Evolving Media and Congressional Troublemakers

 Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the impact of social media and campaign technology.

Eric Cortellessa at Time reports on  Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL)

To some, she’s a dangerously effective new version of the millennial MAGA politician ready to tear down the institutions of government in pursuit of an ultraconservative revolution. To others, she’s something more, the vanguard of a potentially significant turn in American politics. Luna is less a politician who parlayed her seat in Congress into a huge online following—like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—than the other way around: the first social media influencer to parlay an online audience into a seat in Congress.

...

Part of Charlie Kirk’s job is to live on the internet. The pro-Trump activist and podcast host created Turning Point USA with the goal of creating an army of influencers to combat what he saw as the left-wing tilt on college campuses and in popular culture. One day in 2018, Kirk was struck by an Instagram video of a ferocious Latina immigration hawk. “It was literally a rant on how the news was full of it and they weren’t being transparent about what actually happens at the border,” Luna says. But the clip caught on like wildfire. “I saw that she was a natural talent from Day One,” Kirk says. He thought Luna had the same kind of magnetism he saw in Candace Owens, his first big discovery. “I realized she really had a spark.”

Kirk called Luna to offer her a job heading Turning Point’s Hispanic outreach operation. Luna was intrigued, but there was one problem. She was about to leave for medical school in Grenada. Kirk, a prodigious fundraiser, told her not to worry. He would reimburse her for the costs.

“That’s where I changed paths,” Luna says.

Back in olden times -- a dozen years ago -- it was cable.  John Boehner recalls:

Besides the homegrown “talent” at Fox, with their choice of guests they were making people who used to be fringe characters into powerful media stars. One of the first prototypes out of their laboratory was a woman named Michele Bachmann.

After the GOP takeover in 2010, she demanded a seat on Ways and Means. Boehner politely declined.

Her response to me was calm and matter-of-fact. “Well, then I’ll just have to go talk to Sean Hannity and everybody at Fox,” she said, “and Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and everybody else on the radio, and tell them that this is how John Boehner is treating the people who made it possible for the Republicans to take back the House.”

I wasn’t the one with the power, she was saying. I just thought I was. She had the power now.

She was right, of course.

He assuaged her with a seat on Intelligence. 

 

 

Boehner on the Insurrection

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's dishonesty and his record of disregarding the rule of law.  Our next book, Divided We Stand, looks at the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection. 

House GOP Factions, 2015

At FiveThirtyEight, David Wasserman writes of the factional divisions that will challenge Paul Ryan as he becomes speaker-in-waiting.

The Cook Political Report has plotted House GOP members on this leadership/anti-leadership spectrum by assessing members’ records on five critical votes in 2015. On all but the election of the speaker, the GOP required at least some Democratic votes to obtain a majority needed for passage:

Share of House Republicans who backed leadership on five key 2015 votes

• 87% — Election of John Boehner for speaker (Jan. 6)
• 86% — Long-term fix for Medicare physician reimbursement rates (March 26)
• 53% — Reauthorizing federal support for Amtrak (March 4)
• 37% — Funding government without defunding Planned Parenthood (Sept. 30)
• 30% — Funding Department of Homeland Security without overturning Obama’s immigration executive order (March 3)

Then we grouped members together according to their propensity to vote for or against party leadership on these votes, using a rubric devised by Cook National Editor Amy Walter in 2013:
House GOP factions in 2015

• 51 “Dependables”: voted with leadership all five times
• 39 “Allies”: voted with leadership four of five times
• 51 “Helpers”: voted with leadership three of five times
• 53 “Skeptics”: voted with leadership two of five times
• 25 “Agitators”: voted with leadership one of five times
• 11 “Rebels”: voted with leadership zero of five times

Note: 17 Republicans didn’t cast enough votes to be counted in one of the above groups.
Most House Republicans aren’t simply “establishment” backers or “tea party” rebels. In fact, the plurality in the middle belongs to what The New York Times has dubbed the “Vote No, Hope Yes” caucus. These Republicans vote strategically with the leadership just enough of the time to jockey for plum committee assignments, but they voted against Boehner enough to shield themselves from a tea party primary back home.

Sack the Quarterback

Since the 1970s, both parties in both chambers of Congress have played “sack the quarterback,” targeting the other party’s leaders.

Sometimes, it’s taken the form of trying to defeat leaders for reelection:

• Democrats tried to oust House GOP whip Newt Gingrich in 1990 and 1992;
• Republicans beat House Speaker Tom Foley (D-WA) in 1994;
• Republicans beat Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) in 2004;
• Democrats tried to defeat Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) in 2008 and 2014;
• Republicans went after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in 2010

Sometimes it’s taken the form of ethics charges:

• Newt Gingrich trigged an ethics investigation that led to the resignation of Jim Wright in 1989.
• When Gingrich became speaker, Democrats returned the favor, and he had to pay a hefty assessment. 
• In 2006, Democrats went after Speaker Dennis Hastert for his failure to stop the House page scandal.  Republicans lost their majority and Hastert stepped down from party leadership.

Sometimes it has taken the form of media attacks:

• In the 1980 campaign, Republicans ran generic ads against Speaker Tip O'Neill;
• In 1996, Democrats ran against "Dole-Gingrich;"
• In 2002, after Senate GOP leader Trent Lott (R-MS) praised Strom Thurmond, Democrats pounced and Lott quit.

Boehner has taken his share of Democratic shots in recent years, but what makes his resignation different is that so many of the attacks openly came from Republicans and conservatives.  If you wanted to hear criticism of Boehner in recent years, you tuned in to Rush:http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2015/08/04/

The Unbroken Branch

John Boehner and Mitch McConnell just saved trade promotion authority for the president. At The New York Times, Peter Baker puts another nail in the coffin of the "Congress is Broken and Republicans are to Blame" narrative.

Perhaps surprisingly, Mr. Obama has found common ground with Republicans several times in the six months since they took control of the Senate and added to their House majority. He signed a bipartisan measure imposing new restrictions on national security surveillance, and, after initially threatening a veto, accepted bipartisan legislation giving Congress a role in evaluating any nuclear deal with Iran.

White House officials see room for further consensus with Republicans on a large public works program of road, bridge and other construction projects, as well as legislation to overhaul the criminal justice system to address what both parties see as excessive incarceration.

While they would not say so out loud, White House officials found it easier to work with Congress on trade now that Republicans control of both houses. Mr. Obama and his team saw Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, as challenging to work with when he was in the majority, and his opposition could have made it impossible to pass the trade authority measure last year.

By contrast, Obama aides have privately praised Republicans like Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader; Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio; and Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, saying they were straightforward and professional during the trade debate. And Mr. Obama invested more energy in lobbying for trade authority, which would grant him enhanced negotiating power, than he had in perhaps any initiative since Democrats lost the House in 2010.

“The last six months, working on this, they’ve really shown a willingness for the first time to work across the aisle, and because of that, this key economic measure has been salvaged,” said former Gov. John Engler of Michigan, a Republican who is president of the Business Roundtable. “It would have been catastrophic if it had been defeated.”

Immigration Punt

Speaker Boehner has suggested that the House will not act this year on immigration reform. There are serious political costs on both sides of the equation.  But the costs of acting seem to outweigh the costs of not acting. From a purely political standpoint, it made sense for Boehner to punt.

First, business does not have a unified front.  Though NFIB broadly supports immigration reform, it had problems with the Senate bill.

And among groups that support  reform, immigration isn’t necessarily their top issue. Even if immigration reform fizzles this year, the US Chamber of Commerce is still going to back Republicans.

Second, support for immigration reform would probably not bring significant benefits to Republicans in the short term. Hispanics aren’t single-issue voters.  And on a broad range of issues, they tend to side with Democrats, not Republicans.    Yes, in the long run, Republicans have to do better among Hispanics.  But reelection candidates have a time horizon that stops on November 4, 2014.  They can’t afford to worry about what will happen to other Republicans in future years.

Third, there would be a significant political cost to moving immigration reform.  It would lead to bitter debates within the party and could raise the risk that some members could have trouble in primaries.  Most of all, it would eclipse stories about Obamacare problems.  Why step on your own best lines?

Why is there so much GOP opposition?  Obviously, the GOP base voters are deeply skeptical of what they regard as "amnesty." And Republicans at all levels are deeply skeptical of President Obama himself.  Speaker Boehner says:

And frankly, one of the biggest obstacles we face is the one of trust.

The American people, including many of our members, don’t trust that the reform we’re talking about will be implemented as it was intended to be.

The president seems to change the health care law on a whim, whenever he likes.

 Now, he is running around the country telling everyone he’s going to keep acting on his own. He keeps talking about his phone and his pen.

And he’s feeding more distrust about whether he is committed to the rule of law.

Listen, there’s widespread doubt about whether this administration can be trusted to enforce our laws.

It’s going to be difficult to move any immigration legislation until that changes.”

Boehner, Burke, and the Big Lebowski

At The Christian Science Monitor, Francine Kiefer details Speaker Boehner's efforts to nudge his GOP colleagues toward embracing immigration reform. The key word is nudge:  he cannot dictate to them and he is not trying to do so.  Boehner's style is quite different from the headstrong Newt Gingrich, as Peter Boyer explained at the start of his speakership:

Gingrich’s style, and his Speaker-as-Prime Minister approach, facilitated the famous Clinton pivot, insuring the triangulator a second term that outlasted Gingrich’s tenure as Speaker. When I asked Boehner whether he saw the Republican victory of 2010, which was at least as decisive as Gingrich’s, as a mandate, he seemed almost to recoil. “No, no, noooooo,” he said. “I have watched people in the past deal with this issue, whether it’s Speaker Gingrich, or Speaker Pelosi, or President  Obama. And we made a very conscious decision that we were not going to go down that path. The tone that we set is very important. You saw it on Election Night, and you’ve seen it since.”

Whereas Gingrich consciously followed the lead of Woodrow Wilson (albeit the pro-leadership Wilson of Constitutional Government and executive office), Boehner is more reminiscent of Edmund Burke:

But whatever the distinguished few may have been, it is the substance and mass of the body which constitutes its character and must finally determine its direction. In all bodies, those who will lead, must also, in a considerable degree, follow. They must conform their propositions to the taste, talent, and disposition, of those whom they wish to conduct...

Or maybe he's more like The Dude in The Big Lebowski.  As the Sam Elliot character put it:

The Dude abides. I don't know about you but I take comfort in that. It's good knowin' he's out there. The Dude. Takin' 'er easy for all us sinners. 

The Fog of War

Byron York reports on an interview with a GOP House member about the shutdown.  The member says that the leadership was surprised by the rise of Cruz and the intransigence of the Democrats

The congressman began with an anecdote from the Civil War. "I would liken this a little bit to Gettysburg, where a Confederate unit went looking for shoes and stumbled into Union cavalry, and all of a sudden found itself embroiled in battle on a battlefield it didn't intend to be on, and everybody just kept feeding troops into it," the congressman said. "That's basically what's happening now in a political sense. This isn't exactly the fight I think Republicans wanted to have, certainly that the leadership wanted to have, but it's the fight that's here."

...

 Even after the events of August, and the rise of Cruz forced House Republicans to take notice, GOP leaders had little understanding of the course that the conflict, both inside the House Republican conference and with Senate Democrats, would eventually take. "I never thought defund, and honestly, I never thought delay, would work," the lawmaker said. "I think the Democrats very much need the exchanges to come on and work to finally create a constituency for [Obamacare]…so I never thought they would agree on that."

Still, the lawmaker thought Senate Democrats, and Majority Leader Harry Reid, would make some sort of concession on a lesser aspect of Obamacare. "I do think, though, when Boehner sent over delay and [repeal of the] medical device tax, I think he thought he'd probably get back medical device, and that would have probably been enough right there," the congressman said. But Reid and the Democrats steadfastly refused to consider any change to Obamacare, surprising Republicans again. "When [Boehner] didn't get medical device, I think he did something he didn't want to do, which was send over the member health care [the Vitter amendment barring Congress from receiving special subsidies on the Obamacare exchanges]. And I think he did that largely because he thought [Democrats] were trying to jam him." When Boehner lowered his demands to include a delay for just the individual mandate — not for all of Obamacare — Republicans thought Democrats would be open to that more modest proposal.

"Instead, it's no, we're not going to negotiate, we're not going to negotiate, we're not going to negotiate," the lawmaker said. "Which means effectively you're going to try to humiliate the Speaker in front of his conference. And how effective a negotiating partner do you think he'll be then? You're putting the guy in a position where he's got nothing to lose, because you're not giving him anything to win."

Boehner and Coups

One reason why Speaker Boehner is giving ground to the hardliners in the GOP conference is the prospect that they may stage a coup against him. Think Progress lays out the mechanics of how they could do it:  get the House to pass a motion vacating the speakership, then elect one of their own.  Democrats might be happy to join with the hardliners to oust Boehner.  But the latter part of that scenario would work only if the hardliners could secure the votes of a majority of the whole House, which is extremely unlikely.

In 1997, there was an abortive coup against Speaker Gingrich. Ironically, two participants were Boehner and Lindsay Graham (R-SC), now a senator who opposes the shutdown.  On July 16, 1997, Sandy Hume wrote in The Hill:

Last week's leadership coup took shape on Wednesday, when [Majority Leader Dick] Armey and Boehner announced in a private meeting with [Majority Whip Tom] DeLay and [Rep. Bill] Paxon that they were no longer willing to defend, or help rehabilitate, Gingrich.

Armey, said sources who questioned him on the issue, described himself as having "Newt fatigue," and not being willing "to clean up after another one of his messes." An Armey spokesperson said the "fatigue" referred to media questions about Newt's fate.

Boehner , whose relations with Gingrich had turned increasingly sour after Gingrich supplanted his leadership of House communications , was heard to say, "We all know Newt is finished. It's just a question of when" he goes. Boehner later denied it.

The leaders decided to determine the seriousness of the renegades, and after a meeting Thursday evening in Paxon's office, they dispatched DeLay to serve as an emissary in a clandestine meeting with them.

DeLay approached Rep. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) , a leader among the burgeoning group of insurgents , on the House floor Thursday night, telling him to get the renegades together and contact him when they were ready to meet. They gathered about 11 p.m. in Graham's office and for nearly two hours discussed in great detail the methods for ousting Gingrich and the likely succession scenarios.

"They wanted to know how serious it was," said one renegade who was in the meeting. "It was the entire leadership involved. If they thought we had enough people, they would go to Newt and confront him with it. Tell him to step aside."

The other options included a vote of confidence in a conference meeting or presenting a privileged resolution on the House floor calling for the Speaker to vacate the chair. Sources say that renegades have such a resolution, carefully prepared by a GOP moderate committed to the coup effort. 

The whole thing collapsed when Armey got cold feet.

Congressional Leaders Rank Low

Gallup reports:

As Congress heads into a major fiscal showdown that could result in a government shutdown and the U.S. defaulting on its debt, few Americans approve of the job that top congressional leaders are doing. Americans give relatively low job approval ratings to Republican House Speaker John Boehner (37%), Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (33%), Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (39%), and Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (35%).

These findings come from a Gallup poll conducted Sept. 5-8, 2013. This is the first time Gallup has asked Americans whether they approve or disapprove of this particular group of congressional leaders. Previous polls have found that all four legislators suffer low favorability ratings.

Syria, Solarz, and Support

Syria grows as a political problem for the president. At The Daily Beast, Lloyd Green notes that George H.W. Bush won congressional approval of the Gulf War because he was able to build an alliance with Stephen J. Solarz (D-NY).  President Obama, he says, has not even tried to find Solarz's House GOP doppelganger.

In early January 1991, Solarz penned a piece in The New Republic titled “The Stakes in the Gulf.” His influential essay combined idealism with realpolitik. As he wrote, “There is, for a start, the question of oil. If Saddam succeeds in incorporating Kuwait into Iraq, he will be in a position to control, by intimidation or invasion, the oil resources of the entire Gulf.”
...
Meanwhile, Obama is constitutionally incapable of doing serious outreach to the House GOP. For the record, he has taunted House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, publicly embarrassed Congressman Paul Ryan, and pulled the rug out from under the Speaker Boehner.
...

Obama’s quest for congressional support is also hobbled by the public’s widespread opposition to the war, a fact Obama now acknowledges. According to a Washington Post-ABC poll, Americans say “no” to U.S. involvement in Syria by a 2:1 margin. Scott Clement of the Post writes, "There is no political or demographic group in which a majority supports military action in Syria." According to a CNN poll, more than 30 percent say they would be more likely to vote for a congressman who opposed the war, while a bare 11 percent would reward a congressman who backed a war resolution. Apparently, the only constituencies for war are policy elites, as Peggy Noonan observed, and a few foreign governments. Interestingly, members of Congress who served in Iraq and Afghanistan are strongly opposed to U.S. intervention.

All told, Obama faces a challenge stiffer than passing health care. The public is even more opposed, the House is controlled by the GOP, and there are no goodies to ladle out to large swaths of the electorate. The touted gains of attack are intangible, while its downside is real and grave. Going to war simply to keep a campaign promise doesn’t cut it, and the cry of “Do it for Obama!” is trivially self-referential. When Nancy Pelosi’s discussion with her grandson is offered as a rationale for war, Obama is clearly in trouble.

Airstrikes and Politics

Speaker Boehner has announced support for a military strike on Syria.  He is not pandering to public opinion or the GOP base.

The Pew Research Center reports:

President Obama faces an uphill battle in making the case for U.S. military action in Syria. By a 48% to 29% margin, more Americans oppose than support conducting military airstrikes against Syria in response to reports that the Syrian government used chemical weapons.

The new national survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted Aug. 29-Sept. 1 among 1,000 adults, finds that Obama has significant ground to make up in his own party. Just 29% of Democrats favor conducting airstrikes against Syria while 48% are opposed. Opinion among independents is similar (29% favor, 50% oppose). Republicans are more divided, with 35% favoring airstrikes and 40% opposed.

...
 Overall, just 32% of Americans say Obama has explained clearly why the U.S. should launch military airstrikes against Syria while 48% say he has not explained the reasons clearly enough.

The Washington Post reports:

Americans widely oppose launching missile strikes against the Syrian government for its alleged use of chemical weapons, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News pollthat finds little appetite for military action across the country despite a growing drumbeat in Washington.

Broad opposition in the new poll contrasts with a December Post-ABC poll that found most Americans saying they would be supportive of U.S. action if Syria used chemical weapons. At that time, 63 percent supported U.S. military involvement when it was a hypothetical situation, while 30 percent were opposed.

Politico reports:

“Rarely have I ever witnessed such consensus from my audience that we should stay the heck out of Syria,” nationally-syndicated conservative talker Mike Gallagher told POLITICO. “Even liberal callers who usually challenge and criticize me say we should not intervene. I am delighted that the president has done this about-face and will now turn to congress for approval. Now it’s up to the Congress to do the right thing and deliver a big, fat ‘no.’”
...
Rush Limbaugh, meanwhile, told his listeners Tuesday that Obama’s decision was part of the president’s plan to “announce that he’s going to go to Congress to get a use of force authorization and then when the Republicans don’t give it to him, blame them for dead Syrians.” And the Syria question, he said, just comes down to politics for Obama.

“I get into arguments with people about this who still do not understand that no matter what the issue, no matter what day of the week, the either No. 1 or No. 2 objective in the world of Barack Obama is the elimination of any opposition,” Limbaugh said. “You cannot take the 2014 midterm elections out of this equation. You cannot remove from this equation just how desperate the Democrats are to win the House in 2014, anything that can be done to blame the Republicans.”

Shutdown?

Robert Costa reports at National Review Online:

“A shutdown? It’s not happening, it’s really not, but I guess you won’t hear people say that out loud, including me,” chuckles a senior House Republican. “No one, you see, wants to be ‘out-toughed’ on Obamacare. We’re out here talking about repeal everyday. But the speaker and everybody else here know that the Senate votes, unfortunately, will never be there to pass a continuing resolution to defund Obamacare.”

This delicate political situation has forced Boehner and Cantor to work against the shutdown caucus but without antagonizing it. It’s a wink-wink kabuki dance of the highest order. They can’t alienate their conservative members who have been enthralled by the shutdown talk of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, but they can’t have them dictating the fiscal negotiations, either. “Look, we want to protect the American people from Obamacare, and we’ll look at any realistic strategy to do that,” says a leadership aide. “Right now, though, no one seems to able to explain how we win a shutdown fight. Until that changes, it doesn’t make any sense to have one.”

House GOP Factions

Paul Kane writes at The Washington Post that the fiscal cliff vote was a "breaking point for House Republicans, who had disintegrated into squabbling factions, no longer able to agree on — much less execute — some of the most basic government functions."

Ever since, Boehner has cautiously tried to steer his party away from that bitter moment, with varying success. A short-term strategy, which conservatives called “the Williamsburg Accord,” emerged from a bruising mid-January retreat. It restored enough unity to permit the House to dodge a government shutdown, badger the Senate into passing its first budget in four years and open investigations of the Obama White House.

But beyond those limited efforts, the House has not approved ambitious legislation this year. Lawmakers have instead focused on trying to re-brand the party around kitchen-table issues — although even some of those bills have run into trouble. And the most momentous policy decisions, including an immigration overhaul and a fresh deadline for raising the federal debt limit, have no coherent strategy to consolidate Republicans, much less take on the Democrats.

“We basically have gone three or four months where we built a bit of rhythm. It’s been better than the slug-fest of the previous two years,” said Rep. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.), who fought so furiously with leaders that they removed him from the Financial Services Committee in November. But, he added, “the thing you have to analyze is: Have we had a pretty good quarter because we stuck to the formula of Williamsburg? Or is it because we avoided the tough issues?”

Schweikert considers himself a guarded optimist, but interviews with nearly three dozen GOP lawmakers and senior aides revealed plenty of doubt. The majority is “adrift,” according to a longtime conservative. The top five leaders hail from blue states that voted for President Obama, making them out of step with a conference dominated by red-state Republicans. A junior Republican called it a “fractured” conference when it comes to the biggest issues.

Republican Study Committee

At National Journal, Tim Alberta has a good article on the Republican Study Committee.  Unfortunately, the headline refers to the group as a "cabal," a loaded term that does not appear anywhere in the article.

For decades, the group was seen as a parasitic anomaly—a fringe organization of hopeless ideologues surviving off the perception of undue moderation among Republican leadership. Several previous speakers had bullied or ignored it, and one even dissolved the RSC in a quest to squelch internal dissent. For decades, the committee’s membership rolls were thin, and internal GOP debates didn’t matter much anyway, because the party was in the minority.

But the 2010 midterms—thanks to an influx of ideologically charged lawmakers converging with an increasingly conservative GOP—changed everything. More than 60 of 85 GOP freshmen joined the Republican Study Committee, giving the group a record 164 members. The committee known as “the conservative conscience of the House” was now, for the first time in history, a majority of the House majority.

As a result, its influence grew geometrically, and, today, no single subgroup drives the legislative agenda like the RSC. When its members rally against a bill, it usually fails; when they join to push a proposal, it almost always succeeds. Indeed, since 2010, the RSC’s embrace or rejection of any legislative effort has become the surest indicator of whether it will pass the chamber. With 171 members today, the Republican Study Committee is the “largest caucus in all of Congress,” as [RSC chair Steven ] Scalise [R-LA] puts it. If Boehner and his conductors make the trains run, RSC members are the soot-soaked boilermen shoveling coal into the furnace.

The article notes that Gingrich moved to abolish the Legislative Service Organizations because he saw the RSC as a rival power center.  Yours truly made the same point in a 1996 paper. 

Boehner Reflects

The Washington Post reports

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) told the moderate Ripon Society Tuesday that President Obama’s goal is to “annihilate the Republican Party.”

The Republican leader argued that Obama’s ambitious second-term agenda could not be enacted unless Republicans suffer serious losses in the next mid-term elections.

“[G]iven what we heard yesterday about the president’s vision for his second term, it’s pretty clear to me and should be clear to all of you that he knows he can’t do any of that as long as the House is controlled by Republicans,” Boehner said. “So we’re expecting over the next 22 months to be the focus of this administration as they attempt to annihilate the Republican Party. And let me tell you, I do believe that is their goal. To just shove us in the dustbin of history.”

Republicans will need to defend themselves in a “very hostile environment,” Boehner said, by thinking strategically about when and how to confront the president.

The Hill adds more detail:

... Boehner said that he should have taken a different course after the November election by immediately demanding that the Senate produce a bill to avert the worst parts of a combination of tax increases and spending cuts that were due to hit on Jan. 1.

Instead, Boehner delivered a formal speech at the Capitol on the day after President Obama won a second term, in which he offered a major Republican concession – new tax revenue as part of a broader fiscal deal.

“Looking back, what I should have done the day after the election was to make it clear the House has passed a bill to extend all of the current tax rates, the House has passed a bill to replace the sequester with cuts in mandatory spending, and the Senate ought to do its work,” Boehner said. “We’re ready, able and willing to work with the Senate as soon as they produce a bill. It should have been what I said. You know, again, hindsight is 20-20.”
...

“You have no idea the suspicions and the undercurrents that it caused, frankly, a lot of my members,” Boehner said of his negotiations with Obama. “It really has, in fact, caused somewhat of a breach that I’ve been in the middle of trying to repair.”

Boehner attributed the suspicions to the younger members in the Republican ranks who are not familiar with his voting record in the years before he took the Speaker’s gavel.

“Some of our members don’t realize that while I may be a nice enough guy, and I get along with people, when I was voting I had the 8th most conservative voting record in the House,” he said. “But a lot of our newer members – they don’t know that. And so, you know, they think I’m some squish, that I’m ready to sell them out in a heartbeat, when obviously, most of you in this room know that that ain’t quite who I am.”

Full video:

More on the Buffoons' Rebellion

A previous post described a Keystone Kops coup against Boehner. At the Wall Street Journal, Stephen Moore speaks with the Speaker:

Why has the president been such an immovable force when it comes to cutting spending? "Two reasons," Mr. Boehner says. "He's so ideological himself, and he's unwilling to take on the left wing of his own party." That reluctance explains why Mr. Obama originally agreed with the Boehner proposal to raise the retirement age for Medicare, the speaker says, but then "pulled back. He admitted in meetings that he couldn't sell things to his own members. But he didn't even want to try."

Mr. Boehner is frustrated that Republicans were portrayed by the press as dogmatic and unyielding in these talks. "I'm the guy who put revenues on the table the day after the election," he says. "And I'm the guy who put the [income] threshold at a million dollars. Then we agreed to let the rates go up, on dividends, capital gains as a way of trying to move them into a deal. . . . But we could never get him to step up," Mr. Boehner says with a shrug. Negotiations with the White House ended in stalemate when "it became painfully obvious that the president won't cut spending."

Once the talks broke down, the eventual scaled-back deal with no spending cuts was brokered by Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, with Mr. Boehner on the sidelines. He says that after the tax package passed the Senate, the House Republican caucus debated two alternatives. One was to amend the Senate bill by attaching spending cuts, and the other was to vote up or down on the Senate bill.

"We were already off the cliff," he says of the rushed Jan. 1 vote, and he feared that a no vote would do "serious damage to the economy." He denies twisting arms to win passage. Even though a majority of Republicans voted no, and he took flak from conservative groups as a sellout, "in the end, most of our members wanted this to pass, but they didn't want to vote for it."

Roll Call reports:

A concerted effort to unseat Speaker John A. Boehner was under way the day of his re-election to the position, but participants called it off 30 minutes before the House floor vote, CQ Roll Call has learned.

A group of disaffected conservatives had agreed to vote against the Ohio lawmaker if they could get at least 25 members to join the effort. But one member, whose identity could not be verified, rescinded his or her participation the morning of the vote, leaving the group one person short of its self-imposed 25-member threshold. Only 17 votes against Boehner were required to force a second ballot, but the group wanted to have insurance.

Even with 24 members, the group would easily have been able to force a second ballot round, but the effort was aborted in frenetic discussions on the House floor.

“There was an effort to get to a particular number,” said one Republican member who voted for Boehner but was familiar with the effort to oust him.

Republican Reps. Justin Amash of Michigan, Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina and Raúl R. Labrador of Idaho played key roles in organizing the plot. But participants describe its origin as organic and not led by any particular member, despite the suggestion by at least one House Republican that Amash was the ringleader.

The Buffoons' Rebellion

A rebellion this week illustrated the political problems facing Speaker Boehner and the political ineptitude of his internal foes.  Robert Costa reports at NRO:

It was 15 minutes before the big vote for speaker on Thursday afternoon, and Representative Trent Franks, an Arizona Republican, was ready to sit back, clap, and get on with his day. As he waited, he walked to the back of the chamber to catch up with some friends. Then, out of nowhere, a conservative colleague, whom he won’t name, came up to him, tapped his shoulder, and pulled him aside. The colleague whispered that when the vote began, a few backbenchers would attempt to mount a rebellion against Speaker John Boehner. They had kept their plot quiet for weeks, the colleague explained, and he regretted the eleventh-hour mention, but they wanted his support. The colleague thought Franks would participate in the revolt, especially since the Sun Belt conservative has, at times, broken ranks with party leadership.

But Franks wasn’t interested — at all. He shook his head and said, “No, thanks.” Franks couldn’t believe that a small bloc of conservative House Republicans would haphazardly plot against the speaker, especially so close to the roll call. Franks ended the conversation and found a seat. Several other members who were approached, he says, did the same. “I’m one of the most conservative guys here and I find out about this thing 15 minutes before the vote?” Franks asks, in an interview at the Capitol. “To me, it was a ridiculous miscalculation by a sincere but inept group.”
...
Members say the rebellion was mostly a project of the libertarians (Justin Amash of Michigan and Walter Jones of North Carolina) and a clique within the Jordan-affiliated RSC, especially members of the class of 2010 (Mulvaney and Labrador) and their allies. It was never something that involved widespread outreach. “I only heard about it from a reporter,” says Phil Gingrey of Georgia, a longtime figure in conservative circles. “That was a real mistake,” acknowledges a House Republican staffer involved with the coup attempt. “My boss didn’t say much to anybody beforehand. They were thinking that maybe they could help Eric Cantor or someone else find a way to win.”

Just-retired Rep. Steve LaTourette (R-OH) tells Molly Ball:

I think it's ridiculous. They should kick them all out of the Republican conference. The picture in Politico of a sitting Republican member of Congress on the floor with an iPad showing a screen with a whip count to deny the Republicans the speakership of the House is asinine. This is what I'm talking about: These guys are OK when it comes to ideology and dogma, but they don't have a clue how to participate in the legislative process.

I don't know what their objective is. If it was to deny the speakership to Boehner and hand it to Mrs. Pelosi, I don't know how their cause would have been furthered. If it's to force the vote to a second ballot to make some demands, well, who the hell do these people think they are? Twelve out of 233, and they're making demands? That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

Polarization in the House

The congressional elections of 2012 have made it even harder to find common ground in the House.  Nate Silver explains:

Say that Mr. Boehner cannot count on the support of 34 of his Republicans when it comes to passing major fiscal policy legislation. That means he would need to identify 18 Democrats who would vote along with the Republicans who remained with him.

Here’s the problem: it might be hard to round up those 18 Democrats.

The reason is that most of the Democrats who remain in the House are quite liberal.

In fact, the once-powerful Blue Dog Caucus, a coalition of moderate Democrats, will have only 14 members in the new Congress. The centrist Democrats who once filled its ranks fared very poorly in the 2010 midterm elections, while others retired or were harmed by redistricting or by primary battles. Although Republicans have moved more to the right than Democrats have moved to the left in recent years, according to measures like those developed by Mr. Poole, the attrition in the Democratic Party has nevertheless contributed to moving the two parties even further apart.

What that means is that if Mr. Boehner has a significant number of Republican defections, as he did on Thursday night, he will need to win the support of at least some liberal Democrats. And a bill that wins the support of some liberal Democrats will be an even harder sell to Mr. Boehner’s Republicans. For each vote that he picks up from the left, he could risk losing another from his right flank.

Boehner's Bad Night

With Mitt Romney's defeat and the GOP's failure to win the Senate, John Boehner is the most powerful Republican in Washington. In the past 24 hours, however, he learned anew what Edmund Burke wrote:

"In all bodies, those who will lead, must also, in a considerable degree, follow."

Politico reports:

What happened to the 63-year-old in just the last week is striking. On Saturday night, word leaked out that he had given into the White House’s demand that he allow tax rates on the rich to snap to 39.6 percent. Immediately, conservatives were grumbling but still gave Boehner room to maneuver.

On Monday night, Boehner called Obama to inform him he would devise a plan and pass it out of the House — Plan B, he called it — because negotiations with the White House weren’t moving quickly enough.

Boehner’s in-house power structure quickly sprung into action.

His leadership team spent the past few days gathering support for the legislation — as of late Wednesday, there were clear signs that Boehner’s bill did not have sufficient support. On Wednesday night and all day Thursday, Boehner worked the House floor, personally making the case for the bill to wavering members. By late Thursday, he was sitting on the floor with Reps. Patrick Tiberi (Ohio), Tom Latham (Iowa) and Mike Simpson (Idaho) — close allies and friends, who support the speaker unfailingly.

Top Republicans remained hopeful, until late Thursday when GOP lawmakers voiced a public protest. Twenty-one Republicans voted against a spending bill to send a signal to leadership that the tax-rate bill didn’t meet their muster. It was the rank and file screaming that Plan B would not pass.

One hour and 15 minutes later, Boehner was leading Republicans into a Capitol basement meeting room to wave the white flag.

Some of the same members kicked off committees and denied leadership spots — Rep. Tim Huelskamp of Kansas and Rep. Tom Price of Georgia — led the resistance.

Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.) put it plainly: “Nobody’s elected king in our conference.”