Watch that last step...

I see John Boehner tumbling into a dark, bottomless crevasse, and saying to himself on the way down, “Wow...that is such a relief...”

So I’m standing in the kitchen making my daily bread (something I started doing back when I couldn’t get out to buy bread, and discovered that I enjoy) when I hear on the news that John Boehner is stepping down as Speaker of the House of Representatives; not just that, but he’s leaving the House entirely at the end of his term.

And a thought occurs to me: is he just stepping down, or did he suddenly realize that he was falling and decided to acknowledge it?

It's no secret that Congress is a mess. The obstructionism from the right, while aimed at Obama, has done its damage to the Speaker as well, even if Boehner himself has been a big part of most of it. Where Boehner has tried to make deals and move government along (albeit very, very slowly) he has often had these efforts torpedoed by his harder-right “colleagues” in the House. It is to Boehner’s discredit that he so often caved in to the hard right, but let’s be serious: Given the situation in the House, what else could he have done?

It should be noted that Congress and the House under Boehner has been the least productive Congress in U. S. history, and for the first part of Boehner’s tenure things weren’t much better in the Senate, despite a thin Democratic majority in the Senate. Since the Republicans gained their own thin majority in the Senate, it’s gotten worse. Boehner has even been forced to court Democratic support for some of the things he felt he had to do (not always getting it) to the anger of the hard right wing of his party.

You can’t blame Boehner for all of the failures of the Republican Congress, or even of just the Republican House, but he was their leader for all of its recent history and he can’t escape the blame. Time and time again Boehner has led the government to the precipice, and while he may or may not have intended to lead them over the edge (and I’m thinking that in most cases it was not) any efforts to save them at the last minute were undone by the hoards of “teapartiers” pushing from behind.

(We’re back to that old “fiscal cliff” metaphor that I really thought we were done with, but which I suppose will never entirely leave us.)

In truth, I see more of the same for the Republican Party and the Congress...but honestly, I think that they’d have that with or without Boehner.

What it comes down to is that now the Republicans in the House have to choose a new leader to fail to lead them; a new Fred Astaire to lead them in a grand tap-dance through a minefield. Someone willing to take over the job that John Boehner could never do. Now it’s time for someone else to fail; this person will face the same no-compromise hardliners that bedeviled Boehner’s Speakership, and said new Speaker’s only hope for leaving less of a black legacy that Boehner would be putting a Republican in the White House in 2016.

I do not wish him luck.

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