Mere moments into House Speaker John Boehner’s press conference on Friday discussing his resignation on October 30, the “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC were quick to chastise conservative House members on Boehner’s “far right flank” that compose the “no compromise crowd” and “some grassroots conservatives who happened to be elected members of the House.”
During the presser itself, CBS News congressional correspondent Nancy Cordes told Boehner that he’s “made no secret of your frustration with some members of your far right flank and some outside groups” considering “[y]ou’ve used words like knucklehead and some other words we probably can't use on television.”
Cutting away part way through the question and answer portion, NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt told viewers that Boehner was “accelerating his plan to step down at the end of the year under pressure from the far right of his party for not being aggressive enough, not taking a bigger stand against the funding of Planned Parenthood, and so deciding that at the end of the month he will resign Congress.”
Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd then joined Holt for the time remaining in the special report and ruled that Boehner “put his party before himself” and by leaving, “he guarantees the government is not going to get shut down.”
Todd took the second half of his brief take to put this into “the big picture” in which he explained that “some grassroots conservatives who happened to be elected members of the House have enough sway to push Boehner out” and it’s this “dynamic we're watching in the presidential primary.”
Continuing on that 2016 theme, Todd stated:
When you are trying to explain what is powering Trump, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, all these outsiders and how harsh they have been, a Ted Cruz today celebrating John Boehner being pushed out. The same dynamic that is creating this wedge inside the Republican presidential establishment versus the outsiders where the outsiders look like they have the upper hand, that's what drove John Boehner out. This is a larger issue inside this Republican Party that we're going to see continue to play out on the trail.
ABC also participated in the blasting of conservatives with chief White House correspondent Jonathan Karl ruled:
You have a group of Republicans saying who want to oppose him for speaker, want to oppose him the far right willing to say they wanted to shut the government down if Planned Parenthood wasn't funded. Boehner thought that was a terrible fight to have.
Speaking with chief anchor George Stephanopoulos, Karl hyped that while Boehner was “extremely popular” in the GOP conference, there’s consistently been “30 to 40 Republicans who absolutely have no loyalty to him whatsoever and who want to push the kind of no-compromise crowd and those were the ones that it ultimately forced this decision.”
ABC News analyst Cokie Roberts found it similarly pertinent to pour more gasoline on the proverbial fire attacking conservatives for not compromising with President Obama (read: giving him everything he wants):
This is what gives strength to the people that think it compromises a bad thing. That combined with the Republican presidential candidates who are out talking about fighting the government, fighting the President, 72 percent of Republican primary voters in a recent poll say that they're against the Republican leadership of Congress and now those people have a lot more power.
