House Speaker John Boehner has succeeded in making the
largest cut to the bloated federal budget in American history. In
this he surpasses even the great Ronald Reagan, who still deserves
all honor and praise for defeating the Evil Empire and ushering in
tax reform and economic dynamism in political economy. The Speaker
has initiated what one can only hope is a rescue mission of
equivalent importance to the future of the Republic.
Speaker Boehner has managed to mix the best of an
insider’s understanding of the ways of Washington with the idealism
of his younger or newer caucus members who are the engine of this
drive for fiscal reform. The Speaker is the steady hand on the
tiller, the unflappable negotiator, and the captain of his party.
He maintains a cool head and hand while displaying a deep emotional
empathy with this moment in his life, career, and role at this
juncture in history.
Boehner has
managed to cut $38 billion from current budget levels —
roughly $78.5 below President Obama’s initial funding
request for 2011. This is a stunning accomplishment when one
reflects on the trajectory of incontinent spending, debt, and, most
recently, taxes that the Bush and Obama administrations have
visited on the American taxpayer and, even more irresponsibly, on
future generations of young families and workers.
Social conservatives will appreciate his dogged efforts to
defund the nation’s largest abortion abattoir and his successful
cutting off of similar funding for the District of Columbia. He
also restored the voucher program for school children in the
federal city that President Obama and the previous Democratic
Congress had sacrificed on the altar of the teachers’
unions.
The second oldest of 12 children, the son of a saloon
keeper from Cincinnati, Jesuit-educated and a small businessman,
Speaker Boehner is a classic Midwesterner in style, temperament and
instinct. Again, in this way he is similar to Reagan, a native of
Illinois. Unlike many of those carping at his fiscal conservatism,
he mopped floors and helped out at the family tavern to get through
school.
Yet, there still be dragons out there. Awaiting the
Speaker’s attention is the debate on raising the debt ceiling and,
even more portentous, the consequential battle over GOP Budget
Chairman Paul Ryan’s 2012 budget, the polar opposite of what the
President has proposed.
On this latter matter, Boehner deserves special credit for
not crowding, inhibiting, or otherwise holding back Chairman Ryan
in pushing his major budget, tax, and entitlement reforms which
would make Republicans of another era skittish. By delegating this
titanic effort to one of the GOP’s brightest lights, and supporting
him to the maximum extent possible, Boehner is preparing the ground
for the most significant public policy debate since World War
II.
These are difficult, seemingly intractable issues on the
horizon. But given the performance of John Boehner since becoming
Speaker of the House of Representatives, it is hard to imagine a
better, more seasoned, prudent and perspicacious man or woman
leading the party of reform and renewal. He has demonstrated these
traits since the beginning of his tenure.
With the rise of the Tea Party and John Boehner, the
Republicans are beneficiaries of a rare convergence of idealistic
energy and mature experience and deft political
craftsmanship.
