By Scott St. Clair
You would have thought that the political silly season ended after the November mid-term elections. You would have thought that since normally it does, but if you did, you were wrong because it continues on in the paroxysmal histrionics over the re-election of Ohio’s John Boehner to another term as Speaker of the House.
Given the whining and foaming at the mouth we’ve seen over the past few days, some people need to get hosed down, put in strait jackets and given very large chill pills.
John Boehner may leave a lot to be desired as a leader, but until you present a viable alternative, articulate a reason to oppose him and develop a winning strategy to get it done, which nobody has, all you’re doing is playing political Russian roulette with a fully loaded revolver. While your policy ideas may be as beautiful as a Hawaiian sunset and as pure as the driven snow, unless and until you master the politics of getting them implemented, they’re as worthless as toe jam.
And shouting in my face about treason or accusing me of being a RINO because I refuse to follow you over the cliff don’t qualify as reasons. Anger isn’t a strategy – it’s a disorder.
The bottom line is that Speaker Boehner had support from 90 percent of his caucus so deeply in the bag by the time of his re-election on Tuesday, he had votes to spare. This was as phony a “rebellion” as you’ll ever see. Furthermore, calling it “historic” because it got a couple dozen votes is a laugher. The 1998 House coup that ousted former Speaker Newt Gingrich was historic because it changed things – this was merely a temper tantrum by back benchers elbowing for some TV time on Fox News. Talk about your false-flag fakery.
Headlines in The Washington Post and other media outlets to the contrary notwithstanding, in the final analysis it wasn’t the biggest deal in a century, but rather a less-than mediocre non-event. Here’s a hint: stories in left-leaning publications by left-leaning reporters that tell of chaos and anarchy in the Republican Party aren’t meant to report the news – they’re meant to sow the seeds of chaos and anarchy in the Republican Party.
My friend Fredi Simpson, a Republican national committeewoman from Washington State who is as conservative a person as you’ll find on the planet, linked on Facebook to a statement by Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R-SC, who is also as conservative a person as you’ll find on the planet, which brutally and unapologetically savaged the attempt by the back benchers to “organize” – I use the word advisedly given the results and absurdity of how it went down – a 1923-style putsch to overthrow Speaker Boehner. The statement is worth quoting at length:
“It was poorly considered and poorly executed, and I learned first-hand that is no way to fight a battle. This coup today was bound to fail. And in fact, it failed worse than I expected, falling 11 votes short of deposing the Speaker.”
Why did it fail? Rep. Mulvaney answers:
“The hard truth is that we had an election for Speaker in November – just among Republicans. THAT was the time to fight. But not a single person ran against Boehner. Not one. If they had, we could’ve had a secret ballot to find out what the true level of opposition to John Boehner was.
The truth is, there was no conservative who could beat John Boehner. Period. People can ignore that, or they can wish it away, but that is reality.”
The election to which Rep. Mulvaney refers to was two months ago, a week after the mid-term election, and, in the words of some, amounted to a “coronation” of two more years for John Boehner as speaker since he had no opposition and won hands down.
And the consequences of failure? He lays them at the feet of what former President George H.W. Bush once famously called a bunch of Russian reactionaries who tried in 1992 to oust former President Boris Yeltisn, “the coup people”:
“Some people tried to argue that voting against Boehner would give conservatives leverage, or somehow force him to lead in a more conservative fashion, even if the coup attempt failed. All I can say to that is that the exact opposite happened two years ago: conservatives were marginalized, and Boehner was even freer to work with moderates and Democrats. My guess is that the exact same thing will happen again now. And I fail to see how that helps anything that conservatives know needs to be done in Washington.”
Rep. Mulvaney is dead on the money. He saw it coming, knew it was a stinker and stayed as far away from it as he could. It didn’t mean he is without grievances – we all have grievances; nobody is fully happy with anything – but this, he said, wasn’t the way to resolve them. If anything, it was an exploding cigar that blew up in their faces for which there were consequences.
Several of the coup people immediately found themselves cast into the political outer darkness where there is weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Some were stripped of plum committee assignments, and certainly all of them will have a very hard time getting their calls returned from anyone in House leadership or finding a willingness to have their campaigns funded from leadership-raised coffers in 2016.
The moral lesson to the coup people is that loyalty to leadership ought to mean something. Disloyalty has consequences. There is no whining in politics. Screw your courage to the sticking place and take your punishment like a man (no female members participated in the coup, including all the newly-elected women). Don’t complain about getting taken to the woodshed when you misbehave because to do so is girly-man in nature and shows you weren’t up to the task in the first place.
The reaction among SOME in the base was equally rabid. Ranging from fist-shaking emoticons on social media to demands that anyone who voted for the speaker’s re-election be immediately subject to a primary challenge – like that’s going to work for the 2016 election – to accusations of treason because they didn’t do what they were told to do by those who don’t live in their districts. It was like watching a mass stroke.
Maybe the best example is the hatred directed toward newly elected Rep. Mia Love, R-UT, after she supported Boehner. By all rights, she ought to be one of the faces and voices most held out there as the future of the GOP. She showed right off the bat that she was a team player when she vocally supported keeping Rep. Steve Scalise, R-LA, in House leadership after it was revealed he gave a speech 12 years ago to an organization that may have had ties to a former leader of the KKK.
So, it should’ve come as no surprise to anyone when she supported the speaker. But don’t tell that to the coup people and the true believers who acted as if they owned her and she was beholden to someone who lived over 2,000 miles away from her who hadn’t contributed a dime or lifted a finger on her behalf. Never mind her policy positions or the votes she’ll cast on legislation – it was fury and vituperation and threats and some real nasty, borderline-racist stuff – Rep. Love is black – all because of a leadership vote.
There’s already a crudely produced website demanding that she be overthrown in her re-election primary, which won’t be for well over 18 months from now.
But what do you expect from those who only subscribe to the opinions of the person they see every morning in the mirror while regarding any deviation there from as the most heinous apostasy possible?
The coup people and their minions need to take their Don Quixote shtick someplace else, because it didn’t play among the 90 percent of the members of the Republican caucus in the House who voted to re-elect the speaker.
