House conservatives: Boehner’s Speakership is in danger if he caves on DHS/amnesty like McConnell did
on Wed, 25 Feb 2015
“It seems like McConnell and Boehner aren’t even talking to each other. It is mind-boggling.”
Another empty threat or the last straw? This is noteworthy, I think, not so much because there’s a legit prospect of mutiny as because it shows what a total strategic clusterfark the whole cromnibus/DHS/amnesty fiasco has been. Not only are Republicans at each other’s throats, there’s a nonzero chance that DHS may shut down this […]
More than 20 House conservatives sent a letter to Boehner yesterday warning him not to follow McConnell’s lead by passing a “clean” DHS funding bill. Boehner can afford to lose 20 Republicans but not much more than that: He’s got 245 seats, so if 28 Republicans defect, he’ll have to go begging Pelosi and the Democrats for votes. Imagine that as the potential denouement of the GOP’s big power-of-the-purse gambit — John Boehner, commander of the largest Republican House majority in decades, groveling to the minority because his own side can’t even surrender to Obama’s outrageous immigration power grab without help. We’re at the point where O must be tempted to start making new demands of the GOP to see if he can make this capitulation even more total. Instead of insisting on a clean DHS funding bill, why not require Boehner and McConnell to give up on the Keystone pipeline too? Pretty soon, both of them will be willing to do nearly anything to get out of this stupid jam that they’ve created for themselves.
The way this ends, I assume, is with a short DHS shutdown followed by a clean funding bill in the House. Boehner can’t cave before the deadline, I think; if he forces a symbolic shutdown of a few days, he’ll at least show conservatives that he was more willing to hold the line than McConnell was. If he can escape from this with tea partiers convinced that it’s McConnell, not him, who’s the real squish in Republican leadership, that’ll be a small consolation prize. And if, as everyone expects, snap polls taken during the DHS shutdown show that the GOP’s getting most of the blame, that’ll blunt some of the conservative attacks once a clean bill hits the House floor. It’s one thing to cave when there’s merely a theoretical threat of political damage, it’s another to do it when you’re taking on water. That’s essentially what the GOP leadership’s arguing over right now: How much water should they be willing to take on before abandoning ship?
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