Can someone send a copy of Negotiating for Dummies to Speaker Boehner? Please consider the Speaker’s feckless statements and actions over the last several months — after being handed his position by a huge groundswell of conservative support known as the Tea Party movement.
• 3/2/2011: Boehner: Compromise Will Trim GOP’s $61 Billion Budget Cuts: “Responding to a question Tuesday about whether he foresees the House ultimately budging from the $61 billion figure, the Ohio Republican did not say that the chamber would hold firm when the Senate returns their proposal, which will likely include less than a $61 billion reduction in spending levels.”
• 3/10/2011: Tea Party pressures Boehner in budget battle: “Complaints by Tea Party Republicans have already forced Boehner to almost double the amount of spending cuts proposed this year from $32 billion.”
• 4/4/2011: Boehner says $33 billion in cuts is not enough: “I’ve made clear that their $33 billion is not enough and many of the cuts that the White House and Senate Democrats are talking about are full of smoke and mirrors. That’s unacceptable,” the Speaker said.
• 4/14/2011: Boehner: I’m standing by the $38 billion number: Boehner stands by the $38 billion in cuts, saying that this was really “$78.5 billion less than what the president wanted to spend… [and that he was] very disappointed in [Obama’s] speech yesterday,”
• 4/15/2011: CBO Says Spending Cuts Aren’t As Advertised: “The Congressional Budget Office reports that the $38 billion in cuts to the budget for the current fiscal year will actually reduce this year’s deficit by only about $352 million.”
In other words, Boehner held the trump card — a partial shutdown of the government — in his hands and threw it away. Without leverage, he was unable to live up to anything resembling his promises. Promises that the American people support and demand.
As Paul Ryan put it after witnessing the president’s hyper-partisan campaign speech on Wednesday, “the gauntlet has been thrown down” by Obama. He’s gone all in. The big entitlement programs and the American economic system itself are headed for collapse. That’s not what I say. That’s what Peter Orszag, Obama’s former economic adviser, says: ‘If policymakers will not act before we have a fiscal crisis at the federal level, a fiscal crisis we will ultimately have.’