John Boehner Shifts with the Wind on Immigration Reform

John Boehner, public domain

John Boehner said on Jay Leno a while ago, “A leader without followers is simply a man taking a walk.” It was part of his reason for supporting the Tea Baggers in their attempt to hold Obama hostage over the debt ceiling last year.  He seemed rational and drily humorous, and even phlegmatic when talking to Jay Leno. There was no sign of frustrated passion. And he quite openly admitted that without a doubt the fault for the government shutdown lay with Republicans. 

He said he told them Obama wouldn’t back down but they didn’t listen. He saw they were going in one direction and he was heading the opposite.  That’s when he said the bit about a leader. But the reality is, he didn’t lead them, they led him. 

And it’s happening again. For a while it seemed as if the less right wing Republicans were taking their power back, as talk surfaced of immigration reform actually going somewhere. But the Tea Party isn’t giving up without a fight. Their latest stunt is to back away from immigration reform. Now Boehner is quoted in the New York Times as saying “The American people, including many of my members, don’t trust that the reform that we’re talking about will be implemented as it was intended to be.” And the members who do trust that reform will be legally implemented, are they “The American people” too?

Boehner is quoted on Politico as saying “The president seems to change the health care law on a whim, whenever he likes. Now he’s running around the country, telling everyone that he’s going to keep acting on his own. He’s talking about his phone and his pen and he’s feeding more distrust about whether he’s committed to the rule of law. There’s widespread doubt about whether this administration can be trusted to enforce the law.”

Firstly, the President had to adapt the health care law because the roll-out was so problematic. He wasn’t disregarding the law, he was taking responsibility and making sure that Americans didn’t suffer because of the roll-out problems. 

The reference to “his phone and his pen” was about the State of the Union address when President Obama said that he would use executive action where he could in the interests of protecting the middle classes from the GOP’s refusal to entertain wage increases.

The President was referring to an executive action that would require all companies contracted by the government to increase wages from $7.25 to $10.10 when the contracts come up for renewal. New companies being contracted would have to pay the same increased wages. The point was to set an example and show American companies that when they value their employees and treat them well, they work better, they’re more loyal and all sorts of benefits accrue to the company as a result. Then there’s the extra tax they pay which everybody understand is good for the government, and the extra money they have, which they spend on other businesses’ products or services. It’s a win-win. 

However, at no point did President Obama say he was going to break any laws. In fact, he said that this would only apply to new contracts. Old contracts would have to be honoured. You can’t get more trustworthy than that.

But Mr. Boehner picked a couple of sentences, took them out of context and blew them up into something sinister.  Does he really believe what he said about the President? Probably not.  But the Tea Party has their hands around his throat again. If he supports immigration reform they’ll get rid of him. Or that’s what they say. So Boehner trotted out that he doesn’t think he’ll be able to pass an immigration reform bill. Because he doesn’t want to be that man taking a walk, does he? 

For that, 11 million undocumented immigrants, a big proportion of who contribute meaningfully to the economy, must suffer. And a year spent trying to forge a bill that has the support of many businesses and many of those “American people” Boehner referred to, will have been wasted. 

President Obama isn't the one who's untrustworthy. For a list of the executive orders signed by him so far, see The Whitehouse site.

Legacy of the First African-American President

I wonder how many people who comment on what President Obama said in any particular speech actually heard him speak. It’s far easier to read the media and form an opinion, but often there’s very little difference between an article that’s supposed to be journalism and the op-ed pages that are openly personal opinion. 

Not long ago he said he made two promises at his inauguration: that he wasn’t a perfect man and wouldn’t be a perfect president; and that he would work unflinchingly towards giving the middle class better opportunities to be rewarded for their work. He smiled as he said he didn’t break either of those promises. And he hasn’t. As to the first, nobody’s perfect. But it’s a rare American President who will stand up and acknowledge that, and then do what he needs to do to fix whatever problem has resulted from his imperfection.

Obama has done that with Obamacare. He has acknowledged that HealthCare.gov is flawed, and he hasn’t blamed the IT specialists who set it up. He’s clearly said “that’s on me”. He promised people they could keep their old medical insurance policies and it turned out they couldn’t. Again, he shouldered responsibility for that and did something about it. 

You would think, from the way the media interprets what he says and how he says it that he’s on the back foot. But he isn’t. If you listen to him speak you can see that.

He was never going to have it easy. It’s one thing for a country to want change; it’s another for everybody to actually be willing do what’s necessary for that change to happen. For Obama to have been optimally effective, voters needed to take responsibility for properly informing themselves about the Republican agenda, and not give them so much power to thwart Obama at every step. 

And as for him being African American, the racist river of blood that has tainted America since forever never dried up, it just flowed underground. It will be generations before every white conservative American can look at an African American president and see a man or a woman before they see the color of their skin. If it ever happens. What's more likely is that the conservative base will die out. They're vocal, often vicious, and counter-productive. But they aren't smart. They don't even wait for somebody to give them rope. They just grab it and go about hanging themselves.

There’s been a lot of noise about how the ACA is Obama’s legacy, and Republicans celebrated wildly whilst they thought they could take it down, then when HealthCare.gov floundered at first. They believed part of their main objective – to destroy Obama – was achieved. 

Firstly, they didn’t succeed, and HealthCare.gov is already functioning a whole lot better. Secondly, Obama’s legacy is that as the first African American president in a country still dessicated by racism he hasn’t buckled and given in to Republican efforts to derail him and his mission – to improve the lives of the majority of Americans; to strengthen the middle class and to change a status quo that’s brought the US to its knees. Part of that has been to provide all Americans with affordable quality healthcare and destroy the power insurance companies have had which they abused by selling low quality insurance. 

Obama has also withdrawn America from war-mongering and brought the deficit down from 9.2% of GDP in 2009 to less than half of that, at 4.1%, currently. It’s the fastest sustained decline in a deficit since World War II. No wonder House Republicans, whose main opposition to Obama in 2012 was the deficit, who don’t want the status quo to change, don’t want reform, don’t want to lose the power they’ve abused for way too long, stir up dust storms wherever they can to distract Americans from the truth. 

That Obama is successful. He was always going to be, no matter how hard it was for him.

Congress Reaps the Reward of their Blackmail as the Debt Ceiling Crisis Looms

Republicans in Congress are reaping the rewards of their blackmail tactics as public disgust and scorn grow daily; as Obamacare /Affordable Care Act rolls out and more people actually understand what it’s about and that it benefits them; and as the next crisis aka the debt ceiling deadline looms. 

This isn’t the first time this Congress has tried governing by blackmail. The last time they caved; this time they didn’t, but they haven’t got many kudos for it, from Democrat or Republican voters. Everybody, except for the hell-raisers in Congress, is worn out and out of patience with the stupidity that has governed Congress lately and resulted in disaster for so many. The hell-raisers have celebrated, with Michelle Bachman quoted by the Washington Post as saying “We’re very excited. It’s exactly what we wanted and we got it.” but clearly she and her ilk didn’t think about the consequences of their desires.  

Now that more than a million are having to work without pay, and 800,000 others are on forced leave, Congress is scrabbling to save face, backing down, trying to pass piecemeal bills to protect those who have been disastrously affected by their actions.

Too little too late. President Obama and Democrats are standing firm. No compromise on this because the stakes are too high. If they allow government by blackmail they set a dangerous precedent. Members of Congress and especially Speaker Boehner are still doing all they can to point the blame at the Senate for refusing to compromise but few are buying it.

And now the debt ceiling crisis looms. Boehner has been making a point of talking privately and publicly about his determination to raise the debt ceiling, but what he says now and what he actually does could possibly be worlds apart.

He has said that if necessary he’ll work with Democrats in Congress and even break the informal Hastert Rule – which requires a bill to have a Republican majority support. What stopped him doing that up until now? He had only to present a bill to keep government open, without any blackmail conditions attached, and it would have been passed by Democrats and moderate Republicans in the House. No showdown. No shutdown. No consequences to millions. No scrabbling about now trying to fix things that broke real fast.

It was all up to Boehner, but he allowed himself to be caught between rationality and what the voting public wants, and conservatives pushing an agenda that hurt the majority and who have only a small voting public support base but who have the power to have him fired. Boehner chose to keep his job.

Now he’s going to be up against the same fight, and that’s what happens when you align yourself with thugs. With the debt ceiling, the only new factor is his powerful business connections. Are they powerful and influential enough to ensure that he doesn't lose his job if does what they want in the face of resistance from hardliners? Because it’s hard to imagine that the Tea Party members of Congress won’t try the same blackmail tactics.  

Boehner has gotten praise for his comments but it looks as if he's trying to placate his powerful connections and a public that is openly fed up with Congress. Either that or he's trying to raise people's hopes so high that the Tea Party members and their support won't dare to try and hold the country hostage again. The problem is that they've already shown they aren't that smart; they don't read the polls or notice anything outside the bubble of their own self-delusions. Again, to quote Michele Bachmann, this time speaking on the Hannity Show two days ago (as reported on MEDIAite), “This is about the happiest I’ve seen members in a long time because we’ve seen we’re starting to win this dialogue on a national level.” 

So chances are they'll do it again. And again. As Senator Harry Reid said, “You know with a bully you cannot let them slap you around, because they slap you around today, they slap you five or six times tomorrow.” 

President Obama, speaking recently on CNBC, said “It is not unusual for Democrats and Republicans to disagree. That’s the way our founders designed our government; democracy is messy. “But when you have a situation in which a faction is willing potentially to default on US Government obligations then we are in trouble. And if they’re willing to do it now they’ll be willing to do it later.

“One thing that I often hear is ‘well Mr. President, even if they’re being unreasonable, why can’t you just go ahead and do something that makes them happy now?’

“What I have to remind people is that what we’re debating right now is keeping the government open for two months! We would then be going through this exact same thing in the middle of Christmas shopping season…and then we’d have to go through it again six months from now and six months after that. And one thing that I know the American people are tired of - and I have to assume the vast majority of businesses are tired of – is this constant governing from crisis to crisis. So in that sense, do we need to break that fever? Absolutely.”

Speaking about a week ago, he said this: “If Republicans do not like the law, they can go through the regular channels and processes to try to change it. That's why we have elections.”