Why Boehner is so dangerous: Darkness in Washington
fantastic piece. Packer explains why this soulless hack politician is such a threat to what remains of our democracy.
Ryan Lizza’s excellent Daily Comment last week explained the lay of the American political landscape in the clearest possible terms, backed up by numbers: a faction of congressional Republicans, many, if not most, in the South, representing ideologically extreme, heavily white districts that were drawn by Republican-controlled state legislatures after the 2010 elections so as to keep those seats Republican in perpetuum, have their party in a chokehold—and with it, at the moment, the federal government. Eighty House members, Lizza wrote, barely a third of the Republican caucus, most of them new to Congress, forced Speaker John Boehner to reverse his public position and refuse to fund the government after September 30th unless Democrats agreed to gut the Affordable Care Act.
One question Lizza didn’t raise is why Boehner allowed himself to be pushed onto a course that’s so self-destructive—not just for the country but for his party—that a conservative pundit called the House rebels “the suicide caucus.” Maybe Boehner is afraid that a Tea Party revolt could upend his speakership, so he’s rendered it empty in order to hang onto it. Maybe he’s spooked by the continuing power on the right of Fox News and talk radio. Maybe he knows that the key to Republican money lies less with Wall Street or K Street than with far-right organizations like the ones that attended Ted Cruz’s fundraising dinner while he held the Senate floor (with a series of relievers) for twenty-one hours.
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The last time the government shut down was over the Christmas holidays in 1995. Newt Gingrich was in Boehner’s position then, but, unlike Boehner, Gingrich was the chief revolutionary, a leader who was actually leading. Gingrich had spent his whole career accumulating power and giving his fellow Republicans the tools—many of them simply words—to undermine the Democratic-controlled institutions of government in Washington. He was willing to destroy the House in order to take it. But when he went toe to toe with Bill Clinton over the shutdown (it had to do with Medicare spending), Gingrich proved capable of compromise. The two men were constantly on the phone. In “The Pact: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the Rivalry That Defined a Generation,” Steven M. Gillon quotes Clinton’s aide Bruce Reed: “Even though we were in the midst of bitterly divided government, both Clinton and Gingrich saw that it was in their interests, and to a larger degree, in their parties’ interests, to work together.”
become. In the Senate, the moderating influence of Bob Dole has been replaced by the cynical partisanship of Mitch McConnell, while Jesse Helms looks pretty reasonable next to Ted Cruz. Gingrich was a far more volatile and aggressive individual than Boehner, but the institutional norms of self-restraint, and perhaps even self-interest, have broken down under the pressure of an increasingly abnormal Republican Party. In this atmosphere, a hack can be more dangerous than a revolutionary.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/2013/10/darkness-in-washington.html
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