Dear Speaker Boehner,
It's tough to be you.
Your majority is a Great Hall full of Princes and Princesses, 240 of them (counting you), each from their own principality where they prevailed in the last election, albeit some by very narrow margins. They know in their hearts that in 2010, they were elected or reelected not just on their own merits and acute sense of political attitudes in their districts, but also because of campaign money and professional support from firmly entrenched conservative interests.
Who have just commanded attention.
Please, Mr. Speaker, read on ...
Five ultra right wing groups - Club for Growth, Let Freedom Ring, Freedom Works, Red State and Action Majority - teamed up on a letter dated July 18, 2010, to your Congressional Republicans filled with explicit threats: they will not back any candidate "who supports the McConnell-Reid-Pelosi 'Cut, Run, and Hide' plan" and they "will use every tool at our disposal to rally organizations and activists across the country in vigorous opposition" to that plan.
What do you tell your 239 followers who are facing such politico-terrorist threats to gut them at primary time if they stray on this convoluted and arcane Republican proposal?
How can you lead when following is so clearly called for?
- Because you will precipitate a constitutional crisis if you don't. The President has ways around this, but they are in the "nuclear option" category. Do you really want a liberal President to get experience exercising those in times like these?
- Because absolutism and adherence to far right shopping lists has already energized a sleepy populist base in several states, movement that is likely to generate more turnout in the upcoming Presidential election year than in 2010. And turnout, as internal studies and the counsel of GOP professionals must have shown you, could easily reverse the razor-thin margins that elected 50 or so of your flock in the last election.
- Because President Obama has a bullier pulpit than you do. He will most certainly use it now and endlessly until November 6, 2012. People will forget the debates you're all so engaged in now, but they won't forget the results. The results?
- Because the results of such stubborn, lemming like behavior, are tragic. Although we don't remember the names of most Speakers of the House when they leave that high office, you will be known as the one who led his majority and the nation over the cliff on the debt ceiling. You know what's at the bottom. A lot of Republican-respectable sources - the bond agencies, many Wall Street firms, a large number of large and small business people, many well-known economists, even the majority of the American public - have told you what they are afraid is at risk.
Now is not the time to follow the lemmings, sir. They don't deserve it.