John Boehner tries to school Obama on leadership. Fails. Miserably.

John Boehner has been a notoriously weak and ineffective speaker, struggling to get the Republican votes he needs on major legislation and facing an unprecedented number of his own members voting against him for speaker this year. Under the circumstances, you'd think he and his people would just try to stay away from questions of leadership, but instead, on Wednesday Boehner's blog featured a piece attempting to show how much President Obama sucks by comparing him to the leadership of John Boehner. According to Boehner's blog, Obama was "going to Cleveland to try and start a partisan political brawl."

(In reality: to announce investments in manufacturing and talk about the economy.) READ MORE

Boehner Blows It with a Plan Destined to Fail

By KAREN TUMULTY, The Washington Post

December 22, 2012

The main thing that has held Republicans together philosophically is the belief in holding down taxes. Not one of them in Congress has voted for a significant increase in more than two decades. Now that very issue is tearing the GOP apart and making it an all-but-ungovernable majority for Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) to lead in the House.

Disarray is a word much overused in politics. But it barely begins to describe the current state of chaos and incoherence as Republicans come to terms with electoral defeat and try to regroup against a year-end deadline to avert a fiscal crisis.

The presidential election was fought in large measure over the question of whether some Americans should pay more in taxes. Republicans lost that argument with the voters, who polls show are strongly in favor of raising rates for the wealthy.

But a sizable contingent within the GOP doesn’t see it that way and is unwilling to declare defeat on a tenet that so defines them. Nor are they prepared to settle for getting the best deal they can, as a means of avoiding the tax hikes on virtually everyone else that would take effect if no deal is reached.  READ MORE

Back on Hill, Ryan Remains a Fiscal Force

Representative Paul D. Ryan, in Washington last week,
resumes his post as the House Budget Committee chairman.

WASHINGTON — Gone is the private jet and the motorcade that swept him from the tarmac to the private hotel entrances. His security staff has been reduced to a few Capitol Police officers, soon to fade away. Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin is back to driving his own truck back home, and walking to the House floor here for votes alone, like everyone else.

But while the campaign trappings and the high profile of the national campaign are behind him, Mr. Ryan now finds himself at the center of one of the biggest fiscal negotiations in a generation

Speaker John A. Boehner has tapped Mr. Ryan, who has returned to his post as the House Budget Committee chairman after an unsuccessful run for vice president, to help strike a deal to avoid big tax increases and spending cuts by the end of the year, and to bring along fellow Republicans.

“He helps us toward creating a product,” said Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, “and he helps sell the product.” 

The test will be whether Mr. Ryan — who declined last year to sit on another Congressional committee charged with taming the deficit, in large part because doing so might have hurt his prospects for national office — can make the transition from House budget philosopher to governing heavyweight who can help negotiate a bipartisan deal and sell it to his colleagues.  READ MORE