The Hill reports that Speaker of the House Boehner has figured out, after about a month, that the deal he offered to the left and to The Chicago Jesus didn’t really pan out quite the way it was intended. Not that he couldn’t have had a different point of view. If he had listened to conservative critics, instead of purging them from the finance committees, he might have had a somewhat different input and evaluation. But he didn’t do that. Instead he bent over and grabbed his ankles and said, “please sir may I have another?” Just as he always does.
Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is sharing his regrets about his “fiscal-cliff” strategy, less than a month after the House bitterly swallowed a last-minute deal hatched in the Senate. In a private speech to the Ripon Society on Tuesday, Boehner said that he should have taken a different course after the November election by immediately demanding that the Senate produce a bill to avert the worst parts of a combination of tax increases and spending cuts that were due to hit on Jan. 1. Instead, Boehner delivered a formal speech at the Capitol on the day after President Obama won a second term, in which he offered a major Republican concession – new tax revenue as part of a broader fiscal deal.
“Looking back, what I should have done the day after the election was to make it clear the House has passed a bill to extend all of the current tax rates, the House has passed a bill to replace the sequester with cuts in mandatory spending, and the Senate ought to do its work,” Boehner said. “We’re ready, able and willing to work with the Senate as soon as they produce a bill. It should have been what I said. You know, again, hindsight is 20-20.”
With the continuing surrender of the Republicans some people are now thinking that it is time to abandon the Republican party. And indeed there is little evidence to cause one to be enthusiastic about the Republicans who have effectively become the new Whig party. The Republicans are now a Liberal party and the Democrats are the hard left Socialist party. Conservatives have no options under the current structure. What we do have is the possibility of creating a party of our own that may provide a place for conservative Americans a place to go. And that would be the Tea Party. Of course in its current form it still has a way to go in order to become a full fledged political party rather than just a political movement, but the option is certainly there if we want to start to build it.
