I don’t know how much of that is that every Republican held a “hard” position on that issue, or that the possibly-more-moderate Republicans believed, as jsgoddess noted, that participating in any sort of agreement with the Democrats would be the kiss of death in the next election cycle.
Worked on ACORN. But ACORN was largely comprised of scruffy idealists in Goodwill suits and second hand cars. Planned Parenthood has got oodles and gobs of suburban moms who are in the PTA and have some money. Don’t bite what you can’t chew.
Is your definition of “sane” that they agree with your side of the aisle?
A couple of shutdowns ago, I think the sane thing was for the Pubs to shutdown government to jumpstart a real conversation about the viability of continual deficit spending rather than the current paradigm of
Pub = cut taxes and spend more
Dem = raise taxes and spend A LOT more.
Yeah, we see where that strategy went.
Considering that I’ve gone to some lengths to defend Boehner in this thread as being a reasonable person I disagree with, who did the best he could with a crappy hand? No, I don’t think someone has to agree with me to be sane. I hoped my previous posts in this thread would illustrate that “sane equals always agree with me” is the exact opposite of what I think.
It looks pretty well set that this McCarthy guy is getting it. And that he’ll be pretty much the same as Boehner, predictably with similar effect.
Got an issue with this here:
The Speaker is the speaker of the entire House, not just his party’s caucus. And no Speaker is going to have unanimous support on every issue even *within *his caucus. If that’s how McCarthy is going to operate, only involving the Dems when forced and only to the extent forced, then nothing’s going to change except perhaps public perception.
Did Speaker Pelosi act as the Speaker of the entire House, or more often, did she act as the Speaker of her caucus?
The latter. It might not have been quite so polarized as Boehner’s term, but I think that would be true if you went back to previous Speakers on either side. We are getting more and more polarized. It’s not a personality quirk of Boehner’s.
She was faced with a similar anti-everything movement, controlling the Republican caucus via Boehner, that opposed cooperation no matter what. So the question is how hard she tried to be their Speaker too, not how well she succeeded - and there’s no good way to answer that.