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Don’t celebrate yet!: Why Boehner won’t really ditch the right-wing nutjobs
Yes, the speaker lashed out a bit this week. But in the long run, he agrees with the far right more than you think
BRIAN BEUTLER
Depending whom you ask, House Speaker John Boehner’s public divorce this week from the conservative advocacy shops that bullied him into a government shutdown two months ago, and the subsequent House passage of a Bipartisan Budget Act, portends a huge sellout (baaad), or a huge sellout (good!).
The underlying theory is identical, but the question of whether it’s a positive or lamentable development depends on your ideological allegiances. By declaring himself free from the consequences of transgressing influential conservative scorekeepers — “I don’t care what they do,” Boehner said Thursday — he has widened the potential scope of legislative politics in 2014. If those guys don’t matter — if he feels free to cross them at this juncture — it creates coalition-building opportunities that were unthinkable a week or a month ago.
Red State founder Erick Erickson thinks it was a harbinger of Boehner’s strategic decision to isolate the right ahead of his coming immigration reform capitulation. He writes:
John Boehner is trying to get the “us vs. them” battle lines drawn before primary season.” He needs those lines drawn because he is about to move on to the immigration fight. To get to that fight, he has to take on the conservative movement in a number of primaries around the country…. Boehner needs to draw fence sitters to him, make conservative groups unpopular, and then dare the fence sitters to go sit with the unpopular crowd during the immigration fight. He’s been staffing up for the immigration fight in the House. Today, he fired the first real shots in that battle. He’s done as Speaker. This is all legacy building now. And if he has to cry on television and attack his conservative base, he’ll do it.
:::snip:::
full article
http://www.salon.com/2013/12/13/dont_celebrate_yet_why_boehner_wont_really_ditch_the_right_wing_nutjobs/
