Farewell Boehner, Farewell Progress

Last week was one emotional roller coaster.First, on Thursday, Pope Francis managed to garner applause from an increasingly partisan Congress as he spoke words of hope, unity and healing. As Francis asked Congress to “aim at restoring hope, righting wrongs, maintaining commitments and thus promoting the well-being of individuals and of peoples,” it seemed as though there might be a chance at bipartisanship sometime in the near future.And then Boehner resigned.In one fell swoop, Speaker John A. Boehner managed to throw out any lingering emotions of unity and progress and replace them with dysfunction and partisanship. His resignation showed just how much power the extreme right-wingers in the Republican party have—the same people that shut down the government in 2013 over Obamacare and the same ones that again threaten to shut down the government over Planned Parenthood funding.Boehner wasn’t a perfect Speaker of the House. In fact, he was a pretty bad one. Despite all the praises sung by President Obama and others, Boehner’s era oversaw the rejection of any responsibility to actually govern the country. He is still the Speaker who led the “Grand Ol’ Party of No” on an obstructionist rampage where ideology was placed ahead of logic.Contrary to claims by Ted Cruz and other tea-partyers, Boehner was not ousted because he was not conservative enough. Boehner allowed Congress to vote over 50 times to repeal or cripple Obamacare despite its massive success. He abused his power to keep an immigration bill that passed the Senate in a bipartisan manner from coming to the floor in the House. He oversaw the Republican vilification of the import-export bank, a vital aspect of American foreign trade.His true downfall—and his tragic flaw—was his occasional willingness to compromise. Boehner was willing to negotiate important issues, such as infrastructure funding, trade authority and funding the nation’s debt. He led the group of less extreme Republicans in talks with the president over how to get something done. But these negotiations were hijacked by the ultra-conservative faction of the GOP. The more than 50 right wing lunatics in both the House and the Senate refused to let any bill pass that did not meet all of their demands. Immigration reform wouldn’t happen if there was any amnesty involved. The country wouldn’t finance its debt unless the Bush-era tax cuts which worked to bring us into this terrible economy were permanently extended. Those Republicans thought that compromise was a show of weakness and was obstructionist to Republican values rather than an important part of a functioning democracy.Boehner’s resignation is a win for the hard-headed Republican extremists. It forces a march to the right for the whole party. On the primary trail, as Trump, Fiorina and Carson, all three of whom are anti-establishment candidates who have said that they are not open to compromise, hold more than 50 per cent in most polls, other mainstream candidates are being forced to either shift even further to the right or to stay in place. It’s clear that in the current environment, the latter won’t work. Perhaps most surprising was Marco Rubio’s position on Boehner. Rubio has spent most of his adult life in politics and many have hailed him as a small voice of reason in a hurricane of ignorance. He was a part of the Gang of Eight who drafted a bipartisan immigration reform bill, which Boehner is refusing to bring to the Congress floor. Rubio, who used to be for negotiation and compromise, has shown how far he is willing to go to gain traction in the primaries by giving his call for “a new generation of leaders.”Some Republicans are calling for a Speaker who will challenge every move Obama makes. So far, the only representative who has announced his candidacy for the Speakership is Kevin McCarthy of California. He will almost certainly have lost some favor among his own party members. He is essentially a Boehner with a lack of an actual track record. Even though the extreme-right wingnuts won’t be able to put forward a candidate of their own due to their limited numbers, McCarthy will have to listen to them as he campaigns for the position, and when he wins the Speakership, lest he wants the same fate as Boehner. That means even less compromise and more dysfunction for Congress.Hopefully, Pope Francis’s words of unity and progress still ring in the ears of our congressmen, especially the Republican ones. But more likely than not, those lofty words have left their minds. There’s nothing left to do but to hope that the Republicans aren’t as crazy as they seem.