Don’t cry for John Boehner. It was he who created the monster that has now come back to bite him.
It was he who led the charge after 2010 to create severely gerrymandered districts across the nation on the theory that would insure a GOP House majority for a full decade. And he largely succeeded. Look at Ohio for example; a roughly 50/50 state but with a 75%/25% GOP advantage in the House delegation.
But in so doing, he oversaw the creation of districts where the only thing a GOP candidate had to fear was a more conservative primary candidate to their right. The end result of that has been the Tea Party wing in the House that has given Boehner so much grief. And now they have successfully driven him out.
Whoever succeeds Boehner will not likely be willing to stand in the door blocking the crazies from getting their way now. Over the next year the entire image of the Republican Party is going to take a major hit. And moreover the House is likely to pass bills that the GOP Senators would rather not deal with. McConnell will become even more unpopular with the right wing as he tries to finesse them. Republican Senators running for re-election in 2016 will be forced to make votes that will be troublesome to their campaigns. I’m thinking of Mark Kirk in Illinois, Rob Portman in Ohio, Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire among others all of whom won in the great Obama backlash of 2010.
The chaos in Congress will also rub off on whoever wins the GOP nomination for President. So the irony is that their greed for power following 2010 became the ultimate undoing of John Boehner and may well help elect a Democratic President and Senate in 2016; not what they had in mind.
They will likely hold the House and the chaos will only get worse, the infighting in the Republican Party will also get worse making them unable to adjust to the changing demographics working against them.
We shall see what will happen.