The headline on this story is "Vote shows Boehner's lack of control," which is kind of an old-fasioned, horse-race way of reporting Washington politics. There is a new group dynamic now that people who should know better continue to ignore:
House Republicans tried a fresh strategy Wednesday night: Go it alone on a spending bill.
The result was an embarrassing setback.
Wednesday night's rank-and-file rebuke of GOP leadership — with 48 Republicans bolting on a temporary spending bill — underscored the fact that the House Republican majority is still struggling to find unity on major spending bills. It also showed they still need Democratic votes to help them govern.
"Democratic votes to help them govern"? Democratic votes to help keep spending more, for sure. Democrati votes to help keep government growing. "Democratic votes to help" is the problem; it shouldn't be the goal not the goal. Damn right he lacks control.
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And this problem extends all the way down to actions in little 'ole Fort Wayne where the two proported "small government" members of our Fort Wayne Redevelopment Commission can vote "yes" on a mini-private company's (New Harrison LLC) agreement with the commission on using more than 50% public tax revenue ( or should we say public borrowed revenue!) to insure that NO private entity has ANY risk in a non-economically justifiable project!! They believe that giving this LLC the land for half of what the city paid for it, taking $50,000 per year from an Atlanta, Georgia owned corporation (Hardball Capital), and setting 7 years payments in a fund to pay any shortfall in rent for the top two floors of the building -- plus setting aside 10 years of property taxes generated from the project into another fund to insure that PNC bank gets their money back with interest (some of which is also coming from the Federal Government borrowing from China!) - and then using another $5.85 million from Federal New Market Tax Credit and $4 million from the Indiana State CREED tax credits as "give-aways" to the LLC --- How the heck can trhis be looked at as anything other than "Corporate Welfare" ????
And we wonder, "Why are we in such a financial mess in this country?" We never learn from prior political errors. That's known as SNAFU!
Help them govern? What governing have the been doing?
I've been around long enough to understand politics, so I understand why Republicans have been obstructing, not governing. But they ought to at least be honest about it.
By the way, have you seen the guy running against Boehner in the primary? He's a single-issue (abortion) candidate, and his criticism of Boehner is that the speaker is a "socialist."
People who call Obama a socialist clearly don't know what the word means, but Boehner? A socialist?
I'm reluctant to give advice to a party a rarely vote for, but conservatives really ought to stop using the s-word to mean "anything I don't like."
In the '60s, liberals wore out the word "fascist" by indulging in the same sort of hyperbole.
Unless someone self-identifies as a socialist or fascist, I'd like to see both words retired.
Although we like to characterize them as big spenders, the Democrats haven't been as bad lately as we have. During the Dubya administration, we had a compound growth rate of federal government outlays of almost 6.5% per year. Compared to that, Obama has been showing remarkable restraint, with a compound growth rate in federal outlays of 4.8% annually.
Admittedly, both of those figures are higher than recent 20th-century presidents, but at this point, we'd have a hard time convincing voters that we know how to restrain spending and balance a budget.
Boehner should not, and cannot, control how his party votes. If the intention of the founding fathers was to have ONE PERSON decide what would pass and what would not, they would not have created a Congress to begin with.
"Kevin Knuth Says:
September 23rd, 2011 at 9:35 am
Boehner should not, and cannot, control how his party votes."
Heh, you may want to pass that little tid bit along to Harry Reid, he seems to operate quite the opposite of what you espouse.
Seems to me, Tim, that Harry Reid has been proving Will Rogers assertion right - he was not a member of any organized political party, he was a Democrat. The GOP, on the other hand, seems to operate in lock step, not only when it comes to voting, but when it comes to talking points.
The Democrats would benefit from a little more unity. We Republicans would benefit from a little more diversity. And it wouldn't hurt if the average IQ of both parties would warm up to outside temperatures....