Dayton
Daily News
Martin Gottlieb:
Boehner dream of new kind of House languishes
Friday, April 22, 2011
The Boehner Watch, part umpteen:
The fact that the U.S. House of Representatives passed a 2012 budget
blueprint that reinvents Medicare has won plenty of attention. However,
for those interested in how local boy John Boehner is faring — and how
he’s performing — as speaker, also worth noting is just how the House
did that.
The budget was the work of Rep. Paul Ryan, chairman of the Budget
Committee. As recently as late last year, Boehner was lukewarm toward
the Ryan plan. He said it was worthy of attention, but he was careful
not to buy into its most controversial aspects. He clearly worried that
they might hurt the party.
At the time, the national political media were treating his coolness as
part of a general tension between Boehner and some of the younger,
hotter conservatives in the party. Meanwhile, on another front, Boehner
was saying that if he were speaker, he would make the House a more
democratic, open place.
He hated — his sincerity was clear — the practice under his Democratic
predecessor of having all the major decisions made by a handful of
people.
He said far too few members of the House were actual legislators. That
is, they weren’t crafting bills, mastering the details, amending bills,
building support, searching for coalitions.
He wanted openness, inclusion and respect across party lines. He said
that just shoving a partisan agenda through backfires in the long run.
Since then, many have noticed the absence of his promised reforms on
specific occasions. That started with the House’s quick adoption on a
party-line vote of a call for the repeal of the Obama health care
initiative.
Boehner’s response to that criticism was that he never promised that
his new thrust would be evident on every piece of legislation.
Now comes the Ryan budget. It was officially unveiled in early April,
showed up at the Budget Committee on April 6 and was passed by the full
House on April 15.
That process is incomparably faster than what happens on a normal or
minor piece of legislation, much less a sweeping new approach to the
entire federal budget and the elimination of the government as the
insurer in Medicare.
Despite complaints from Boehner and other Republicans about the failure
of the Democrats to let the public examine their legislation in 2009
and 2010, there can be no pretense that the Ryan budget vote was timed
to let the public weigh in. The whole idea was to get it done fast.
(According to a Washington Post poll after the vote, people oppose the
Ryan Medicare plan by about 2-1.)
The House vote came a day after Congress and the White House had
belatedly agreed to a 2011 budget, a fight that had consumed Congress.
It came on a straight party-line vote, except that four Republicans
bolted.
Some might look at these facts and conclude that Boehner was never
sincere about his desire not to let his House be a Republican version
of Nancy Pelosi’s.
In truth, however, he was naive rather than dishonest. He described and
wanted something that just isn’t possible in these polarized times.
The political atmosphere is actually more partisan on his watch than it
was on Pelosi’s, not because he’s more polarizing, but because the
Republicans who were elected last year are on a tear which simply has
no common ground with Democrats.
Keep in mind that just over a fifth of the House’s members are
freshmen, overwhelmingly on the Republican side.
You’ve heard, perhaps, about the leader of old who said, “There go my
people. I must follow them. I’m their leader.” Boehner isn’t the first
leader to be forced to follow.
Truth be told, he basically shares the views of the freshmen on policy
issues. He’s the first to say that. He just has different views about
Congress.
He can’t reconcile the two sets of views, because they can’t be
reconciled, because almost nobody really cares about process —
notwithstanding partisan complaints about the other side’s processes.
It’s really all about outcomes, policy, ideology.
When historians look back at the nature of the House in our times,
they’re less likely to see a Pelosi era followed by a Boehner era than
a Pelosi-Boehner era.
Read it at the Dayton Daily News
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