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One thing you can certainly say for Louie Gohmert is that he wouldn't be afraid of the media, and too often that has been Boehner's downfall in going up against Obama

Louie Gohmert challenges Boehner for House Speaker



I love Louie Gohmert, and I lost my patience with John Boehner a long time ago as House Speaker, but I'm still not finding myself getting too excited about Gohmert challenging Boehner for the speakership. Here's why, in a nutshell:
  1. Gohmert's not going to win. The number of House conservatives willing to participate in a rebellion against Boehner at this point is maybe 20 or so. That's out of 247 in the caucus. Having worked this long to get back control of the Senate, neither House nor Senate Republicans seems interested in throwing over their experienced leader for someone new.
  2. The job of the House Speaker involves a lot more than just being conservative. Before he was in the leadership, Boehner's voting record was quite conservative - enough so that a lot of conservatives were pretty happy to see him elevated when it first started happening. The Speaker has to make a lot of decisions concerning legislative strategy and other inside baseball that don't have as much to do with ideology as people think. When Gohmert vows to "fight tooth and nail" on certain things, that's great, but the question is more how you fight, and which fights you choose. There's a difference between thinking conservative things and being savvy enough to make them happen.
  3. On the main issue Gohmert is citing as his reason for running, I'm not sure he's right. He's upset about Boehner pushing through CRomnibus because it doesn't defund executive amnesty right now, pushing the fight instead back to February. But if you actually consider the strategy here, it's not bad. By passing a bill that funds the entire government except Homeland Security through September, you take away the rheteorical weapon Obama has used most effectively in budget fights - the claim that the GOP wants a government shutdown. He can't say that now. The fight will be solely about executive amnesty. How does Obama win that fight? A lot of you don't like this, but I think McConnell and Boehner deployed a pretty clever strategy here if, and only if, they hang tough in February. That last question is a pretty important one, but Gohmert wanted to make the defunding of amnesty happen in December. How, strategically, would he have done that? Just saying you'd "fight tooth and nail" is not a strategy.

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  • My biggest problem with Boehner is that he didn't use the House majority's power of the purse to a) tighten the reins on spending; and b) force Harry Reid to pass real budgets. By going along with Reid's practice of "budgeting" by no budget at all but rather by a series of continuing resolutions based on spending priorities established in the "emergency stimulus" year of 2009, Boehner let Reid get away with locking in the out-of-control spending of Democrats' dreams without the public really noticing. This might have been one of the best arguments for a Gohmert speakership, except that Reid has now lost his power. The better question is whether Mitch McConnell is prepared to return the Senate to normal-order budgets or whether he considers it too risky a fight to pick. In my mind it's not a matter of picking a fight, even if the media wants to treat it that way. It's a matter of doing your job correctly. But I don't yet know for sure if that's how McConnell sees it. I want to see how McConnell and Boehner really approach the question of a federal budget for FY 2016 since they've already taken care of the rest of FY 2015 apart from Homeland Security.
  • One thing you can certainly say for Louie Gohmert is that he wouldn't be afraid of the media, and too often that has been Boehner's downfall in going up against Obama. He had ways to win, but we always ended up hearing "if we do that the media will say . . ." and instead he chose not to win. That was simply infuriating. I'd love to have a Speaker who wasn't afraid of fighting to win, and Gohmert would be that, but I'm still not sure he understands you need a lot more legislative skill than just "being a true conservative" and "fighting tooth and nail" to accomplish things in a legislative environment. At any rate, it doesn't matter, because he's not going to win.


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