Paul Ryan is Tired of this Crap

I think I've made a regular point of noting that Paul Ryan is a little overrated and has been given a very strange reputation for seriousness--and the idea that Ryan's retirement means that "Trumpism" will follow his departure or that he looked at a potential "blue wave" coming up in the 2018 mid-term elections equally sound a little false to me.   Speaker of the House Ryan made his mind up in 2016 that if he could work with the Freedom Caucus, he could work with Trump, so long as his agenda got accomplished.  And there was nothing about that that really surprised me, there. It's one thing to note that Paul Ryan didn't so much "run" for his speakership, so much as happen to be the least awful person for the job, and even then he made clear he still wanted his family time. 

The reason why should be clear--the job sucks. It sucked when John Boehner was doing it. Boehner looks like a healthier man after his retirement. Weathering the whims of the Freedom Caucus and Trump and trying to maintain his reputation for seriousness, and dealing with what could be a loss of the GOP House majority sounds like a courage-sucking tightrope act. Of course he's ready to bail.

I just don't think what come after is worse or more necessarily "Trumpist". Let Scalise and McCarthy fight over leading the House GOP. Let Wisconsin Republicans try to find someone less odious than Paul Nehlen to run in Ryan's district. I don't think the next handful of months is going to show us a new, more liberated Paul Ryan who will, say, yank Devin Nunes from the Intelligence committee or anything really stunning like that. He's already done his big act--planning an exit. And if that puts the GOP in a tighter spot?

They deserve it. 

The Trump Problem 2: What the Elites Don't Know, but the Base Understands

This morning, the Oracle of Wasilla Sarah Palin made a curse against Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and all his doin's, to the effect of her being in support of Rep. Ryan's being primaried and cast in the place of darkness, there to wail and gnash his teeth, like Eric Cantor was. 

This is not an absurd thing to say. There is a Republican challenger for Ryan's seat, and if I know anything about the good folks of Wisconsin, it's that they voted for Walker three times and produced a Glenn Grothman, so? Maybe the pride of Janesville should feel a little discomfort. (Or maybe, if freed from having to appeal to everybody as the guy both begged to become Speaker of the House and arm-twisted until he had to deny wanting to make a run at the convention for president in the event it was contested, the sigh of relief.) But how vast this former VP candidate's (Ryan, I mean, not Palin) heresy is depends on your POV.

After all, when I derided Paul Ryan's response to Trump's nomination as he was "just not ready" as being willing to be brought to "yes",  I considered that he was going to get there, eventually, but it was just possible that he was aware of a certain ticket with a flashy, but under-informed VP candidate with great right-wing bona fides, but which, nonetheless, lost to a celebrity-quality POC with a funny foreign name and a gaffe-prone 70's vintage Democrat Congresscritter.  And even Sarah Palin knows the weaknesses of that particular ticket. In other words--Ryan is just being cagey about whether the entire country is ready to swallow what the GOP base drinks in every day.

I remember when that very question was very much on the minds of a handful of high-profile names in the GOP circa 2009. Rep. Eric Cantor, former Gov. Mitt Romney, and former Gov. Jeb Bush were all keen to take what they learned from the post-mortems of the 2008 election and try to reconcile it with a listening tour of the Republican base.

There's a pretty impressive "Where are they now?" Romney lost in 2012, Rep. Cantor lost in a primary, and Jeb Bush's 2016 Presidential Primary bid was a subject of pity and awe. Whatever they were listening to--it could not help them.

Donald Trump Has a Funny Idea

.@realDonald Trump accuses Cruz's father of helping JFK's assassin pic.twitter.com/qJjz8QyuIf

— POLITICO (@politico) May 3, 2016

You know, there are a lot of things you can say about Ted Cruz--after all, when your wife has to explain you are not the Zodiac Killer and the former Speaker of the House calls you "Lucifer" , it's a sign your reputation is in trouble. But saying that someone's dad helped assassinate JFK is kinda cuckoo bananas.

But this is Trump. He mainstreams tabloid conspiracy theory all the time. Anyone else, we would wonder whether the person throwing this out there was in his right mind, or maybe was actually too gullible or deranged to be presidential. With Trump? Normal! What an election year!

Reading Tea Leaves

There's a certain element that would rather an awful lot before they would see a Speaker Paul Ryan. They see the former VP candidate and Budget Wizard as establishment now. He was once hailed for the austerity of his budgets, but now he's being semi-pilloried because of the vague idea he might think government should work. That's his heresy. He might just try to have a functional government that pays its just debts and doesn't default.

There is the reason why Congress is ill-favored in various polls. I have no love for Paul Ryan, but he wants to do a difficult job the teafolk don't even think is worth doing. And by the way, screw teafolk.

I'd really like it if McConnell and Boehner just say "screw it" and introduce a pretty anodyne budget bill covering the next two years, but they are still so owned there would likely be unacceptable fuckery no Democrat would accept. Could they get together on a clean bill? Shit, Boehner, isn't that what you are resigning for?

I'd like to think a clean bill is in our future--but they better make it fast. Debt ceiling comes up soon.


(Or it will be just fine and I won't even have to write about this crap for another two years.)

Pull the Other One, It's Got Bells On

 

If one has followed at all the Twitter output of @SpeakerBoehner, one might note that he's been working the pole hard for the Benghazi Committee. He's spinning on it, doing splits, taking it down low and trying to make folks believe and trust the Benghazi Committee. Bullshit, Orange John. There is no sex in that particular Champagne Room and there is a limit to the rain. Once again, a GOP Rep. has spilled just a little bit of the beans--this is about Hillary Clinton:

 

“Sometimes the biggest sin you can commit in D.C. is to tell the truth,” Hanna said in an interview on Keeler in the Morning, a radio show in upstate New York. The third-term congressman paused for a moment, perhaps recognizing the importance of what he was about to say, before going on to agree with McCarthy’s original statement.

“This may not be politically correct, but I think that there was a big part of this investigation that was designed to go after people and an individual, Hillary Clinton,” Hanna said.

He explained further why he believes the Benghazi Committee’s purpose has been in part to attack Clinton. “After what Kevin McCarthy said, it’s difficult to accept at least a part of it was not,” Hanna said. “I think that’s the way Washington works. But you’d like to expect more from a committee that’s spent millions of dollars and tons of time.”

After millions of dollars and tons of time? Yes. Yes, you would expect more--but this is what we're apparently getting:

With the slow progress, members have engaged in social activities like a wine club nicknamed “Wine Wednesdays,” drinking from glasses imprinted with the words “Glacial Pace,” a dig at Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland and the committee’s ranking member, Major Podliska said. Mr. Cummings used the term to question the speed of the committee’s work.

At one point, several Republican staff members formed a gun-buying club and discussed in the committee’s conference room the 9-millimeter Glock handguns they intended to buy and what type of monograms they would inscribe on them, Major Podliska said.

It's the House GOP social event of the ages. You compare and contrast that to the lip-quivering over four courageous dead in the embassy attack, and it certainly seems a little like...using those bodies for a campaign. Politicizing the dead. While not actually having all that many shits to give.

Oh--which just recently got done, in an incompetent ad by some asshats calling themselves the StopHillaryPAC. These numbnuts were so out to get at Hillary Clinton that they featured the actual grave of Ambassador Christopher Stephens in their ad, but they couldn't be arsed to get the spelling of Libya right the first time, going with "Lybia".

Tina Wong at Vanity Fair suggests that the misspelling may be a Freudian slip regarding their impression of "lying" or a (probably more Freudian, am I right?) subliminal suggestion of labia. That sort of thing has disgustingly been done before, of course. (Roger Stone has gone on to be Donald Trump's main man, by the way,.)

Anymore, after something like 25 years of being acutely politically aware, when people try to talk scandal about the Clintons, either of them, I smell the sharp tang of rodent buggery. If Speaker Boehner fears that the Benghazi Committee isn't bringing in the tips anymore, maybe he isn't really making it in this club and should bring that hustle to a close.

So, Did John Boehner Push to Keep the Benghazi Cmte Alive?

Recent gavel-renunciator John Boehner is quite possibly the guy who turned the Benghazi Select Committee on to Clinton-emails-all-the-time. I personally always thought there was a partisan quality to the Select Committee, but I didn't see out to how it would get to be about trapping Hillary Clinton out loud until pretty recently. But in light of the sort of information that had been out there, I think it was becoming increasingly clear that there wasn't new information about what happened then that even was being looked for.

But why would Boehner push to have a committee about the deaths of four US persons in Libya be about Hillary Clinton's emails? Because of the Infinite Football-Pull. Politically, Hillary Clinton was the most likely candidate for the Democratic nomination, so by wrecking her, he could break out of the "always-losing" scenario by having someone in the Oval Office--a Republican--who would give the House GOP militants at least some of what they wanted some of the time--and really do him a favor by not being a Dem at all.

The idea that Boehner threatened to walk off the Speaker position knowing full well no one in their right mind would want it while still pumping for the Committee's validity, kind of suggests he wanted to stay on but with a stronger hand? It makes some sense.  But since the game is more or less given away--does this mean he really leaves--or is he further caught in a hell of his own making? (Enquiring minds might like to know with the CR up and the debt ceiling also.)

If so, Trey Gowdy isn't alone in being under fire for the Benghazi Committee becoming (even more) overtly partisan. Boehner assisted.  Does this mean he also should be looking at an ethics issue? Probably not--we are far removed from the day when Newt Gingrich stepped down from his speakership partly for ethics reasons by a GOP committee. But he still might just like to, you know. Go away.

(All this backstory is, in part, why I found the idea of Newt Gingrich in the running for a shot at Speaker so amusing when it got floated. The partisan witch hunt that Gingrich lived and politically died by--the current GOP learned it by watching him!)

House of Jokers

BREAKING: McCarthy drops out of speaker race, according to reports http://t.co/0lmg7UY7fm pic.twitter.com/Mk1dJcD3jW

— Talking Points Memo (@TPM) October 8, 2015

See what I mean? In my comment:

A bunch of anti-government folks got elected to Congress; it only makes sense they'd eventually try to burn down the House. Boehner was willing to play with matches, but never right into the kerosene.

McCarthy broke one of their matches. 

Hillary Clinton Seizes the Day

Here's the deal--a lot of us folks who were pretty politically concerned back in the 1990's remember the Whitewater nonsense. The Hunting of the President and the full court press to take down the Clintons--both of them, was a very real and concerted effort, and the stupid media hacks who liked having stories spoon-fed to them by "high-level insiders" and "anonymous sources" was a very real thing. Hillary Clinton was a target of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy then, because she was deeply involved in the attempt to pass a universal health care bill. A fuckton of money went into discouraging universal health care--there were these obnoxious ads: The Harry and Louise ads, that basically said: Health care is complicated, and you damn dumb folks wouldn't understand the Hillary Clinton plan if you lived to be a hundred and there would probably be some kind of changes, so you should be against it.

They didn't just have to kill Hillarycare, they had to hit her with dark speculations about the suicide of Vince Foster and the go-nowhere Whitewater thing. It was prolonged and tedious and seedy and ultimately, they found out that Bill Clinton was kind of a womanizer. Wow. We knew that before he got elected in 1992.

Seeing that then, there was no doubt about what the Benghazi hearings were about now. They can go all bloody shirt "What about the families of the four dead Americans?" but after three years, the likelihood that Libyan terrorists did it and there wasn't any kind of advance warning nor a lot of room for the various agencies to coordinate a timely response to do anything, simply remains. Unfortunate. But there it is. If they want to pimp these deaths any further, they might as well just slap what ever questions haven't been asked and answered on a brief list and wrap it up.

John Boehner is Still Workin' It

.@HouseBenghazi’s very existence is only the result of the Obama Admin’s obstruction http://t.co/HOn0fJrUZk pic.twitter.com/GOTgwrUT2H

— Speaker John Boehner (@SpeakerBoehner) October 1, 2015

Still?  Dude, if you're really going to quit, start with this. In the meantime, Josh Marshall's take is really good.

John Boehner, Don't Look Back in Anger or Tears

There are metaphors that can be used for Speaker of the House John Boehner ("The Only Adult in the House" and the "Designated Driver" come to mind for me) but I think my impression of Boehner's tenure as Speaker of the House is summed up by the three-part series of blog posts I did called "Speaker of Nothing" regarding the summer of 2011 debt ceiling fight. Here he is, Speaker of the House, a powerful position--provided you have a caucus behind you interested in governing. But his Speakership was dependent upon a Tea Party wave in 2010, resulting in many people new to politics who 1) weren't necessarily "House-trained" and 2) were instinctively anti-government.

It's damn hard to come to a consensus with people who actually think "lowering the debt ceiling" is a thing, or who believe that a government shut-down is a perfectly cromulent stunt to put on one's political resume. This is a person who has had to sit across from Michele Bachmann, Steve King, and Louie Gohmert, and accept these were the people on his own team--and no damn help. He's had to deal with occasional votes that weren't against him per se--but are hard not to take a little personally. And sometimes he was put in places he probably had no "win".

I can't blame the man for wanting out, because getting pressure over trying to keep the government running over defunding Planned Parenthood has got to be a vicious kick in the gut for a devout pro-life Catholic. But the problem is, he's standing in the gap between a functional government and the crazies in his own party, for who nothing will ever be enough. He could probably promise them ponies upon ponies--but they would still want flying unicorns, even if those things don't exist. If he came to this decision in the wake of the Pope's visit, with an understanding that he could no longer reconcile his job with his heart--it makes sense.

The problem for the aftermath though is--does this change anything? Will there still be a gap to stand in, or will the Tea Party nihilists just go all smash-happy? Rep. Pete King said, ruefully, this is a "victory for the crazies."  I don't think he's wrong. There are folks who denied Superstorm Sandy emergency funding and don't understand that your national defense and infrastructure are only as good as you actually pay for.

Rep. Boehner might have taken more of an aggressive role in trying to educate and convince his team in how not to be awful, and it does him no credit to have been the Speaker of such dysfunctional Congressional terms. But I think he tried--oh, he tried. And we did survive, after all. We might have busted his balls a  lot. But we could have had worse.

Boehner Hangs On

So, Rep. John Boehner hangs on as Speaker of the House with only 25 votes against him (that came to: 3 votes for Rep. Gohmert, 2 for Rep. Yoho, 1 for Sen. Rand Paul, 1 for Sen. Jeff Sessions, 2 for Rep. Jim Jordan (OH), 12 for Rep Daniel Webster --good for him, huh?--and then some other guys). If the challenge to Boehner's position as Speaker was intended to send a message, Boehner is apparently sending a message back. 

What's it all mean? I don't know, the year is young. If I was to guess from looking at the names of the guys who got votes in this "rebellion"--I think Formerly Amherst is right and they seem to be mostly anti-illegal immigration folks. With GOP control of both houses of Congress, I don't think it's out of the question that some kind of immigration reform gets passed just because the GOP wanted to be sure they got the border security aspect the way they wanted it. As a liberal, I don't think I like the idea of a "deport everybody" scheme when we do have solid, but undocumented people who otherwise are good citizens in all but the paperwork; but I appreciate the idea that cross-border traffic includes some unpleasant criminal realities we don't want, and that the economy doesn't benefit from "under the table" jobs going to undocumented (which can also mean "unprotected") workers when those businesses should be playing by the rules and hiring on the up and up.

As for the above picture--that is awkward, no? I'm just saying. Minority Leader Pelosi is smiling, but her right hand is kind of saying "Nope".  (Or is that just me?)

The Speaker of Nothing Will Most Likely Abide

You know, deep down, I want to believe that the Congress, as currently constituted, still understands that Rep. Ted Yoho is a dunce and Rep. Louie Gohmert is floridly delusional.  And I mean, floridly.  They are both avid batshit peddlers, and in their way, could each advance aspects of conservatism as it now exists in ways we would be frankly astounded by, as if yokels at a freakshow. (Did I mention the Speaker of the House is third in line for Chief executive in the ultimate emergency where the top two are disposed of?)

Still and all, I think batshittery will give way to experience, and despite the regular dunking of the only adult in the GOP  Kiddie pool, Boehner  will continue his tenure of pulling snouts out of the water. It seems thankless. I bet it is.

And maybe there's an off-chance the GOP lottery will draw a non-House GOP
stalwart, like Ted Cruz (I know they like him, anyway--at least he isn't dipstick dumb and batshit cray, amirite?)  Also Ted Cruz is way down with the House GOP.

Not sure what it means when I am wishing Cruz for a leadership position, but OMG--I know Boehner is dysfunctional, but Yoho and Gohmert are not capable persons. Anything but one of them.

--He'll Also Walk Dogs!

Deep down, I don't have a lot to say about President Obama's expansion of deportation deferment because it really isn't quite the tyrannical overreach leading to possibly massive civil disobedience and anarchy that some people want to characterize it as. It's a temporary executive order which can easily be undone by whoever follows him in office. Or, for what it's worth, Congress could, instead of talking about impeachment and imprisonment (?) actually work on passing legislation to reform immigration, since passing legislation is, last I checked, in their job description.

And the funny thing of it is, I think Obama does stuff like this reluctantly, really. I suspect he'd prefer to have the legislative branch be somewhat functional--he came from the US Senate and knows  a thing or two about the Constitution. He even commented that he pleaded with Speaker of the House John Boehner to get something passed, to the extent of even personal services ("washing the car" and "walking the dog").

Will this recent announcement shame Congress into doing the positive, rational thing of having an open, non-grandstanding debate?

I have my doubts.

I'll Do Reince Priebus One Better

I kind of like how that thing called "good sportsmanship" is running out in Washington. It was kind of fake anyway. So when, shortly after his party drubs the Dems in a midterm wave, Reince Priebus seizes on President Obama's Wednesday presser to say he "doesn't believe a word Obama says", I feel like he's just saying it how he feels. Nope, there's nothing cynical in what he's saying:  he genuinely thinks that President Obama would not attempt to go it alone and do something to reform immigration because:

"So he’s been talking about immigration reform for seven years, so you’re using his words as if they actually mean something, and ask me to respond to it. He’s been talking about this when he had 60 votes in the Senate and Nancy Pelosi in the House and they didn’t do a darn thing."

The RNC chief added that "all he’s been doing for the last year is lying to Hispanic voters across the country." Priebus pointed to Obama initially saying he would act on immigration before the end of the summer, then delaying the action until after the midterm elections.

Leaving DACA aside, which I guess I will for rhetoric's sake--let's just say Obama does something without Congress, since he is pretty sure he's getting nothing from them. Is there any way at all he wouldn't think the unified GOP-led Congress would not be on his overreaching self faster than, hmm.  See, the problem with part of the "Obama's overreaching and/or has never wanted to really do something" trope is that Congress could conceivably work with him to everyone's benefit and pass needful legislation, and we could call it something like, I don't know, a "functioning democracy". (The other, bigger part is that it's self-contradictory, as so much Obama criticism actually is.) It's not like the House leadership can pretend they have to deal with much obstruction from the Senate, anymore.  And it isn't like Boehner and McConnell haven't at least attempted to strike a pose of wanting to work with the White House. (If they can promise no government shut-downs, and want to strike a deal at tax reform--I'm pretty open to hearing them out, especially if they will stop chiseling at the ACA). If they don't work things out, they have to accept some responsibility.

Instead of not believing that McConnell and Boehner can, under the new paradigm, work better with the White House--I'll take them at their word that they might try. I'll keep track of whether it looks like they are, as folks say "Getting'er done." But if they aren't doing it...well...

Watch this space for the usual grievances.

Drunkle Boehner Tells a Shtory

I sort of thought this was a parody, but no:

"Does anybody think that Vladimir Putin would have gone into Crimea had George W. Bush been president of the United States? No!" Boehner asked, and answered, before a group of Republican volunteers here.

 

"Even Putin is smart enough to know that Bush would have punched him in the nose in about 10 seconds!" Boehner said to an applauding crowd.

Does everyone remember when Putin went into Georgia and did not get punched in the nose? Right.

But he sure said it out loud where uncritical people could hear. Yeah, clapping people--he knew you'd like that one. Uncle John is full of stories. Pull his finger...you can hear where his lawsuit against the president went.

Something About Ted...

I never thought I'd say this about Senator Ted Cruz, but really, he's something of a humble man. He takes no credit for his apparent role in the failure of the House GOP border bill, much in the way he took no credit, really, for the government shutdown. It is hard for me to imagine, truly, that he had nothing to do with these things.

You rarely see such a "no ego" approach to politics, by gum. You just don't.

Is it Ever Really About Impeachment, Though?

I think it is really possible that there is something that grinds Speaker of the House John Boehner's gears about all that executive ordering stuff that the President does, and that could very well be why he is bringing a lawsuit over that very thing--not that there's any one particular thing he is doing it over:

The speaker did not specify which executive actions he planned to challenge. House Republicans were angered in January when Mr. Obama promised in his State of the Union address to use his “pen and phone” to counter congressional inaction.

Use of office supplies can be pretty upsetting to some. But use of executive orders is a pretty common presidential activity, that in comparison with the last hundred or so years worth of presidents, Obama has actually honored more in the breach than the observance.

But one thing is pretty clear--this is not about impeachment. Even if the "I" word has been thrown about before. It's just that, well, the criteria of "high crimes and misdemeanors" hasn't so much been provable. Actually, the people most likely to use the "I" bomb want to talk about birth certificates and cover-ups of things that aren't actually very covered-up. So this is obviously different, because it's about...you know. The way Obama is being President wrong, not in any one big way, just in all these little ways that...Really?

I'm just saying. When regular people go to court, it's because their neighbor's unkempt old tree finally tipped over onto their yard and took out their car, or because the contractor got paid for half the job, but here it is, months later, and they've barely done a third of it. People sue for concrete reasons, not because they just don't like someone's politics. It seems to me a little bit like this is having one's impeachment hearing cake whilst not having to eat crow about not having a very good case for it.

Perhaps Boehner will nail down his particular objections later on, but right now, I'm not sure what this is supposed to actually accomplish.

Showdown Over? Or Just Begun?

It wasn't very long ago that I was bemoaning the likelihood of a debt ceiling crisis and replay of the handwringing and handwringing and speculation (Boehner's last stand as Speaker? trillion-dollar coin, anyone?) that comes with it, so I am pleasantly surprised that Boehner brought up a clean debt limit raise and it passed. Like, in a day. Would that the kindly spirits that look after the sanity of grouchy polibloggers always gave such speedy service!

But of course, that can't be all there is to it. For one thing, the reason the clean bill was put on the floor is because, after some spit balling about what addenda might make passing it worthwhile to his legion--Boehner determined that he could not guarantee 217 votes from his side and went for the option where he only needed about 18. He got 28.  Think about those numbers a minute. The time he's been having of it, he was glad to get 28, you think?

Which is why the Tea Party folks who now want Boehner's head on a platter puzzle me. It's similar to the "Green Lantern" theory of the presidency, where some on the left think Obama can make things work by magic.   Let's call it the "Orange Lantern" (why orange? oh, no reason) theory of the Speakership, where it might be thought that more can be accomplished by Boehner if he just--believed more? (Some of these people have a tenuous grip on How Things Are Done.)

Anyway, now it's off to the Senate, where the poor debt ceiling raise is at the mercy of Sen. Ted Cruz, who hints at a filibuster.  (Might I recommend Where the Wild Things Are if he means to talk at us again? That is a nice read.)

You know, if John Boehner considered stepping down from the House Speakership, given that the speaker need not be a member of the House of Representatives, perhaps he should nominate his former lawyer Ted Cruz. I think several of the Tea Party caucus could get behind that idea. Then it could be his fat in fryer when the time came to make a necessary, if unpopular, vote.

It's His Party: He Can Cry if He Wants To

The final (for now) congressional vote on ending the government shutdown and raising the debt limit finally happened, and here are our totals:

The Senate voted 81 to 18 Wednesday night to reopen the federal government and raise the nation's borrowing limit, hours before the Treasury Department faced the possibility of being unable to pay all of America's bills for the first time in modern history. 

The House followed suit, voting 285-144, to end the latest damaging battle of divided government in a polarized Congress.

I wil probably have a lot more to say about this tomorrow, but for now, keep in mind that there were 18 GOP Senators and 144 GOP House members (oh, yes, they were all GOP members), who for some reason thought not raising the debt ceiling would be fine with them. Among the "Nays" were usual suspects for the 2016 GOP presidential primaries--Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul--even Paul Ryan.

That's kind of a disgrace, isn't it?  In a few years, will they be able to defend that? Will they maintain that this was a symbolic vote since they didn't doubt in the least that the votes to pass were there?  I guess we will see how that flies.

But speaking of whether or not the votes were there, I guess Boehner was not accurate when he previously said that the votes to pass a clean CR weren't there.  It's possible he only thought he could get them if his member were under the debt limit gun, so to speak. But when you consider the last 16 days, and $24 billion lost in the economy, it just doesn't seem like this was all that productive. does it?

This also takes us back to the dilemma from the beginning of the year--Boehner might really have only 80-odd reliable votes in his caucus, and Nancy Pelosi has pretty much the Democratic side. He's a pretty weak speaker to begin with, and with yet another violation of the Hastert rule, once again, his Speakership may be in peril.  But once again--who wants it? If Speaker Boehner looks like a man who drinks, he also looks to me like a man with reasons.

I'm so Not Trying not to make this the "All About Ted" Show--

But when I read things that make me concerned that he is exactly the sort of nutter who wants all the shit to burn down, I become increasingly concerned that Ted Cruz needs to be caught in flagrante delicto with a chicken or some other such career-stopping thing. Or needs to be temporarily mislaid in someone's trunk (kidding!)

Also a person I am disquietous about--Eric Cantor. That little rule change is fucking us hard. I can hope Cantor has his head sufficiently *not* up his ass to at some remotely last minute, do a reasonable thing (better to beg forgiveness than ask permission, amirite?) but I also think this fool might be shorting T-bills. So what I'm saying is I have no faith. (FWIW-- he did this before.)  (If Cantor were--is that an ethical complaint? Or just natural House perks?)

What I think I'm saying is--I am tired of pinning this to random members of the GOP. I'm comfy now calling them all to share blame. They do. Both houses. And if I slandered a House Majority leader, I am so sorry. Seriously. I shouldn't have slandered this guy and apologized after the fact, because that shit is clearly wrong. Also, one should probably do what is right. Like not shut down the government and threaten a debt default.  Just sayin'.