax cut was first conceived by Representative Jack Kemp of New York in 1977. At the time, he was a junior congressman much better known for his career in professional football than for his legislative accomplishments, which were modest." When Kemp proposed it, it was opposed by every member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, on both sides of the aisle. "Even those who thought Kemp’s plan was a good idea in principle thought it was pie-in-the-sky that would never be enacted by a Congress in which Democrats held large majorities in both the House and Senate." You see where this is going by now. Four years later, Kemp's big impossible dream was signed into law.

The relevance to today’s policy debates is that what may at first appear to be politically impossible can quickly become possible with the right leadership, changing circumstances, and a little luck. I’m not saying that Sanders’s ideas are necessarily good or politically doable. But I am saying that it’s wrong to oppose them simply because they could not pass Congress today. If Republicans had taken that view in the late 1970s, the world today would look very different, both politically and economically. Sometimes it’s necessary to throw the bomb and see what happens.

Perhaps you agree with Hillary and think Bartlett lacks understanding of the situation and that Bernie's big dreams aren't going anywhere, ever. If you don't feel that way, though, please consider contributing to Bernie's campaign and, perhaps, to the campaigns of some of the congressional candidates who share his dreams. Just tap on the thermometer below:

GOP Extremists About To Be Hoist On Their Own Petard?

Mainstream conservatives in Congress are begging Boehner to make a deal with Nancy Pelosi to pass some of the urgent items on the national agenda, particularly lifting the debt ceiling. Their attitude is "screw the assholes in the Liberty Caucus; they brought this on themselves." Long Island Republican Peter King said Boehner can make these kinds of bold moves now because only a caretaker Speaker now and "doesn't have to worry about losing votes." And notice that of the 3 sponsors of this letter to Boehner asking him to do something about runaway gun violence, 2 of them are Republicans!

Dear Speaker Boehner,

Gun violence affects every District and every community in America. We were all shocked and saddened by the senseless deaths of the victims of the Sandy Hook tragedy and have vowed that we would not let this happen again. Sadly, since then, America has been witness to at least 53 mass shootings. Every day in this country, more than thirty people die as a result of gun violence. This does not even address the individual victims of domestic violence or other vicious crimes that destroy families and communities.

Our children should be safe in schools. People should be allowed to worship without threat of violence. Walking the neighborhoods of our cities should not be a high risk activity. It is a long time past that Congress addresses this national epidemic. We must ensure that guns do not make it into the hands of criminals, domestic abusers and the dangerously mentally ill. We can do this without infringing on Constitutionally guaranteed rights.

We call on you to bring to the Floor legislation that can protect innocent lives while safeguarding the rights of law abiding gun owners. No legislation will stop every tragedy, but passing commonsense gun laws will at least stop some. It is the least we can do to honor the memory of those we've lost to gun violence and prevent that list from growing.

There's a sense of irony that the extremists who pushed Boehner out are now making it easier for him to ignore them, cast partisan considerations to the wind and just do what's good for the American public. Jason Chaffetz, orginally elected as a teabagger by ousting a long-time, mainstream conservative, Chris Cannon, headed up the Republican-dominated Committee charged with investigating the far-right's fake Planned Parenthood "scandal." The far right wasn't happy with what the investigation turned up and now they want another committee to give them the outcome they're demanding. Does Boehner have any incentive to play these games with these crazy people any longer?

For Republicans reality always stings

Amid speculation that these extremists ended Boehner's career because he didn't hate Obama enough, or wasn't willing to sacrifice the country on the right-wing's alter of Obama hatred, mainstream conservatives are starting to deal with the reality of turning to Pelosi to make up for the defections from their own political fringe. Charlie Dent (R-PA) is even threatening the extremists with the possibility of going to the Democrats to help them elect a Speaker. "In order to pass any bill around this place, everybody knows we need to assemble a bipartisan coalition. I suspect at some point, if we can't get 218 Republicans to vote for a speaker candidate, we'll have to assemble a bipartisan coalition to elect a speaker."

So now that the extremists, nihilists and Confederates have pushed mainstream conservatives Boehner and McCarthy out and are even working to destroy GOP leaders as far right as Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, they've created a situation that may make them wish they had never heard of Ted Cruz. Boehner can't leave until they elect a new Speaker, which seems more and more impossible by the day. What leverage do these radicals have left? Steve Stivers, an Ohio conservative but not an anarchist: "Sometimes the dog catches the car and doesn't know what to do."

"While we go through this process, we've got to continue to address the people's priorities. This institution cannot grind to a halt," Boehner told Republicans Friday morning in a closed-door session. "It is my hope-- and indeed it is my plan-- for this House to elect a new speaker before the end of October. But at the end of the day, that's really up to the people in this room."

Excerpts of Boehner's remarks came from an official who was in the room. Not authorized to disclose them publicly, the official requested anonymity.

Facing a fall of fiscal fights with the Obama administration, Boehner has said he doesn't want to leave a "dirty barn" for his successor. The toughest item, by far, is legislation that must pass by early November or so to increase the government's borrowing cap so it won't default on its bills. Last year, Boehner orchestrated a debt ceiling increase by relying on just 28 Republicans and 193 Democrats-- the exact opposite of the way the House is usually run.

Then there are ongoing talks about easing spending curbs that have frozen the budgets of both the Pentagon and domestic agencies.

"John is going to try to clean the barn up as best he can," said Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pa. "He's not going to clean the whole thing, but we can probably dispose of the debt ceiling. I hope we can reach a budget agreement."

Boehner's penchant for relying on Democrats to make up for tea party defections on legislation like a 2013 tax increase and last month's temporary government funding bill got him in trouble with the right. There's little they can do if he follows the same strategy on the debt limit and a budget deal.

"It is ironic how smart John Boehner's looking," said Rep. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D. "Frankly, all this talk of a fresh new face sounds very sweet on the surface, but we're not electing a student council president. His stock rises with the prospects of an alternative and the steadiness of his hand, the clarity of his positions-- whether you like them or not-- and the fact he's not prone to panic. It's all looking really good right about now."

Conservatives suffered a setback on Friday when emboldened GOP moderates orchestrated a rarely successful petition drive to force legislation reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank onto the floor agenda later this month. The roster of more than three dozen GOP signatories included many Boehner loyalists.

The 13-term lawmaker not only supports reviving the bank, which helps overseas sales of U.S. goods, he called an additional minutes-long House session on Monday that, under the arcane rules governing such petition efforts, sped up the House vote on the measure to the end of October rather than into November.

His office says that wasn't the motivation for the unexpected pro forma session.

A Boehner aide noted that the speaker has said he won't change his way of approaching this fall's treacherous set of issues. For instance, Boehner marched ahead last month with legislation to temporarily fund the government and rejected tea party calls to "defund" Planned Parenthood at the risk of a government shutdown.

Typically on tough votes it often looks like many GOP lawmakers cast "no" votes-- to insulate themselves against criticism from conservative talk radio and Washington-based outside groups-- while secretly rooting for the legislation to pass.

The crowd that votes "no" but roots for bills to pass, however, appreciates it when Boehner turns to Democrats to extricate them from a tough spot.

"That's what we're dealing with: Hope yes, vote no," said Dent. "Same thing will happen on the debt ceiling, same thing will happen on a budget agreement."

Boehner's political maturity is a commodity that's sometimes in short supply in the House, making some Republicans wistful.

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., said the speaker's election should be postponed until next year, with Boehner remaining as speaker in the meantime.

"I hope he can stay-- if he's willing to forgo some of his golf games and time with his grandbaby," she said, adding that she thinks Boehner would agree to serve into next year.

Certainly not what the Liberty Caucus misfits or their allies at Hate Talk Radio wanted or expected. But absolutely what they deserve.