What made John Boehner cry as he looked at the new Congress? Relief, weariness, affection, or hurt, or the sense that he wasn’t in a safe place? He had just been reëlected speaker, although there were a dozen votes against him—a high number, as these votes go. Maybe they were tears of resentment at the fun that Joe Biden seemed to be having swearing in senators. (He hugged a lot of people.) “Public service was never meant to be an easy living,” Boehner said. “So if you have come here to see your name in lights or to pass off political victory as accomplishment, you have come to the wrong place. The door is behind you.”
Boehner was forgetting all the members of his party who pass off sheer acts of sabotage as accomplishments—who act like the door is there to be torn off its hinges. There were a dozen Republican freshmen who began their first full day in Congress by voting against a bill that would help victims of Sandy rebuild their homes. Fifty-five other Republicans joined them; no Democrats opposed the bill. Nine Republicans voted against both Sandy relief and Boehner. One of the no votes on Sandy relief was that of Paul Ryan, who, just a little over two months ago, had himself photographed packing supplies supposedly bound for devastated parts of New Jersey. Maybe he’d been thinking about the official tally of electoral votes, also held in Congress on Friday, and it made him grumpy. (The state electoral ballots were presented in mahogany boxes.) But there has been every indication that Ryan plans to run again, at the top of the ticket. Is he planning to raise any money in New York or New Jersey? Perhaps it was more important, after he’d voted yes on the fiscal-cliff deal, to prove to fellow-Republicans that he could be as extreme as any of them. It was a vote for his own madness.
What is especially discouraging about the sixty-seven no votes is that the bill in question wasn’t even the larger sixty-billion-dollar relief package—the one that was supposed to be voted on by the last Congress, before Boehner called off the vote. It was just $9.7 billion to let the National Flood Insurance Program borrow enough to pay out claims to people who had signed-and-sealed flood-insurance policies with paid-up premiums; in that sense, it hardly counts as “relief.” There may be all sorts of flaws with the insurance program, but this was a matter of letting a government entity meet its obligations, not a matter of charity.
The G.O.P. wasn’t just being delinquent about the Sandy vote; they have actual philosophical objections to dealing with one of the worst disasters we’ve had in years (and, as Alex Koppelman writes, to preparing for future ones). If sixty-seven Republicans had no problem voting against the $9.7 billion, despite witnessing the anger in their own party at the delay, how many will find it easy to oppose the full package? More than two months have passed since Sandy.
This doesn’t bode well for the coming debt-ceiling fight, or for the willingness of the new Congress to not burn the place down. Even the vote against Boehner appears to have been more of a group tantrum than a rebellion. (According to the National Review’s Robert Costa, a dramatic high point came when Michele Bachmann “slowly strolled down the aisle” to cast a late vote for the Speaker.) The door did let in fewer Republicans for the hundred and thirteenth Congress; it is being talked about as the most diverse ever (those points are related). Maybe, if the door opens a little more, rationality will slip in.
Photograph by Pete Marovich/Bloomberg/Getty.
