The planned resignation of John Boehner is the best news we are likely to get this week.
For starters, it means that Cruz' plans to use a shutdown to preserve his presidential run are, if not dead, on life support at the very least:
House Republicans are confident they will avoid a government shutdown after the sudden announcement on Friday that Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is stepping down.
“I think with the Speaker's decision, the odds of a shutdown are much less likely,” Rep. David Jolly (R-Fla.) said. “Because the ‘shutdown caucus’ as I call them has a small victory, and they can move forward knowing that perhaps there's a bigger battle they can fight in the coming weeks.”
That's part of it. And I presume that's what the members of the Bagger Caucus will be telling themselves when they pass clean CRs and debt ceiling hikes. Hell, a number of them may be glad of the excuse to back away from the cliff. But I think there's something else at work here: Namely, John Boehner's showing them that he has zero Fs to give.
More past the Boehner-colored cartouche.
Here's the deal:
Boehner has wanted to leave for years now, almost since he took over in 2011. The two main reasons he didn't until now are that a) his preferred successor Eric Cantor lost his House seat to a bagger in the primary, and b) the GOP establishment and its patrons begged him to stay.
What's kept the baggers from replacing him with one of their own as Speaker are the fact that being a GOP Speaker is a thankless task (and the baggers are egotistical jerks with very thin skins) that requires a lot of actual work and thought on the part of the Speaker and his staff (and the baggers are in general lazy and stupid). We saw that during the last attempts to oust him as Speaker: Some bagger's name would be put up by some of his friends, then he'd bow out once he found out he'd have to do things that pissed them off.
Now, he's finally said "Enough" . He's stepping down from politics, period. The baggers have no hold on him anymore. Word is he's busily working with Nancy and Harry and Mitch as well as the saner GOP caucus crowd to get everything passed, including a debt ceiling hike, before he leaves.
And again, what can the baggers do about it? Nothing. All the ones who think they want the Speaker's gavel wind up backing off once they realize they'll have to do a) work hard and b) do things their friends won't like. (That's what happened the last time there was a serious bagger challenge to his Speakership.)
He has zero fucks to give.