The Blackmail Caucus, a.k.a. the Republican Party
John
Boehner was a terrible, very bad, no good speaker of the House. Under
his leadership, Republicans pursued an unprecedented strategy of
scorched-earth obstructionism, which did immense damage to the economy
and undermined America’s credibility around the world.
Still,
things could have been worse. And under his successor they almost
surely will be worse. Bad as Mr. Boehner was, he was just a symptom of
the underlying malady, the madness that has consumed his party.
For
me, Mr. Boehner’s defining moment remains what he said and did as House
minority leader in early 2009, when a newly inaugurated President Obama
was trying to cope with the disastrous recession that began under his
predecessor.
There was and is a strong consensus among economists that a temporary period of deficit spending can help mitigate an economic slump. In 2008 a stimulus plan
passed Congress with bipartisan support, and the case for a further
stimulus in 2009 was overwhelming. But with a Democrat in the White
House, Mr. Boehner demanded that policy go in the opposite direction,
declaring that “American families are tightening their belts. But they don’t see government tightening its belt.” And he called for government to “go on a diet.”
This
was know-nothing economics, and incredibly irresponsible at a time of
crisis; not long ago it would have been hard to imagine a major
political figure making such a statement. Did Mr. Boehner actually
believe what he was saying? Was he just against anything Mr. Obama was
for? Or was he engaged in deliberate sabotage, trying to block measures
that would help the economy because a bad economy would be good for
Republican electoral prospects?
We’ll
probably never know for sure, but those remarks set the tone for
everything that followed. The Boehner era has been one in which
Republicans have accepted no responsibility for helping to govern the
country, in which they have opposed anything and everything the
president proposes.
What’s
more, it has been an era of budget blackmail, in which threats that
Republicans will shut down the government or push it into default unless
they get their way have become standard operating procedure.
All in all, Republicans during the Boehner era fully justified the characterization offered by the political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein,
in their book “It’s Even Worse Than You Think.” Yes, the G.O.P. has
become an “insurgent outlier” that is “ideologically extreme” and
“unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science.”
And Mr. Boehner did nothing to fight these tendencies. On the contrary,
he catered to and fed the extremism.
So why is he out? Basically because the obstructionism failed.
Republicans did manage to put a severe crimp on federal spending,
which has grown much more slowly under Mr. Obama than it did under
George W. Bush, or for that matter Ronald Reagan. The weakness of
spending has, in turn, been a major headwind delaying recovery, probably
the single biggest reason it has taken so long to bounce back from the
2007-2009 recession.
But
the economy nonetheless did well enough for Mr. Obama to win
re-election with a solid majority in 2012, and his victory ensured that
his signature policy initiative, health-care reform — enacted before
Republicans took control of the House — went into effect on schedule,
despite the dozens of votes Mr. Boehner held calling for its repeal.
Furthermore, Obamacare is working: the number of uninsured Americans has dropped sharply even as health-care costs seem to have come under control.
In
other words, despite all Mr. Boehner’s efforts to bring him down, Mr.
Obama is looking more and more like a highly successful president. For
the base, which has never considered Mr. Obama legitimate — polling
suggests that many Republicans believe that he wasn’t even born here
— this is a nightmare. And all too many ambitious Republican
politicians are willing to tell the base that it’s Mr. Boehner’s fault,
that he just didn’t try blackmail hard enough.
This
is nonsense, of course. In fact, the controversy over Planned
Parenthood that probably triggered the Boehner exit — shut down the
government in response to obviously doctored videos?
— might have been custom-designed to illustrate just how crazy the
G.O.P.’s extremists have become, how unrealistic they are about what
confrontational politics can accomplish.
But
Republican leaders who have encouraged the base to believe all kinds of
untrue things are in no position to start preaching political
rationality.
Mr.
Boehner is quitting because he found himself caught between the limits
of the politically possible and a base that lives in its own reality.
But don’t cry for (or with) Mr. Boehner; cry for America, which must
find a way to live with a G.O.P. gone mad.
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