The House GOP: A Chicken With It's Head Cut Off

    If it seems that there's no leadership in the House these days that's because there isn't. A big piece came out in Politico which showed just how bad it's gotten. It's (mis)rule by faction. There seem to be two leading factions among House leadership at present

    "Apparently there are now two groups of Republicans in the House. First, there's a group of firebrand conservatives headed by Eric Cantor, which, as near as I can tell, is mostly dedicated to finding slightly more slippery language to sell its usual right-wing agenda of school vouchers, block granting Medicaid, increased tax credits, and gutting labor laws. Second, there's a group of insane, frothing-at-the-mouth conservatives who think of Cantor as Nancy Pelosi's lapdog and are basically uninterested in anything other than repealing Obamacare, slashing taxes even more, ending the welfare state, and making speeches about how Obama is destroying America. It's quite a little group that John Boehner has up there."

    http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/05/quote-day-house-republicans-have-completely-melted-down 

     For all this it seems that Boehner probably does as well as anyone could be expected to. In truth no one could "lead" this group-the press never stops talking about Obama's failure to lead; in fact Maureen Dowd is at it again. 

    In the House, there's no leading this group. There really is no plan and the effect seems to be the kind of post policy nihilism Greg Sargent talks about. 

     http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/04/30/the-morning-plum-the-gop-and-post-policy-nihilism/

     The trouble with the House GOP is that there really isn't any method to the madness; there really is no there there.  It truly is a ship of fools with no captain, no one at the steering wheel, no one thinking about a rudder. The outside conservative groups like Heritage and Club For Growth don't speak with leadership but oppose them at every turn. 

      "Much to the chagrin of GOP leadership, outside groups — Club for Growth and Heritage Action — oppose top Republicans at every turn. Those groups claim they don’t ever hear from Boehner, Cantor and McCarthy. The conservative groups — natural allies who could give cover to the House Republican Conference — feel they have no buy-in to their agenda from the House GOP leadership."

     “I get asked a lot, ‘Do you guys talk to leadership?’” said Chris Chocola, a former House Republican lawmaker who now heads the Club for Growth. “The fact is we don’t. I don’t know that that’s good or bad, but we just don’t. So if I were them, I’d probably try to at least survey the conservative outside groups and how they do things before I do something like that.”

    Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/05/house-in-chaos-republican-leadership-eric-cantor-90803_Page2.html#ixzz2S9RBrnhk

     While the Centrist press may ridicule the President's "permission structure" theory of leadership for the GOP it makes a lot more sense than their vapid Green Lattern Theory of Presidential Leadership. Lately Maureen Dowd has been vying to be the Most Serious Journalist in the Room with her Obama needs to lead pieces. 

    "The least surprising news of the week is that getting dressed down at the White House correspondents dinner did nothing to persuade Maureen Dowd and other opinion makers that their fantastical depictions of presidential power are actually puerile and lazy. Less than a month after Republicans rejected Obama’s budget — Chained CPI and all — gauzy platitudes about leadership are back in vogue."

     "Meanwhile, back in the real world, Jake Sherman reports that the very people Obama’s supposed to “lead” to a budget deal (or a deal on anything) are perhaps more dysfunctional and reactionary than at any point since they came to power."

The House simply isn’t interested in the agendas being pushed by the president and Democratic Senate. Most Republicans aren’t looking for a big legislative push on gun control. GOP leaders are skeptical that they can arrive at a framework to negotiate a budget agreement with Senate Democrats. And tax reform and an immigration overhaul, while broadly supported, are still seen as long shots.

Members of leadership have trouble staying on the same page…. It’s come to the point that top House aides say simply that they’re not taking into consideration Obama’s priorities when they plan their debt ceiling moves.

     "Internalize that story and you’ll understand why all the noise about leading and “juice” and so on is so misguided."

     "That’s the House majority. Without at least its implicit assent, Obama really can’t pass anything. And he can’t change these attitudes, or the incentives of the people who hold them, with speeches or dinners or even de facto threats and bribes."

     http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2013/05/the_permission_structure_is_the_leadership.php

      In a sense the only assent Obama really needs, however, is for Boehner to ignore the Hastert Rule as he already has on some very important votes already this session. Today immigration reform could pass the House easily if he simply allowed it up to a vote, but this would be through majority Democrat support and only minority GOP support which his what he's hoping to avoid on immigration. For that matter, it's the same thing on the sequester: the compromise Dems have proposed probably makes it through the House too if Boehner didn't table it. 

     Boehner, then, is key to much future legislation. The Boehner Rule-which has replaced the Hastert Rule-is that the Senate must pass legislation first then the House will look at it after. Clear political pressure must be there-like there likely is on immigration, particularly if the Senate gets 70 votes in favor as seems doable at this point-and the more prudent Boehner will likely allow a vote. 

     This vision is far from the after school special Dowd and Bob Woodward seem to think Washington is but it's how things will get done during the next two years. So Obama's permission structure is where we're at. Pat Toomey makes this clear:

     "Via Amanda Terkel, Toomey admitted in an interview that expanded background checks went down to defeat because Republicans opposed the bill out of a desire to deny the president a victory. Here’s what Toomey said, according to a write-up in the Times Herald:

“In the end it didn’t pass because we’re so politicized. There were some on my side who did not want to be seen helping the president do something he wanted to get done, just because the president wanted to do it,” Toomey said.

     http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/05/01/pat-toomey-confirms-it-obama-is-right-about-gop/