It took the visit of the Holy Father, His Excellency the Pope for John Boehner to come to his senses and be the sacrificial lamb his Grand Old Party of Republican hard-hearts needed to advance their agenda.
They will all get their collective wish come the end of October when Boehner rests his speaker’s gavel for good.
And Boehner could not have thrown himself on the sword at a better, more appropriate time, what with the specter of Donald Trump looming as the outlier hologram trying his damndest to be “one of them” without, however, all the religiosity and faux presidential candidate politeness.
Also, it is becoming clearer since he announced his pending resignation that Boehner is no longer — if he ever really was — the newfangled type of archconservative Republican who’d callously shut down the federal government to prove a point about just how badass newfangled Republicans are.
It seems Boehner has been out-Republicanned by conservatives leaning so far right they’re falling out of the car door.
All the bluster and bitterness of recoiling from government intervention, government spending, government programs… hell, just plain old
governance , must have been getting to Boehner’s Midwestern soul.
Yes. It appears John Boehner has a soul, that place deep in his chest where inconsolable things go to nest and marinate. He will need it once he resigns as speaker because then his real work begins — as a human being — helping to avert and untangle all the troubles the Republicans have concocted to keep themselves employed and at odds with Democrats
Republicans know they need the Lord, so the Pope’s visit to Washington — the most sin-sick, confused, hate-filled and power mad center — was apropriate; they also know they need a shake-up, even if it means losing one of the Gang of Seven, sent to Washington to show the old-heads how New Republicans rape and pillage.
I love watching Republicans the way some folks enjoy going to the coast to whale watch or some flocked outside to see the super moon.And here is what I most love about watching Republicans: In their most bloodlusty shrewdness they do not hold to sentimentalities.
Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio could not wait to dance on Boehner’s grave and spewed anti-Boehner rhetoric — to cheering, elated Republican audiences — merely moments after Boehner made his announcement.
According to the New York Times, Cruz even told his supporters that Boehner very likely had secretly cut deals with Democrat Nancy Pelosi to continue funding the Obama administration (Planned Parenthood, the Iran deal, Affordable Health Care, etc.) to the end of its tenure before heading off to a fat-cat consulting job.
Yes, his people have branded him a traitor of the highest order.However, Boehner’s love/hate relationship with this new crop of Republicans is nothing new. After he became speaker during the “tea party wave” of the 2010 election, Boehner agreed with all the right Republican speaking points — curbing government spending, et al — but his Republican commitment was immediately questioned by this fringe element of TeaPartyRepublican Frankensteins.
By the time questions of whether Boehner’s blood ran real Republican, it was too late, and he was in over his emotional head.
Republican leadership these days is very nearly an oxymoron. Look at the field of what’s-his-faces running for the Republican nomination for president. If they were all mashed up together as one person with a book-length CV of accomplishments, offices and money, I still couldn’t throw a rock and hit a viable candidate.
Let this all be a lesson to anyone interested in the least at keeping this government viable, open and running. This is now the party of haters — even of themselves — and they are baring their teeth to bite off the very limbs of those who do not function to further maim the country that has allowed them to harm it in the first place.
America made Republicans.And now wrong-headed Republicans are trying to undo America in their own image, whatever that is.But Republicans do not care about their brethren and who throws whom under the campaign bus.Everything and everyone must go!I wonder at which point Boehner really realized he was going to go.I know what he is telling the public: that he had been thinking about it and rose one morning and, after saying his prayers, said, “This is it.”
I guess I will have to believe that version.
I have long had an infatuation with John Boehner, ever since I was a fledgling reporter at The Hamilton Journal-News in the mid-1990s and Boehner’s name was on every Butler County Republican’s lips as the next Chosen One to go lead Republicans in Washington. I was so preoccupied with spelling people’s names right and turning in stories I did not bother myself with the minutiae of county politics, but Boehner excited and intrigued a lot of people.
By the time I was getting my sea legs, Boehner was four years into his congressional seat — a seat he easily won after he crushed Buz Lukens, who was plagued by a sex scandal involving a minor.
And when he’d come into the newsroom to answer endorsement questions from what amounted to our editorial board, his gaggle of henchmen at his heels, the smell of stale cigarette smoke, after shave and tanning potions was intoxicating.
This guy’s going to be a Washington leader, huh?
So he was.
By 1994, Boehner became part of that infamous Gang of Seven, who brought the House banking scandal to the fore, a signal that Boehner and his ilk were new kinds of scandal-sniffing, small-government Republicans. His light got brighter when he aligned himself with Newt Gingrich, and together they wrote the Contract with America, something that galvanized Americans in general, Republicans specifically, and helped Republicans secure the congressional majority for the first time in 40 years.
I still do not understand what that document was all about, but, hey, it’s all tears down Boehner’s face at this point.
All of this seems like such a wet dream, expertly engineered as it all was. Boehner’s political ascension was the stuff of a made-for-TV movie in which our hero meets little resistance on his way to Washington from his West Chester home on the golf course.
But Boehner’s’ been around long enough to have witnessed mighty changes in his party — changes that do not include him.
Changes that can now be blamed on him.
At least he got to see the Pope.
CONTACT KATHY Y. WILSON: letters@citybeat.com
This article appears in Sep 30 – Oct 6, 2015.