Posts Tagged ‘Dick Armey’
December 22nd, 2011 by John Feehery
You Can Lead A Horse to Water…
John Boehner has seen this movie before.
You have to feel for the Speaker.
He knows that it would have been smarter politically had the House Republicans taken up the Senate payroll tax bill, passed it and had the President sign it.
The Republicans would have then declared total victory, and then come back in two months and gotten another concession from the President.
The Keystone pipeline provision was a huge concession by Mr. Obama, and getting that done would have been enough to be plausibly happy.
But at the end of a session, when emotions run high, when Members lose a healthy sense of perspective, sometimes reason does not win out.
And let’s face it. The House Majority never, ever likes to be jammed by bipartisan action from the Senate.
I can think of a couple of examples when I worked in the House where we were furious with Senate action. One time, the Senate Republican leadership cut a secret deal that made President Bush’s tax cut half the size. Another time, the whole Senate passed legislation federalizing the TSA. A third time, the Senate passed a 9/11 Commission. Read more...
Tags: Braveheart, Dana Milbank, Dick Armey, Horse, John Boehner, water, William Wallace
Posted in Theory | No Comments »
September 7th, 2011 by John Feehery
Ev and Gerry started the whole response thing.
Everett Dirksen and Gerry Ford, the former Senate Republican leader from Illinois and the former House Minority Leader (and later President) from Michigan used to have a radio show broadcast from the Capitol.
They turned that radio show into a televised rebuttal to President Johnson’s 1966 State of the Union Address.
Dirksen, with his mop of white hair, and Ford, with his bald pate, must have been quite a sight in the years leading up to the Age of Aquarius. Dirksen was the one who famously said, “a billion here, and a billion there, and pretty soon you are talking real money.”
I could understand the frustration of the two Republican (and minority) leaders. Lyndon Johnson wasn’t much to tell the truth, and Republicans at the start of 1966 didn’t have any legislative power. Dirksen, a genius when it came to the political communication innovation, probably dreamed up the idea of a joint response, and a new idea was born: Let’s tell our side of the story. Read more...
Tags: Age of Aquarius, America, Ames Straw poll, assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Bob Livingston, Bob McDonnell, Bob Michel, Bobby Jindal, Congress, Denny Hastert, Dick Armey, Everett Dirksen, Gerry Ford, GOP, Government, House Republicans, Jennifer Dunn, Jim Wright, John Boehner, Lyndon Johnson, Michele Bachmann, Mike Mansfield, Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich, NFL, Obama, Paul Ryan, Politics, President Johnson’s 1966 State of the Union Address, President Obama, Presidential election, Republican, Richard Nixon, Robert Byrd, Ronald Reagan, Senate Republican leader from Illinois, spending, Steve Largent, White House
Posted in Economy, Financial Crisis, GOP, Government, History, Politics, Theory, election, speeches | No Comments »
July 27th, 2011 by John Feehery
John Boehner is doing an exceptional job as Speaker under extraordinarily tough times.
When I first started working in Congress, Tom Foley had just taken over from Jim Wright as Speaker of the House. Unlike the dictatorial Wright, Foley ran a decentralized process that gave too much power to Committee barons like Dan Rostenkowski, Jack Brooks and John Dingell.
Foley could never quite get the Chairmen to work together enough to overcome their jurisdictional squabbles, and Democrats faltered under the House Bank scandal, the Post Office debacle and a series of other damaging revelations about a Congress that was out of control.
When Newt Gingrich came to the Speaker’s Office, he leap-frogged over the gentlemanly Bob Michel (my former boss) who unfortunately announced his retirement before he could see the promised land of a Republican majority. Gingrich learned the lessons of the ineffective Foley, centralized power in his chambers, and bull-rushed an ambitious Contract with America legislative agenda. Along the way, Gingrich alienated some of the new Freshmen, his committee Chairmen, and some key members of the leadership, so much so that a few of them launched a failed coup against the embattled Speaker. Read more...
Tags: America, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Bob Michel, Congress, Conservatives, Dan Rostenkowski, Democrats, Denny Hastert, Dick Armey, George Bush, GOP, Government, Grand Bargain, House Republicans, Jack Brooks, Jim Wright, John Boehner, John Dingell, Mark Foley scandal, Nancy Pelosi, Newt Gingrich, President Obama, Republican, Republican Conference, Republicans, Speaker of the House, spending, taxes, Tea Party, the Iraq War, Tom DeLay, Tom Foley, White House
Posted in Bailouts, Economy, Financial Crisis, GOP, Government, History, Media, Politics, Promises, Reviews, Scandals, Theory, election, speeches, spending, taxes, war | No Comments »
June 3rd, 2011 by John Feehery
It is great to be here in New Hampshire.
I am not going to kid you. I need to win New Hampshire if I have any chance of winning the nomination to be President.
I have no chance in Iowa. Believe me. I know. Those folks hate me. I sprinkled that state with millions of dollars the last time I ran, and they weren’t buying what I was selling.
So, I have to win here.
I am not going to pull a Guiliani and wait until Florida. What an idiot! I hear he is back up here, nosing around. I hope Rudy runs. I hope he brings his third wife too. That plays well with the family values crowd.
I hear Sarah Palin is visiting the state too. I really hope she runs. She will get all of those tea-party votes that I will never get. I would rather she split the crazy vote so Pawlenty doesn’t win.
The Tea Party doesn’t like me very much. Well, screw ‘em. These guys don’t have the balls to call themselves Republican anymore. Most of these Tea Party organizations are run by flim-flam artists who are trying to find get rich quick schemes. Read more...
Tags: Americans, Barack Obama, Bible, Democrats, Dick Armey, George Bush, medicare, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan Medicare plan, preseidential election, Republican, Rudy Guiliani, Sarah Palin, Scott Brown, Tea Party, Tim Pawlenty
Posted in Economy, Financial Crisis, Foreign Relations, GOP, Government, History, Media, Politics, Presidential election, Promises, Religion, Theory, election, health care, spending, taxes | 1 Comment »
March 5th, 2010 by John Feehery
I hate it when David Brooks writes a column on a subject that I have been researching on and planning to write about for weeks. And he did it to me this morning, with a great column about “The Wall Mart Hippies” (http://budurl.com/2r5v).
His central thesis is that tea-party crowd is not really conservative at all. “Both the New Left and the Tea Party movement are radically anticonservative. Conservatism is built on the idea of original sin — on the assumption of human fallibility and uncertainty. To remedy our fallen condition, conservatives believe in civilization — in social structures, permanent institutions and just authorities, which embody the accumulated wisdom of the ages and structure individual longings. That idea was rejected in the 1960s by people who put their faith in unrestrained passion and zealotry. The New Left then, like the Tea Partiers now, had a legitimate point about the failure of the ruling class. But they ruined it through their own imprudence, self-righteousness and naïve radicalism. The Tea Partiers will not take over the G.O.P., but it seems as though the ’60s political style will always be with us — first on the left, now the right.” Read more...
Tags: Abby Hoffman, Barack Obama, Conservatives, David Brooks, democratic process, Dick Armey, Edmund Burke, Glen Beck, James O’Keefe, RUSH LIMBAUGH, Russell Kirk, Tea Party, The New Left
Posted in Government, Politics, Radicalism | 7 Comments »
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