Meet John Boehner – powerful politician, ‘simple guy’
The most powerful Republican in America mows his own lawn, had youthful aspirations of becoming a salesman and quietly convinced two know-it-all lawmakers to vote “yes.”
House Speaker John Boehner revealed these and other aspects about himself during a question-and-answer session after a high-profile speech Thursday to the Economic Club of Washington.
Drawing laughter from the crowd, Boehner also made it clear he has no interest in running for vice president, a job that requires attending plenty of foreign funerals.
“I have enough trouble going to funerals of people I know,” said Boehner, known for easily breaking into tears. “I’m a pretty simple guy,” said Boehner, who’s led his party’s charge to shrink the U.S. government since taking the gavel in January as House speaker.
“People ask me if I’m having fun? Hell no, I’m not having fun. But I’m glad I’m here,” Boehner said. “I rely on being straight up with people.”
Some time back, Boehner said he had to deal with two House Republican freshmen, “young whipper snappers who seemed to have all the answers,” and who opposed him on a certain matter.
“I brought them in my office, closed the door … looked at them and said, ‘Boys, I’m not going to open it until you say yes. It could take 30 seconds, 30 minutes … three hours,’ “ Boehner recalled. “It took about 45 minutes.”
Well, come August 3rd Boehner will have a tear jerk story to tell about how he couldnt sit around for another 8 years of spendimg when Bush 2 did so much to balance the budget build a fence around mexico, free the people of Iraq, Afghanistan. Pakistan, Iran, and the great state of denial.
Washington Extra – In abeyance
Some say impasse, some say abeyance.
But whatever they call it, debt negotiations between Vice President Joe Biden and lawmakers hit a brick wall.
After two days of meetings this week, Republicans decided it wasn’t worth going to the third session today and walked away.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor took the harsher line, saying the talks were at an “impasse.” Dictionary definition: a situation from which there is no escape or a deadlock.
The White House took a gentler line describing the talks as in “abeyance.” Dictionary definition: temporary inactivity or a suspension.
So now they kick it upstairs. President Barack Obama, House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid will take over, according to Reid.
That’s two Democrats and one Republican at the table. Does one golf game (Obama and Boehner last Saturday) a compromise make?
Washington Extra – Tee party
President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner get to flex their golfing skills tomorrow and we’re guessing there’s plenty of pre-game strategizing going on.
Is Obama telling Vice President Joe Biden, arguably the best golfer of the four, to hold back on the hole-in-ones? They do after all want Boehner amenable to their views on the debt limit stand-off.
Is Ohio Governor John Kasich giving Boehner advice on how to keep the Veep off-guard so they can ruin his handicap and have bragging rights on the Republican versus Democrat scoreboard?
And will the political foursome keep up with appearances and wear that loud clothing golfers seem to like so much, and which can make a bystander cringe?
But is golf really about winning or how you play the game? In this case it will be a success if no one ends up teed off…
Here are our top stories from Washington…
White House shrugs off Obama comments caught on open microphone
The White House is shrugging off candid comments by President Barack Obama about private budget talks with Republicans. The next day’s message is — no big deal.
Obama was speaking to supporters at a political fund-raiser in Chicago after reporters left the room. But a microphone was accidentally left on and the comments were piped back to the White House press room and recorded by CBS News and ABC News.
Obama said he told House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell that they should not try to “sneak” through a provision on Planned Parenthood. “‘You guys want to have this debate? We’re happy to have that debate. We will have the debate on the floor of the Senate or the floor of the House. Put it in a separate bill. We’ll call it up. And if you think you can overturn my veto, try it,’” he said.
White House spokesman Jay Carney today told reporters “it’s not a problem, not an issue.”
Is the president embarrassed about anything that he said?
Carney: “Not at all.”
Regret?
Obama has budget deal “bonus” for Colorado schoolkids; Boehner bashes Democrats at fund-raiser
President Barack Obama is getting into a habit of surprising tourists. Over the weekend it was a trip to the Lincoln Memorial, and on Monday he turned up to surprise a group of school children at the White House.
“Not only did things work out, but we figured we’d give you a little bonus,” Obama told the 50 students from Altona Middle School in Colorado. Then he posed for pictures with them and answered a few questions behind the White House. (One of his favorite things about being president is that he has no commute because his office is right next to his house).
The mother of one of the students, Shalini Schane, wrote a letter to Obama on April 6 begging him to find some agreement to keep the government open so that her son could make a class trip to Washington for which his class had been raising money all year.
Schane was with the students and stood in the front row — in jeans and a tank top — as they posed for a picture. Obama, who wore a black suit, shook Schane’s hand and kissed her cheek, telling the kids, “She’s responsible for getting you here.”
Obama had used Schane’s letter in a speech he gave shortly before midnight on Friday when he announced the budget deal. “She asked those of us in Washington to get past our petty grievances and make things right,” he said.
House Speaker John Boehner, who led the Republicans in the budget negotiations, has been praised for shifting the focus in Washington to spending cuts and for winning billions of dollars in budget cuts from the Obama administration.
There’s politics happening in Washington, Obama complains
It’s a bit like being surprised there’s gambling in Las Vegas.
Politics in Washington?
President Barack Obama riddled his speech in Pennsylvania with criticism of people (think capital R) who would play politics with important issues like the budget.
“So we’ve agreed to a compromise, but somehow we still don’t have a deal, because some folks are trying to inject politics in what should be a simple debate about how to pay our bills,” Obama said.
“Companies don’t like uncertainty and if they start seeing that suddenly we may have a shutdown of our government, that could halt momentum right when we need to build it up — all because of politics.”
Very little about Washington doesn’t involve politics, so even trying to blame the other side for playing politics can itself be seen as a bit of politicking.
House Speaker John Boehner, for his part, blamed Obama for not showing leadership on the budget.
The president is just realizing their is “Politics in Washington”???? What has he been doing the last 3 years?
George H. W. Bush was the last 1 term president, Obama is next and will be the 13th president to serve 1 term.
Any U.S. Citizen whom lost their birth certificate can get another one. All they need to know is where they were born, does the President not know where he was born? Hawaii was his last stop and um no certificate their.
Hey Mr. President please google: How to Get a Certified Copy of My Birth Certificate.
What would Gingrich do?
President Obama may be in hot water with lawmakers who think the U.S.-led military mission in Libya is a big mistake. But some GOP voices are calling for an escalation of U.S. involvement — or at least an expansion of U.S. goals.
Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker who is considering a run for the Republican presidential nomination, tells NBC’s Today show that the United States will face defeat in Libya if the current mission ends with Muammar Gaddafi still in power.
People might have a hard time arguing with that point.
But what would he do now, if he were president?
Gingrich’s answer sounds just like the message John McCain conveyed on the same TV show a day earlier, when he called for arming the Libyan rebels to ensure the end of Gaddafi’s 41-year rule.
“We should be very clear to the Libyans that Gaddafi is going to go,” Gingrich says. ”We should help equip the Libyan rebels.” Otherwise he’d let the Pentagon, the CIA, etc, determine what needs to be done “to win”.
But there may be problems with the arm-the-rebels idea. Reports from the field suggest the rag-tag Libyan rebel force wouldn’t be able to defeat Gaddafi in its present state. According to accounts, some rebels are so innocent of martial tactics that they may not even be sure which end of the gun goes ‘Bang!”
Newt Gingrich famously said, “It doesn’t matter what I do. People need to hear what I have to say. There’s no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn’t matter what I live.”
So I guess the answer to the question posed by this article is, It doesn’t matter what Gingrich would do, only what he says OTHER people should do.
Washington Extra – Same page
Alarm over Japan’s nuclear crisis prompted a slumping stock market to slump some more in a third day of selling.
The United States and Japan weren’t quite on the same page in terms of advice to the public. The State Department recommended that Americans living within 50 miles of the Fukushima nuclear plant evacuate or stay indoors, while Japan asked residents within 18 miles to do the same.
Republicans and Democrats are still not on the same page as far as spending cuts go, which means back to the drawing board with a three-week reprieve from the sixth stopgap spending bill expected to pass Congress by Friday. Talks will get an added kick when the latest temporary funding bill is passed, but in a divided Congress bipartisan deals become a fairly lofty goal.
“I understand the world we live in right now,” House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas told us in an interview. “I’m going to attempt to work in a very bipartisan way” to slow down the implementation of Dodd-Frank, the Republican said about the financial reform measure named after two Democrats.
House Speaker John Boehner knows it won’t be easy, but he’s confident a bipartisan deal will be found to fund the government for the rest of this fiscal year — somehow, some way — congressional correspondent Thomas Ferraro blogs.
Some wise words from Lucas on trying to reach agreements in Washington when you don’t quite see eye-to-eye: “It’s a town where it’s always a challenge to draw the distinction of speaking with each other and to each other.”
Be sure to look at congressional correspondent Andy Sullivan’s special report — On borrowed time: budget delays start to hurt.
Boehner confident on getting budget deal, but admits it won’t be easy
House Speaker John Boehner, facing somewhat of a revolt in Republican ranks, says “it is not going to be easy” to craft and win passage of a bipartisan deal to cut spending and fund the government for the rest of this fiscal year.
But the top U.S. Republican said he remains confident that it will be done — somehow, some way.
“We never thought it was going to be easy,” Boehner said a day after the House passed a short-term funding bill that 54 of his 240 House Republican colleagues opposed.
Many of these Republicans — some veteran conservatives along with a number of newly elected lawmakers backed by the Tea Party — voted no because they felt that the $6 billion in proposed cuts over three weeks are woefully inadequate.
They also worry that the major policy changes they’re hoping to attach to a spending-cut bill this year will be thrown overboard. They include preventing the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases blamed for global warming and stopping implementation of President Barack Obama’s healthcare overhaul.
The Senate is expected to give final congressional approval to the House-passed measure by Friday, clearing the way for Obama to sign it into law. The House, Senate and the White House would then have until April 8 to reach agreement on another funding measure or face a government shutdown.
Democrats are hoping that Boehner leaves his Tea Party activists behind and cuts a deal with moderates to fund the government through Sept. 30.
This man makes me sick!! The only cuts that matter to him and the GOP are those that affect the poor and elderly. They take NOTHING from the rich.
Is “simple” really a euphemism for mentally deficient?