AI~ 1. He can’t deliver the votes for even the least controversial bills. 2. He doesn’t keep his word. When the GOP took control of the House in 2010, Boehner said that their priority would be jobs. Of course, we know that the House has not passed a single bill that concerns jobs. Not one. 3. He is unable to effectively articulate his opinions. Boehner seems to want to make everybody (on his side) happy but that is, of course, impossible. Between the “old guard” Republicans, the Tea Party, the right-wing media and the GOP’s donors, there are few places where all opinions converge. And Boehner tries to make his own opinion conform to whomever he is speaking to about or for at the moment. 4. He can’t build a coalition across the aisle. This is an outgrowth of his other faults, really, but Boehner’s inability to work with House Democrats is another way he is crippling that chamber. Part of his governing-by-crisis mode includes this refusal to work with the minority party. In an op-ed last week, Jamal Simmons of US News And World Report suggested that Boehner should stop trying to work with the Tea party and form a working coalition with the remaining reasonable members of the GOP and House Dems. If he did so, Jamal, posits, Boehner could come out looking like a hero when that group passes a CR and ends this shutdown. 5. He can’t control his own caucus. This should be obvious to even the most loyal Republican. From the start of his tenure as Speaker, Boehner has shown himself unwilling or unable to get his party — the majority — to vote regularly as a bloc. 6. He is not someone we want as third in line in the hierarchy of the government. When you put all of these things together, you have a man whose position in the government is undeserved. He can’t get votes for even the most basic of bills. He can’t get a part of his caucus do their job. He allows bills onto the floor that waste time and taxpayer money. He can’t say what he really means: when he aimed his shout “This is not a game,” at the President, who can doubt that it was meant for his unruly children in the House? He doesn’t appear to want to find solutions, to govern and legislate — the only job he was sent to Washington to do
Posted on: Wed, 09 Oct 2013 00:24:22 +0000