Boehner’s House implodes over flawed farm bill
By E.J. Dionne Jr., WashPost, Published: June 23
The roof fell in on John Boehner’s House of Representatives last week. The Republican leadership’s humiliating defeat on a deeply flawed and inhumane farm bill was as clear a lesson as we’ll get about the real causes of dysfunction in the nation’s capital.
Our ability to govern ourselves is being brought low by a witches’ brew of right-wing ideology, a shockingly cruel attitude toward the poor on the part of the Republican majority, and the speaker’s incoherence when it comes to his need for Democratic votes to pass bills.
Boehner is unwilling to put together broad bipartisan coalitions to pass middle-ground legislation except when he is pressed to the wall. Yet he and his lieutenants tried to blame last Thursday’s farm legislation fiasco — the product of a massive repudiation by GOP conservatives of their high command — on the Democrats’ failure to hand over enough votes.
He seemed to think he could freely pander to the desire of right-wing members of his caucus to throw millions of low-income Americans off the food stamp program. When that didn’t produce enough votes, he then expected Democrats to support a measure that most of them rightly regarded as immoral. In the end, the bill went down 234 to 195, with 62 Republicans voting no and 24 Democrats voting yes — more help, by the way, than Nancy Pelosi usually got from Republicans when she was speaker.
(More here.)
The roof fell in on John Boehner’s House of Representatives last week. The Republican leadership’s humiliating defeat on a deeply flawed and inhumane farm bill was as clear a lesson as we’ll get about the real causes of dysfunction in the nation’s capital.
Our ability to govern ourselves is being brought low by a witches’ brew of right-wing ideology, a shockingly cruel attitude toward the poor on the part of the Republican majority, and the speaker’s incoherence when it comes to his need for Democratic votes to pass bills.
Boehner is unwilling to put together broad bipartisan coalitions to pass middle-ground legislation except when he is pressed to the wall. Yet he and his lieutenants tried to blame last Thursday’s farm legislation fiasco — the product of a massive repudiation by GOP conservatives of their high command — on the Democrats’ failure to hand over enough votes.
He seemed to think he could freely pander to the desire of right-wing members of his caucus to throw millions of low-income Americans off the food stamp program. When that didn’t produce enough votes, he then expected Democrats to support a measure that most of them rightly regarded as immoral. In the end, the bill went down 234 to 195, with 62 Republicans voting no and 24 Democrats voting yes — more help, by the way, than Nancy Pelosi usually got from Republicans when she was speaker.
(More here.)
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