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Pierce writes: "It has long been the opinion of the management of this shebeen that obvious anagram Reince Priebus is the emptiest suit in American politics. I see no reason to change that now."

House Speaker John Boehner. (photo: AP)
House Speaker John Boehner. (photo: AP)


The Essential Uselessness of John Boehner

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

27 February 15

 

t has long been the opinion of the management of this shebeen that obvious anagram Reince Priebus is the emptiest suit in American politics. I see no reason to change that now. However, as this ongoing brawl between the Republican majorities in the two houses of the national legislature makes painfully clear, Speaker of the House John Boehner is making a strong bid to overtake Priebus, even though their problems are quite nearly the same. Priebus's suit is empty because being the chairman of the Republican National Committee doesn't mean a whole helluva lot when you've got a flock of gozillionnaires willing to finance the campaigns of people that the RNC would rather not see traipsing around the landscape with their underwear on their heads. What power does Priebus have over Sheldon Adelson? Or the Kochs? Or any of the other panjandrums who can construct entire presidential candidacies from deep in their vaults? Similarly, Boehner has no apparent control of his majority because so many of them are from safe Republican districts and can find electoral sustenance from the same new universe of sources on which the presidential candidates can call. It is unimaginable that Boehner would threaten a recalcitrant conservative House member with a primary. He'd get laughed at. The fact is that almost every former source of political power in the Republican party has been rendered largely a figurehead.

Thus does he find himself being outmaneuvered in the ongoing cockfight over tying the funding for the Department of Homeland Security to the president's executive orders on immigration. Thus do we find Boehner looking for a way out and flopping around like a trout in the canoe.

And on Wednesday morning, Mr. Boehner and House Republicans emerged from their private meeting saying they had no plans to act until the Senate actually sent them a bill. "I don't know what the Senate's capable of passing, and until I see what they're going to pass, no decisions have been made on the House side," Mr. Boehner said. "The House has done its job to fund the Department of Homeland Security and to stop the president's overreach on immigration, and we're waiting for the Senate to do their job."

That dog, he declines to hunt. Boehner knows that he's already got Representative Steve King going after Mitch McConnell's head because the Senate Majority Leader has proposed to decouple the passge of DHS funding from the attempt to defund the president's entirely lawful actions on immigration, because McConnell knows the political stakes of being hung with a shutdown over such a transparently fraudulent equivalence. Boehner knows he can no more control King and the rest of the xenophobe caucus any more than he can make it stop snowing. So he has no choice but to blame the Senate, which must endear him to McConnell.

Several options that members have suggested, said someone with knowledge of the discussions, include a short-term funding measure until the House and the Senate can meet in a joint committee to resolve the differences between their plans; a short-term funding measure until the Senate passes Ms. Collins's proposal; or adding back in language to repeal Mr. Obama's 2014 executive actions, but leaving untouched his 2012 protections for the young immigrants known as "Dreamers." Another possibility is passing a bill to fund the department - but with the condition that the financing would end if a recent ruling by a federal judge to halt the president from implementing his immigration executive actions is overturned. "There wasn't really a clear message of where we're going," said Representative Raúl R. Labrador, Republican of Idaho.

This would not be a problem for an actual Speaker of the House. Do you think that Sam Rayburn would take on an issue of this magnitude without having "a clear message" of where his majority was going? Tip O'Neill? Hell, Newt Gingrich? The fact is that Boehner has a majority that is far beyond his control because a) he's not a deft enough politician even to try, and b) he has nothing with which to knuckle his people into line. To wit,

If Mr. Boehner and his leadership team do ultimately try to pass a "clean" funding bill that has no immigration-related amendments, probably with the support of Democratic members, the Republican base "would be extremely angry," said Representative John Fleming, Republican of Louisiana. "So this is very, very delicate territory for our leadership."

There is no Republican party any more. There is only a universe of competing power centers, some more influential than others, but all of them operating on their own agendas and by their own standards and for their own purposes. This apparently unwieldy system can exist -- and even, for the moment, prosper -- because of how the Supreme Court has changed the nature of politics in this country. But the natural forces in this new universe are inescapably centrifugal. They pull the politics away from formal central authority. It is going to take politicians raised entirely within this new universe to set the lines of authority within it, and that is most assuredly not John Boehner. Until then, sooner or later, everything is bound occasionally to fly apart.

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