Boner Republicans

She Said,He Said

SHE SAID -- Conservatives Keep Losing to Leadership. Can They Change the Game? [...] The problem for members of the tea party is that the game is rigged against them, as they are repeatedly outmaneuvered and outsmarted procedurally. What they've found—and what Sen. Tom Cotton's controversial letter to Iran this week has proven—is that they're much better off taking the fight away from the House and Senate floors. The vast majority of conservative firebrands have only been in Congress for a few years; House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have been here for decades. Every rule, every parliamentary trick that conservatives could use to stick it to their leadership, Boehner and McConnell have already thought of it and found another legislative tool to stop them. [...]Sarah Mimms continued HE SAID Mimms is right that leadership is getting the better of these fights. But it isn’t just that leadership has a better command of the rules. It’s not really as though if conservatives had more procedural tricks up their sleeve they could have changed the outcome of any of the recent fights. Leadership didn’t have a better knowledge of the rules, they were the only people who were in position to pull the trigger on the rules. The reality is this: conservatives lost every meaningful fight for the next two years when they failed to oust Rep. John Boehner and Sen. Mitch McConnell. In other words, it isn’t that conservatives pulled the wrong plays. It’s that the wrong people were in the wrong positions. No amount of “experience” in the chamber is going to change the fact that as long as Boehner and McConnell are pulling the levers, we are going to continue to lose important fights. It’s nice to have a plan to get out in front of fights from a PR perspective, as Cotton has done with the Iran issue, but ultimately the corporate crony lapdogs are going to win all the important fights until they are no longer in the position to win them. [...] Leon H. Wolf continued Before anyone pleads party unity, rebut this first:  Dems vow to protect Boehner from conservative coup