John Boehner. Not sure why he's still Speaker.
The
Washington Post says House Republicans
have settled on an agenda for the coming year:
Girding for President Obama’s effort to paint them as an obstacle to recovery, House Republicans have crafted a minimalist agenda that is designed to turn the November elections into a referendum on the White House’s stewardship of the economy. [...]
[M]uch of the GOP agenda for the next 10 months is about holding up a political mirror to Obama, trying to expose any failures of his administration. Boehner has instructed his committee chairmen to expedite all oversight investigations of the administration to highlight any policies or regulations that have hindered the economy.
So the "Republican plan" is basically Republicans saying "we have no plan." Their entire plan is to call Obama names, and then schedule some investigations in which they can call Obama names, and frame it all as leadership. Which is exactly what they've been doing for the last few years as well, so I guess they didn't spend a lot of effort on it.
It is a tiny bit surprising that Boehner and the others are continuing to be quite so forthcoming about the entire Republican agenda being to come up with ways to make Obama look bad, as opposed to, say, fixing the economy or cutting unemployment, but again: It's what they did last year too. They're nothing if not agonizingly consistent.
A report from last week did a better job of capturing the generic, vacuous nature of the GOP "plans":
The 242-member House majority met behind closed doors for the first time this year, coming off a bitter defeat in the payroll tax fight at the close of 2011.
Party leaders emerged from the meeting proclaiming that the conference was united around the belief that President Obama’s policies have failed, though they have to settle on their own strategy for the coming election year.
“Our members are united around the realization that the policies that have been promoted by this administration have not worked,” Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said.
Yeah, that's real genius at work there. It took a 242-person meeting for them to decide they still don't like the idea of a Democratic president and aren't going to give him any credit for anything, ever. Which they knew before, so now they're going to double down on it.
Get ready for this to be the worst year yet, in terms of congressional incompetence and dysfunction. By the end of the year, these people will have made Caligula's horse look like a model statesman.