Speaker John Boehner giving Majority Leader Eric Cantor the evil eye (Larry Downing/Reuters)
House Speaker John Boehner, recognizing that the "where's the jobs" needling wasn't just Democrats and progressives making fun of him but actually an important marker of how he was handling his very important job, put all his eggs into a transportation bill basket, one that he was counting on to answer the jobs critics. That hasn't worked out so well for him.
Just in the past two weeks, nearly 100 Republicans said they’d vote against two different versions of Boehner’s signature highway bill—one that covers five years and another that was merely 18 months.
On Thursday, Boehner was forced to admit that the “current plan” is to bring up the Senate bill or “something like it.” Meaning he will be hard up to find enough members to support his vision for more road building coupled with expanded oil drilling.
As this POLITICO article notes, "And that loss is just this week alone." It goes on to point out the problems Boehner has had for months, primarily giving President Obama two victories in three months on the payroll tax cut extension and the creation of the (failed) Super Congress over his objections. It also highlights the discontent within his caucus.
[T]he streak of recent wins for Democrats is quite jarring for some Republicans. It’s gotten so bad for Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) that he has stopped going to House GOP conference meetings. There’s simply nothing leadership can do to get him to vote for the issue du jour—the $260 billion highway bill. [...]
Gowdy has no interest in joining the House GOP leadership, which he deemed a club he wouldn’t join even “if you quintupled the salary.”
“Could you imagine trying to cobble together 218 votes in a conference full of high school student body presidents?” Gowdy mused. [...]
Most members decline to talk about the string of misfortunes for Republicans, but they’ll gladly criticize their leadership’s work product.
“The inside baseball games is not my thing,” said Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, who heads the Republican Study Committee. “I look at it from this perspective—we have a debt bigger than our economy. We have to do dramatic things.”
What the article doesn't bring up are the
public and ugly divisions within leadership, and the
splintering in the caucus over the budget and yet another government shutdown threat. Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and budget chief Paul Ryan are all on different pages, with the disconnect clearly becoming dissent and division.
But with all these losses, at least he's still going to carry on the fight for religious freedom ... oh, never mind.
