Wall
Street Journal...
Boehner’s
Surprising Success
Time and again the House speaker has
out-maneuvered the president.
By Karl Rove
August
27, 2011
The
politician who has done more than
any other to set the national agenda this year will soon return to
Washington.
It is not President Barack Obama. It’s House Speaker John Boehner.
After
his annual August bus tour to
help re-elect House Republicans, Mr. Boehner will spend a short
vacation next
week at his house in West Chester, Ohio, where he’ll relax by cutting
his lawn
with something not often seen on Martha’s Vineyard: a Toro push mower.
It’s
been a remarkable run for Mr.
Boehner. It began even before he became speaker, during last December’s
lame-duck session, when outnumbered House Republicans outmaneuvered
Democrats
and Mr. Obama on taxes.
Mr.
Boehner won by shifting the debate
from whether wealthier Americans should pay their “fair share” to
whether it is
wise to raise taxes amid high joblessness and sluggish growth. It
worked. Mr.
Obama started by calling for higher taxes. He ended by signing a
two-year
extension of all the Bush tax cuts.
In
February, the speaker and his new
House majority cut Mr. Obama’s planned 2011 budget by $61 billion and
then, in
April, slashed the government’s spending authority by $38 billion.
Then
there was the debt-ceiling
battle. Mr. Obama started by insisting on a “clean debt-ceiling vote,”
meaning
an increase without spending cuts.
Mr.
Boehner simply refused to accept
the president’s claim that not a dime of spending could be cut. Instead
the
speaker calmly and firmly stated his conditions: Any debt-ceiling
increase must
be “accompanied by meaningful action to cut spending.” And in a May
speech to
the Economic Club of New York, he laid down his marker: Any debt-limit
increase
must be paired with bigger spending cuts and no tax hikes.
On
the defensive, Mr. Obama abandoned
his demand for a clean debt-ceiling increase and began advocating “a
balanced
approach” of spending cuts and tax increases. But Mr. Boehner rallied
his
colleagues and once again Mr. Obama came out the loser.
Mr.
Boehner may not be an inspiring
orator, but he has moved the country and Congress in his direction. He
has
succeeded in large part because he had a more modest view of the post
than his
recent predecessors. In a private dinner last year in Texas, I was
struck by
his complaint that only a handful of people mattered in the
Democrat-run
House—namely, the Speaker and four or five other members. This wasn’t
the way
the Founders intended the House to operate, Mr. Boehner said, with more
than a
little passion in his voice.
Accordingly,
he has ceded power to
congressional committees so more of the House’s work is done there. He
has
widened the theaters of operation for younger ambitious House
Republican
leaders. Mr. Boehner excels at persuading members rather than bribing
them with
earmarks or threatening them with retaliation. He has long opposed the
former;
the second is not his nature. All this has paradoxically strengthened
his hand.
So
Washington’s agenda this fall will
reflect the priorities not of the glitzy Mr. Obama but of the modest,
well-grounded Mr. Boehner. Prodded by the speaker, Mr. Obama has
already
pledged to send to the Hill for consideration three major trade
agreements that
have languished since the president’s inauguration. The annual budget
battle
will give Mr. Boehner and the House GOP more opportunities to cut
spending as
the 12 separate appropriations bills needed to fund the government move
through
Congress.
Then
there is the “super committee”
formed as part of the debt-ceiling agreement. While it may not meet its
mandated target of $1.5 trillion more in cuts, its discussions will
take place
on Mr. Boehner’s terms: where to cut rather than where to tax.
When
the president lays out his latest
stimulus plan next month, it is Mr. Boehner’s challenge to make certain
Congress doesn’t substitute more spending on food stamps and
unemployment
benefits for measures that will actually spur job creation and economic
growth.
Rarely
does the leader of one branch
of Congress become the political sun around which the president
revolves. Time
and again this year, the 61st speaker of the House has out-thought,
out-negotiated and outmaneuvered America’s 44th president. And Mr.
Obama,
frustrated and increasingly unsteady, is losing his cool. On his recent
Midwest
bus trip, for example, the president tried making a virtue of
impotence,
blaming others—including the GOP House—for his failures.
These
are the tactics of a politician
who sees power slipping away. Mr. Boehner’s influence, on the other
hand,
increases with every victory.
Who
woulda thunk it?
Mr.
Rove is the former senior adviser
and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.
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it at the Wall Street Journal
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