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Dayton
Daily News Editorial...
Boehner did well for
the Republicans
Monday, April 11, 2011
Speaker John Boehner turned out to be a good choice to lead his party
through the government shutown/budget battle.
He’s a Tea Party guy at heart — if he were just coming on the scene,
that’s how he would align — but he’s been in Washington 20 years.
He knows how to negotiate, how to keep his eye on the big picture, when
to ignore passing flaps.
He got through a period of intense media scrutiny and intense pressure
without embarrassing himself or his party.
Whatever you think of his views on the budget, you have to grant that
he handled the task at hand with professionalism.
He managed to get more cuts for the Republicans than their numbers —
controlling only the House — might suggest they could get. And he did
that without a government shutdown, which could have undone any
political benefit he and his party might get.
Republicans and the Tea Party are right on the edge of appearing
extreme to the American people, at a time when President Barack Obama
is moving toward the center. A shutdown would have been a problem for
them.
But with a deal having emerged that gets mixed reviews from the
president, they may look to many independents like responsible players.
Speaker Boehner also did his party a favor by not allowing a shutdown
over conservative goals like banning funding for the president’s health
care overhaul, hard new restrictions on the Environmental Protection
Agency, and zeroing out of federal spending on Planned Parenthood and
National Public Radio.
During the 2010 campaign, he insisted that the Tea Party movement was
about spending, not about social issues like abortion and public radio.
After the election, that turned out not to be entirely true.
Speaker Boehner raised the broader conservative agenda in negotiations,
but he continued to insist publicly that it wasn’t the heart of the
matter, and he has now let it go for a while.
As this is written, his success can’t be fully measured, because no one
knows how many Republicans will go along with the compromise on the
final vote. His goal was to get enough Republicans to show his party
could govern the House without Democratic help.
Republican Reps. Jim Jordan of Urbana and Steve Chabot of the
Cincinnati area have rejected the deal, along with some other
conservative Republicans. Rep. Jordan’s decision has some special
visibility, because he’s the chair of a large group called the
Republican Study Group.
Those who vote against the compromise are voting for shutdown, the only
real alternative at the moment.
To say that Speaker Boehner got through this crisis OK is not to
suggest that he has found a pattern for future fights.
As many have said, the real fights come now. The $38 billion that the
compromise cuts from last year’s budget amounts to about one percent of
the budget. Now come battles about the 2012 budget and about increasing
the legal limit on federal debt.
The brinksmanship that was at work this time — the game of chicken that
resulted in negotiations going until the last hour — reflects badly on
the country’s political health. People watching from the outside — not
to mention from the inside — have to be wondering if America’s internal
divisions have become so intense as to make the country dysfunctional.
It’s close.
Read it at the Dayton Daily News
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