http://www.nationalreview.com/node/424643/print After Boehner
By The Editors — September 25, 2015
The election of a Republican House in 2010 put an end to the march of liberal legislation through Congress. Obama would get no signing ceremony for carbon caps, for pro-union laws, for new gun controls, or even, as it turned out, for the “comprehensive immigration reform” so favored by all the great and good. Republicans in Congress also imposed some spending cuts, albeit ones that fell too heavily on defense. When George W. Bush’s tax cuts expired, they got President Obama to agree to put many of them into law indefinitely.
Those are real accomplishments for which Speaker John Boehner, who has just announced that he will retire at the end of October, deserves some credit. While he seems to have favored something like the misbegotten immigration bill that the Senate passed in 2013, for example, he wisely chose to avoid letting it go through over his party’s objections. But overall his record is one that conservatives find, and should find, disappointing. To be sure, there are real limits, as Boehner and his allies always insisted, on what Republican congressmen can achieve when an implacably liberal president has a unified Democratic party behind him; but what is most dismaying is how little Republican congressmen have even tried to achieve. The House has never voted on a conservative replacement for Obamacare, or a tax reform, or even a bill to unwind Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. One of the few conservative policy victories in the last few years — the end, for now, of federal authorization of the Export-Import Bank — was accomplished over Boehner’s objections.
The Republican leadership in Congress constantly complains that conservative groups are demanding that it fight the Obama administration in ways it considers counterproductive. But it does not suggest that instead Republicans fight against the administration, or for conservative causes, in some superior way. Its alternative to losing fights consists of “regular order” and advancing bipartisan legislation that appeals to business groups. That is a recipe for demoralization among conservatives, loss of Republican popularity among swing voters, further strife within the party caucus, and a further weakening of Congress as an institution.
Boehner has conservative views on most issues and sought to advance those views as best he could. But he has allowed a destructive dynamic to take hold among Republicans in which realism is forever pitted against vision. We wish him well in retirement, and wish for a successor who will transcend that division.
