John Boehner doesn't even pretend anymore to seek a bipartisan solution to the Sequester and the automatic budget cuts that will follow. On Thursday, February 28, 2013, on the day before the Sequester was scheduled to take place if no agreement was reached, Boehner halted all talks and negotiations to head off the automatics cuts the Sequestor required.
John Boehner said " the revenue issue is now closed", and walked out of the House of Representatives to the cheers of fellow Republicans. On what moral ground does a legislative body of the United States Of America cheer a congressional leader who refuses to lead? It is easy to run away from a difficult fight and to refrain from making difficult decisions. Any Coward can do that. But it takes courage, intelligences, and guts to stay in the difficult fight and make difficult decisions.
Even more important, how can a legislative body of the United States Of America applaud and take pride in seeing America head to more difficult times? The answer is clear. These Republicans want America to fail. And they want poor, working class and middle class Americans to suffer. They revel in the possibility of a financial disaster. For four days, House leader Boehner refused to even allow a vote on a replacement bill to avoid the Sequester. Again, the reason is clear. Boehner and the conservative Tea Party Republicans influenced wing of the Republican Party doesn't want to avoid the sequester; they want it to happen. And those thinking Republicans who know better and don't want it to happen are too cowardly to speak out against it for fear of being ostracized by the bullying no action leaders of their party.
So the GOP insists on applaud a leader who doesn't lead, cheering and feeling smug and proud in the process. But this isn't leadership; it smacks more of juvenile buffoonery--feeling smug, intelligent, and irrepressible when you're doing something stupid.
It reminds us of a time when young black boys and girls in the south endured the slangs and jeers of racists whites because they were tired of going to segregated underfunded Negro public schools. This included young girls like Dorothy Counts, the 15 year old daughter of a Johnson C. Smith College professor. She was the first Black to attent the all-white Harding High School in Charlotte. Boehner's Republicans are very much like the grinning jeerin boys in the seats behind Ms. Counts in the photo above, feel good, smart, smug, and irrepressible while doing something that is very stupid and very wrong.
There may be an upside to all of this. The people who will suffer the most from these automatic cuts are the poor and working class Redstate voters who receive more in government assistance than they pay in taxes. These are conservative Republican voters who put these cheerleaders of chaos in office. Perhaps by 2014 they will see the error of their ways and vote the leaders of the "Party of No" out of office. This of course assumes that Bobby Jindal is right and the Republican party, at least the voters, will stop being the stupid party.
Or maybe they will just secede from the union as they promised they would do when President Barack Obama was re-elected. Would that be good for America?