Earlier today, the House of Representatives passed the GOP budget authored by Representative Paul Ryan by a vote of 228-191 (a day after President Obama’s budget was voted down in the House 414-0, which comes a year after Obama’s budget was voted down in the Senate 97-0). It’s therefore worth a tip of the hat not simply to Ryan, chairman of the Budget Committee, but also to Speaker John Boehner.
It was Boehner who a year ago gave the green light to Ryan to push ahead with his bold budget, even though then (and now) it calls for fundamentally reforming Medicare. Last year in particular the fear among many Republicans and conservatives was that advocating a restructuring of Medicare was political suicide. It hasn’t turned out that way, but that wasn’t known at the time. And Boehner’s support was crucial to Ryan; without it, the Wisconsin representative could never have pushed ahead.
More broadly, Boehner has shown himself to be a first-rate Speaker – trustworthy, keeping his caucus together during trying moments, avoiding (for the most part) missteps, and demonstrating both pragmatism and a commitment to conservative principles. Boehner isn’t perfect, he’s not the flashiest speaker in history, and he doesn’t see his role as saving Western civilization and standing between us and Auschwitz. But he’s a very able and experienced politician, a steady hand on the wheel, and he’s shown courage in his own understated way.
That isn’t acknowledged nearly as often as it should be by conservatives.
Peter Wehner has a short memory.. Boehner utterly botched the debt ceiling showdown. This was a gigantic mistake as it (a) created the idiotic and calamitous defense cuts we are about to experience, (b) allowed Obama to pose as the reasonable one, (c) changed the subject from Obama's handling of the economy to a messy argument about the deficit, the Supercommittee, the S&P Downgrade, etc and (d) gave birth to the Occupy Wall Street movement that still is a potent force or at least Zeitgheist that even Republicans have had to pander to (such as Gingrich in South Carolina). The debt ceiling was never the right way to get spending cuts unless the GOP was willing to follow through with its threats, which it obviously was not. Boehner deserves to have lost his job over this.
John Boehner was an important part of the leadership after the 1994 Republican takeover that joined with John Kasich and fought with President Clinton over the budget. That effort was critical to balancing the budget, and Boehner has a hard-line philosophy toward balancing the budget. n nAs a rule, the Budget Committee is only as strong as the leadership permits it to be. After the Budget Committee submits and passes its budget in March and April, its active role in the budget process ends. The execution of the budget plan is then left to the Appropriations Committee which can and generally will ignore the budget if so allowed. The relative strength of the Budget Committee under Chairman Kasich after 1994 was based entirely on Speaker Gingrich and the rest of the leadership backing Chairman Kasich's budgets against the opposition of the appropriators. John Boehner was part of that leadership. n nThat alliance between Speaker Gingrich and the leadership ended when Speaker Gingrich lost his job. Though there were many public reasons for that, the most powerful opposition to Gingrich within the House Republican caucus came from the Appropriations Committee and was based entirely on his insistence of budget discipline. Note that Appropriations Chairman Livingston became Speaker, and after his downfall (prompted by his extramarital affair), another appropriator, Tom DeLay, became the power broker in the House leadership. (Boehner was out of the leadership during this period.) Needless to say, the Budget Committee ceased to matter within the body, and the election of President George W. Bush, with his spendthrift ways, led directly to the irresponsible spending of the early 2000s. n nFrankly, I am encouraged that Speaker Boehner and Budget Chairman Paul Ryan are forming an alliance similar to that between Speaker Gingrich and John Kasich. (Perhaps he will be less bold than Speaker Gingrich, who did end up with a knife in his back. But perhaps not, since it only mattered after Gingrich had weakened himself in many other ways.) The willingness of Speaker Boehner to back the Ryan budget over what must be considerable, if quiet, opposition from parts of his conference is a good sign. It may show a much needed shift from the fiscal profligacy of recent Republican Congresses.
I think the problem with "moderates" is that none of the utter destructions about them are important enough to bother themselves with.