Carl Bernstein: GOP leadership ‘cancerous’

[Jack Rabbit]

30. The Speaker cannot be impeached

He can be removed by a vote of his caucus, and John Boehner's performance in this messy business has been so bad that his unpopularity probably crosses ideological lines. He just might be replaced by next week, if not sooner.

How bad was Speaker Boehner's leadership in this crisis? He's made Harry Reid look like Daniel Webster or Henry Clay. He made a President whose administration is more likely to prosecute a chemotherapy patient with a prescription for marijuana than the war criminals responsible for the invasion of Iraq or Wall Street bankers responsible for worldwide fraud look like Abraham Lincoln.

The corollary to the adage "Success has a thousand fathers but failure is an orphan" is nobody likes a loser. Boehner and Ted Cruz are clearly the biggest losers today, along with Sarah Palin, who inserted herself into the headlines in a desperate attempt at relevance but only to emerge as a two bit rabble rouser who ought to be charged with inciting a riot. Another pair of losers is the Koch brothers, and hopefully all the Kochs' money and all the Kochs' PR agents won't be able to put them back together again.

In short, the big losers are the members of the Tea Party. However, Boehner isn't a member of the Tea Party, so how did he manage to be such a big loser? By playing along with them, that's how. He had to placate rattlesnakes that are the Tea Party and give them this doomed attempt to defund the Affordable Care Act. In reveling with rattlesnakes, Boehner got bit and may die from the venom. That's how toxic the Tea Party is. We will note that the rattlesnake is the creature that adorns the Gadsden flag, often waved at Tea Party rallies.

Boehner will be replaced by Eric Cantor, something that would be a disaster in normal circumstances. Cantor is more closely identified with the Tea Party extremists, once saying that there can be no Social Security in the America "we" want to create. Cantor is a cynical man who attempted to undermine efforts at reaching a debt ceiling deal in 2011 after placing bets in the Wall Street casinos that the government would default. A deal was reached after Cantor was removed from the negotiations between the congressional leadership and the White House. To replace Boehner with such a man may seem like a step backward, but Boehner was too ineffective for this to be a step backward. Cantor will merely appear to be leading the Tea Party, still dominating the Republican caucus, to one disaster after another while Boehner appeared to just go with the flow to one Tea Party-dictated disaster after another. It's not at all a step backward; it's running in place. The GOP congressional caucus will be running in place until November 2014 when the Republican Party, too, dies from venom as a result of bites from that creature on the Gadsden flag.