Pity John Boehner. Last night’s humiliating rebellion in the House only adds to his woes.
The most powerful Republican in Washington has been looking at the calendar and the polls, and what he’s seen is this: 1) On Jan. 1, taxes automatically go up on everyone in America. 2) Everybody is going to blame the GOP if that happens.
Has anyone ever been in a worse negotiating position?
Oh, and don’t forget the heat he’s feeling from Republicans and conservatives who are calling him a weakling and a traitor, a monster, a coward, a sellout and whatever nasty adjectives they can come up with that will make the dollars flow from political donors who think “fight” is a winning strategy after you’ve already lost.
Boehner doesn’t want taxes to go up. His party opposes all the tax hikes now under discussion. He’d like all current tax levels to become permanent.
Democrats do want taxes to go up — on high earners. Senate Democrats passed a bill hiking taxes for everyone making $250,000 or more. President Obama wants taxes to go up on Americans who make $400,000 or more.
To secure their goal, Dems are willing to say no to Boehner, who acceded by saying he and the House GOP would pass a bill raising taxes on Americans making $1 million a year or more — the first tax hike supported by Republicans since 1990.
And Democrats are in a delicious position, too, absolutely delicious. This was exemplified by a cruel tweet yesterday from White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer, who wept crocodile tears of false concern: “There is no logical explanation for Boehner’s move. Break their 20-year promise on taxes for nothing?”
You’d almost think that the White House was deliberately stoking the flames so that Boehner would be crushed by his own forces and pass nothing — perhaps leaving him unable to strike a deal with the White House and watching helplessly as the nation goes over the fiscal cliff on New Year’s.
You’d be right, because that is either the White House strategy — or it’s just the game of chicken the White House is playing. Pfeiffer and his colleagues, up to the president, know that every poll out there shows blame for the failure to reach a deal will be assigned almost exclusively to the GOP.
Well, maybe not exclusively. It now appears about 25 percent of Americans will hold Obama and the Democrats responsible, and only about 65 percent of will blame Republicans (with good odds that the other 10 percent will follow suit).
This is the reality with which Boehner must deal. The Republican Party’s reputation isn’t good; the reputation of Congress is even worse. Meanwhile, the president’s approval rating is up to 56 percent in Gallup, his highest level since 2009.
So Boehner put forward a proposal on which Republicans could vote so that the argument couldn’t be made that they didn’t act in the face of this looming catastrophe. But enough of his own members wouldn’t deliver the votes that he had to pull the bill.
The speaker’s doing what little he can with what little he has. Those conservatives who attack him for a sincere effort to manage an unavoidable defeat, or who are trying to raise money by using Boehner as a foil, are making an implicit case for their own marginalization.