The Internet is blazing with stories that John Boehner is about to resign as Speaker Of The House, or be replaced as soon as the new Congress gets sworn in tomorrow. Well let's take a minute and ask, what choice did Boehner have, really?
The House had passed a "fiscal cliff" bill and sent it to the Senate. The Senate made amendments and overwhelmingly approved the amended measure, sending it back to the House. Boehner knew that the House D's would overwhelmingly support the Senate version and that only a handful of republicans would be needed for its passage. He counted heads and saw that it was going to pass. So here was his choice.
There is a small but vocal group of hard core TEA party types in Congress. They have been nothing but a thorn in Boehner's side for a long time but they really don't have enough numbers yet to change the outcome of anything except a very close vote. Politically he had no reason to elevate their positions.
In fact, he recently cut them out of power by making committee reassignments. If he sided with them now in trying to stop the measure he would lend them credibility and potentially embolden them. But doing so would not have changed the outcome. The republicans who were planning to vote for passage were already there.
Having counted the votes and notifying his caucus that the bill was going to pass Boehner knew that the number of "Nay" votes would increase. Why? So that many of his members could say they did everything possible to oppose the passage.
Boehner also knew that among those who voted no, were a lot of people who could have gone either way but considered a "no" vote to have more political dividends considering that the matter was already decided. It happens all the time in Congress, people vote the popular line when it makes no difference. Just look how many republicans voted against the measure and it still passed.
So Boehner locked elbows with Mitch McConnell, made nice with the rest of the House and in return could probably get enough democrat votes to keep his seat, but it would be a difficult run for him. From there he could continue to marginalize the TEA party types, (I'm sure the dems would support that).
Did he choose wisely? Should he have put up a sham fight knowing that the outcome was already determined? Will he quit, or be run out? Hard to tell, but what other choice did he have really, other than to make a token vote with the "nay" sayers so he could look better, like a bunch of the other ones did?
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