After today’s debacle, can we agree he’s a terrible Speaker? Can he survive as Speaker?
Some content would be appreciated.
No. I think he is incompetent.
Sorry Ivory: today he was forced to withdraw the appropriations bill meant to deal with the border mess. Most people blame the meddling of SENATOR Cruz. And, Terr, knew it didn’t look right.
Here ya go. He can’t even keep his own party-caucus in line.
Boehner is a bumbling idiot. As are most of the politicians. Democrats as well. But people pick their favorite idiot, then vote for him. If only people stopped voting for idiots…
Damn. What a baffoon.
Rachel Maddow has had a long-running series on the “John Boehner is Bad at His Job Hypothesis”. I was hoping she’d be on tonight but instead it was Steve Kornacki. In any case, here’s an example from December 2012.
I think he’s a mediocre Speaker, but I doubt the worst. He basically is the pick of a caucus that is ungovernable in itself but holds a majority of seats. It’s not a good time to be Speaker because that means you’re trying to basically lead a GOP that has two almost parties-within-a-party. One that is your typical conservative GOP party and another that believes they should never vote to pass any legislation of any kind ever, unless it’s something so crazy/ridiculous it will never pass in the Senate and would be vetoed even if it did.
I’m not sure what politician could govern the actual GOP caucus at present. But that being said there have been some incidents that show Boehner isn’t highly competent, but even if he were I doubt he’d have gotten much done he hasn’t gotten done just due to the very limited room in which he can operate.
The Founders didn’t (unfortunately) fully posit parties, they imagined various factions but didn’t imagine quite this static situation. Traditional American parties can still work within the framework of our government because they are big coalitions in which many members of both party actually hold some views in common with the opposition and will vote across party lines here and there.
But in the last 30 years instead the two parties have started to function like parliamentary parties, but when we don’t have a parliamentary system that suddenly causes things to break down since the three elected portions of the legislative process can be split among the parties. Even that was at least tenable for awhile because the leaders of these parliamentary-like parties usually saw the need to pass key legislation, and had enough power to to make it happen, so they did the compromising for their caucus. But now one of the two parties is actually fractured, and worse it is fractured while controlling one House of the legislature. So now basically nothing meaningful can ever happen without a significant legislative realignment.
Yes, but I disagree on 2 points.
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There is no meaningful typical GOP party left. Instead there are the crazies and the Presidential GOP party: the latter cares about winning the Presidency. The latter considers getting something done. But they are in sync on policy.
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Obstructionism works. Bipartisanship favors the party who holds the Presidency according to Mitch McConnell. As for today’s events David Weigle notes: “Voters are aware of a border crisis, they are aware that Barack Obama is president—they blame him for nothing getting done.”
There’s no real penalty for do-nothing Republican obstructionism. If immigration reform were put up for a straight up or down vote, it would pass with a mix of Democrats and Republicans. But Boehner has no interest in cutting a deal. That only makes the President look good.
Remember most seats are safe seats. Republicans of the House of Representatives have threats on their right, but only a few have threats on their left. And even informed conservatives can’t accept that their party has embraced obstructionism, even when McConnell lays it out for them. The conservative public simply isn’t wired for mature political analysis.
ETA: I agree that the preceding implies a bug in our political system: separation of powers/checks and balances assumes deal cutting and compromise. When the latter is eschewed, our system no longer works.
ETA2: By implication, I disagree with the OP. Boehner may not be forging compromise or balancing competing interests, but he is certainly protecting his job and the jobs of his Washington Republican constituents.
Your notion that Boehner has ANY interest in cutting deals or serving the nation shows a certain naivete. He’s not incompetent, he simply is satisfied to be the leader of an obstructionist, do-nothing House of Representatives.
Is there any point at which the public are just going to say screw it and throw out these sorts of people?
Eh, its more his Caucus then the man himself. I don’t think if Boehner was replaced by someone else, they’d be any more successful at trying to get the GOP Housemembers to vote for legislation. Note the law that was defeated wasn’t even really supposed to pass the Senate, it was just a political manuever so the House could say it was doinig something and it was all the Dems in the Senate’s fault. And yet, the GOP still couldn’t get itself organized to pass it.
Anyways, Newt Gingrich was certainly worse at his job, and that’s just, what, three Speakers ago? So I don’t think Boehner is the most incompent Speaker in any case.
I don’t think you can call a legislator competent or incompetent, since they don’t actually run anything. Not even a “leader”, since they are in the position of leading people who don’t work for them. It’s not Boehner’s fault he leads such a fractured caucus. If he could appoint all the Republican Congressmen, then it would be his fault.
…so what does the former want?
In better times, he might not be so terrible. He doesn’t seem to be that bad a person. When he reads his lines about how terrible Obama is about this or that, one gets the impression that he doesn’t believe a word he is saying. His whackos demand a certain measure of red meat and he’s obliged to deliver.
As it is, the GOP caucus is unleadable. There are enough members who don’t feel any obligation to pass any legislation at all, and refuse to pass anything that Obama would be able to sign in good faith. Their goal this week is not to pass anything that would be passed by the Senate and signed into law. Their goal is to pass something extreme enough to please the right wing of their own party and be rejected by the Senate.
After more than 210 years, the Constitution has failed. We have one party that has figured out how to game the system, refusing to let the government work at all unless they control it all. I think we’re at the point where either the Republican Party is destroyed, or the nation is. But all too many people own allegience to the former and not the latter.
The thing is, the bill they derailed wasn’t really meant to pass the Senate either. Boehner just wanted to have the Senate Dems be the ones to stop it so the GOP could say they tried.
So I don’t think the Tea party really had a point in blocking the bill other then as “more hard core then thou” chest thumping.
Yeah, right. Would you let us get away with excusing Obama with such a lame rationalization? I don’t think so.
Obama appoints the people under him. That’s why it seems really special for some of you to think that Boehner is incompetent, but giving Obama a pass when his appointees fail to do their jobs.
that’s not to say I think Boehner’s competent either, I’m just not certain that competence or incompetence is relevant to legislating.
First, bills are still passing out of the House, some even get approved by the Senate and the President signs them. Congress is working just fine.
Second, Congress doesn’t have to legislate if it doesn’t want to. The country is not constantly in need of hundreds of new laws. We’ve been around for over 200 years with the laws we’ve got, passing only 500 new laws instead of 2000 is not going to wreck our system of government.