Boehner’s worst failure yet: Incompetence, near-shutdown & sorry state of GOP “governance”
Speaker gets bailed out by Dems (again) after GOP rebukes him on DHS funding. Here's the bad news going forward
John Boehner (Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst)
On Friday
afternoon, just a few short hours before the Department Homeland
Security was set to shut down, the Republican leadership in the House of
Representatives scheduled a vote to grant DHS three more weeks of
funding. The idea was to buy John Boehner some time to do… something.
The legislative impasse that led us to the precipice of the shutdown was
created by Boehner, who passed a bill tying DHS appropriations to the
rollback of President Obama’s immigration executive actions. He spent
several weeks insisting that the House had “done its job” and would not
pass any new legislation funding DHS. But Senate Republicans and
Democrats came together to pass a clean DHS funding bill, which forced
Boehner to once again act. Rather than bow to political reality and take
the only route available to him to actually fund the agency, Boehner
opted to prolong the agony and punt.
And he couldn’t even do that. The three-week continuing resolution failed when
over 50 conservative Republicans voted against it, rebuking Boehner and
the leadership and sending the entire process into utter chaos with
less than half a day remaining until the shutdown.
As
has happened so many times over the last four years, the rest of the
Congressional leadership was impelled to overcome Boehner’s incompetence
and cobble together a last-minute solution. Mitch McConnell and Harry
Reid pushed a one-week CR through the Senate late Friday night, and Nancy Pelosi instructed House Democrats to support its passage, with the promise from Boehner that
the House would pass a clean, long-term DHS funding bill this week. The
one-week bill passed with the overwhelming support of Democrats, and Obama signed it.
So,
for all intents and purposes, the House minority leader was calling the
shots last Friday, determining which legislation would pass and mapping
out future votes. Boehner was along for the ride, keeping a low profile
with the rest of the Republican leadership while the Democrats held
press briefings sketching out the way forward. It’d be embarrassing
enough of this had never happened before, but it’s getting difficult to
keep track of how many times Pelosi has had to bail out Boehner. That it
is still happening despite the fact that Boehner is now sitting on one
of the largest Congressional majorities in decades is about as damning
an indictment of his speakership as one could ask for.
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And
that spells real trouble going forward. The story of the first two
months of the all-Republican Congress has been complete dysfunction and
the inability to perform the rudimentary tasks of government. The
Republicans are fighting amongst themselves and venting obvious
frustration with Boehner’s shambolic approach to governing. On Friday
night, McConnell passed the one-week CR and then immediately adjourned
the Senate for the weekend – putting all the pressure to act on Boehner
and sending a clear message that he’s done with this fight. Earlier in
the day, Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) pleaded with House Republicans to stop the madness. “Hopefully we’re gonna end the attaching of bullshit to essential items of the government,” he said.
But
the DHS finding fight is just the first test of basic governance
confronting the Republican Congress. Sometime later this year the U.S.
is going to bump up against the debt limit,
and there’s an excellent chance that the debt limit renewal will
coincide with the next appropriations fight (the “Cromnibus,” passed
last December, only funded government operations through this
September). The difficulty the Republicans have had working in concert
to fund a single department doesn’t bode well for a combination debt
limit/government funding showdown (with the attendant threats of default
and shutdown).
But
before we even get to that point, there’s a chance the Republican
Congress will have to deal with the potentially catastrophic fallout
from the King v. Burwell decision. If the Supreme Court strikes down the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies in 37 states, Republicans will be under intense pressure to
do something to mitigate the damage. Can anyone credibly argue that
Congress is up to the task when the Speaker of the House has little to
no control over one-fifth of his caucus?
And,
of course, the DHS funding fight still has to be resolved. Congress
bought themselves an extra week, and Democrats agreed to the extension
with the thinking that cold political logic and a sense of
self-preservation will finally push Boehner to give in and fund the
agency without strings. But Boehner’s capacity for illogical and
irrational behavior is why they’re in this situation to begin with.
Boehner will eventually cave, but there’s no guarantee when that will
happen.
And
really this fight never should have happened in the first place. From
the moment of its inception, the Republican strategy was bound to fail.
But the leaders in both houses of Congress plowed ahead because they had
no idea what else to do, and now they’re being dragged along as the
Democrats push through last-minute legislative patches to keep the
lights on at DHS. There are a lot of words to describe that process, but
“governance” is not one of them.
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