After the shock resignation of John Boehner, should you fear and dread the rise of a revitalized right wing in Congress? Sunday's New York Times front page featured a "news analysis" on the surprise retirement announcement of House Speaker John Boehner, who's been under fire from some GOP members who found him too passive in the procedural battles against President Obama. The takeaway from Jonathan Weisman and Michael Shear's label-heavy story was encapsulated in the headline: "The Post-Boehner Congress and Washington's Sense of Dread ."
Fear and dread among those who hew to the conventional wisdom dispersed by the liberal media, at least.
At the White House, a stunned President Obama expressed hope for bipartisan progress as turmoil among Republicans ended Representative John A. Boehner’s speakership.
On Capitol Hill, the conservatives who had again felled one of their leaders rallied to name the terms for the next person to wield the speaker’s gavel.
And on Wall Street, fear set in at the prospect of another showdown over the government’s ability to pay its debt, support its export businesses and simply keep its doors open.
Mr. Boehner’s sudden announcement on Friday that he will step down from the speakership and leave the House on Oct. 30 has thrown Washington into deep uncertainty. His resignation is likely to herald an even more combative stretch in the nation’s capital, emboldening conservatives to defy Mr. Obama on looming decisions regarding spending, debt and taxes.
Some in Congress and the White House hold out hope that Mr. Boehner’s departure and the election of a new speaker will break the fever among conservatives , who have been plotting his downfall for over a year, and grant his replacement a grace period. Mr. Obama promised Friday to “reach out immediately” to the next speaker to begin working on the nation’s problems.
But more prevalent is a sense of dread that an already bitter and divisive political atmosphere is about to get even worse.
The Republican presidential primary has been dominated by outsiders like Donald J. Trump, Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson, who have castigated their party’s leadership in Washington. Now, with conservatives claiming Mr. Boehner’s demise as a political victory, many expect his successor to face tremendous pressure to bring that combative spirit to the halls of Congress, and to instigate a showdown with the president over budget limits and the debt ceiling at the end of the year.
Uncompromising conservatives on and off Capitol Hill are demanding the elevation of one of their own to confront the president at every turn. And lawmakers who had pressed to get rid of Mr. Boehner warned Friday that they would not buckle in their defense of those spending limits, even in response to veto threats by Mr. Obama that could lead to a Christmastime stalemate and government shutdown.
The Times leaned hard on the "conservative" label, while finding unbiased sources like Obama adviser David Axelrod to criticize them.
The new speaker, elevated to the country’s third-highest constitutional post by a conservative rebellion , will face demands from those same rebels to extract concessions from a president who has little to lose by standing firm. At stake for conservatives will be the one clear victory they have scored since the Tea Party revolution of 2010: firm statutory limits on spending signed into law in 2011, which Mr. Obama has said he can no longer abide.
In turn, the Republican Party, already wrestling with the effect of Mr. Trump’s populist insurgency on its chances at the White House, could find itself with the political challenge of justifying to moderate voters yet another Washington crisis, prompted by an even more obstreperous, confrontational House majority.
“Having been hoisted to the speaker’s chair by what was essentially a revolt,” David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Mr. Obama, predicted, the next speaker will not have the freedom to compromise with the president.
The Times kept up the theme of immature conservatives irresponsibly "egg[ing] on the rebellion."
Already, those who have egged on the rebellion are showing no willingness to give the next speaker much room for compromise. Before the news of Mr. Boehner’s decision had even sunk in, conservative knives were out for the heir apparent, Kevin McCarthy of California, the House majority leader.
Weisman and Shear portrayed the Tea Party as bloodthirsty looking for scalps.
Not content with one political casualty, the Tea Party Patriots created FireTheLeader.com on Friday to drum up support to replace Mr. McConnell in the Senate leadership. Mr. Schiliro compared conservatives in Washington to people sipping water from an “unquenchable cup.” He said they would not be satisfied by Mr. Boehner’s fall.
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The outside conservative groups that Mr. Boehner had openly clashed with, and thought he had bested, claimed victory on Friday and immediately began organizing to elect a more strident conservative to lead the House through Mr. Obama’s final 15 months.
"Strident" means loud, harsh, and generally unpleasant. Did those groups really look for a "strident" conservative, or is that just the paper's unsympathetic spin?
Such efforts may not block Mr. McCarthy’s path, but they could force his campaign for the gavel farther to the right. Worries about his right flank helped prompt him last year to embrace the demise of the Export-Import Bank, the 81-year-old federal export credit agency, which has long had bipartisan support but has of late become a target for conservatives.
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Hours after Mr. Boehner’s announcement, Representative Roger Williams, Republican of Texas and one of the conservative hard-liners, warned , “I hope all Republicans, including those in the Senate, are listening to what grass-roots conservatives are saying: It is time for conservative leadership and conservative principles.”
"Hard line" is apparently the new preferred swear word for the New York Times to use against conservatives. It also made Jason Horowitz's Sunday A1 story, the latest shaping of the Pope's trip to America into a weapon against the U.S. political right: "A Pastoral Pope, Slipping Conservatives' Grasp ."
In corners of this church’s triennial World Meeting of Families, at meetings titled “Homosexuality in the Family” and “The Family: A Home for the Wounded Heart,” that hard line has left bruises.
Sunday's report on the Pope by Patrick Healy, "Politics and Philosophy Clash Where the Pope Urges an Embrace of Refugees ," also mentioned "hard-line conservative voters " who favor national security concerns over taking in Middle East refugees.
