Gingrich's Ghost

The ghost of Gingrich' tenure as Speaker of the House is speaking...and John Boehner should listen.

I was enjoying my day of not thinking about the election.

I was enjoying not feeling the need to blog about every little dumb thing that the republican leadership does to try to thwart Obama. I actually hoped that now that the Democrats had won another Presidential term, that just maybe the Rpublicans would be willing to work with their democratic counterparts to actually achieve something. Instead of blogging, I spent most of the day watching more than 200 reruns of Gunsmoke on PPV (is it still PPV if it's free?) and I'm not even halfway through them. But then I heard Speaker of the House John Boehner say a really dumb thing, and I knew that I had been naive. An excerpt:

"The American people want solutions -- and tonight, they've responded by renewing our majority. With this vote, the American people have also made clear that there is NO mandate for raising taxes. What Americans want are solutions that will ease the burden on small businesses, bring jobs home, and let our economy grow. We are humbled to have again been entrusted by the American people with the responsibility of leading the People's House."

It was a short speech and there was a bit of Republican back-slapping, but what I came away with (from this and other sources) was this, and I paraphrase: "We are willing to work with you only if you're willing to do things our way."

Was John Boehner watching the same election that I was?

Let me throw a few facts at Mr. Boehner.

Yes, the Republicans held the house, but that lead narrowed. Republicans came into this election with 240 seats (190 for Democrats); they came out of it with 236. (Last I heard, anyway; a couple of seats still hadn't been determined.) Not so much of a loss, I'll grant, but (IMHO) hardly a pro-Republican "mandate."

The Democrats came into this election with control of the Senate, narrowly. That hold was strengthened: of 33 seats up for grabs, the Democrats took 23 of them, increasing their lead in the upper house by one seat; Democrats now hold 54 seats to the Republicans 45. Again, not a great gain but a gain nonetheless, and certainly no Republican "mandate."

(You'd think those numbers would be easy to find in the web. They weren't. And you'll notice that the Senate numbers don't add up to 100; there's still one seat undecided, as of this writing.)

And, of course, the big one: The Democrats came into this election holding the White House, and they still hold it. They needed 270 electoral votes to do so; they got over 300. If you want to say that it's "no mandate" I might agree with you, and the popular vote wasn't all that decisive, but I recall that even in 200 when the Republicans lost the popular vote they claimed a mandate, and their victory in the Electoral College was much narrower. Sauce for the goose...

(I've blogged about the misuse of the term "mandate" before; read that article from 2008 here.)

A little history: When Newt Gingrich became Speaker of a newly-Republican House after Clinton's first midterm, he vowed that the Republicans would cooperate but never compromise. (That's a very strange definition of "cooperate.") He didn't hold that position long; Republican obstructionism was widely perceived as Republican obstructionism (funny, that...) and it didn't play in Peoria. The Republicans in Congress looked more stubbornly bone-headed each day, and eventually Newt was forced to make a number of compromises just to get things moving. (He later was forced out due to ethics violations, but that's another story.)

Boehner has shown that he intends to start down the same path, hoping it leads somewhere else this time. He's obviously hoping we will let him, and with a still bitterly divided Congress and a batch of sour grapes being served on the Right, he may be right.

I hope not. I hope the American people will again look at mounting Republican obstructionism and demand that Congress get off its collective asses and do something for a change. But with the nation as bitterly divided as Congress, I may hope in vain.

There. I have spoken. I'm going back to Gunsmoke now; I've got more than a hundred B&W episodes left and I'm still not into the Festus years.

The Blues Viking

The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.