Just Like Last Year John Boehner Promises That There Won’t Be a Government Shutdown

John Boehner is back to making promises he can’t keep by doing the same thing that he did last year. Speaker Boehner is promising that there won’t be a government shutdown.

The Hill reported,

And Speaker John Boehner and his leadership team are ruling out a repeat of October, when Texas Sen. Ted Cruz led a conservative rebellion and forced the government to close for two weeks in a bid to defund ObamaCare.
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“We’re not going to shoot ourselves in the foot and jeopardize our chances of winning the Senate and gaining more seats in the House,” a senior GOP aide said Thursday. The shutdown chatter from some conservatives “clearly isn’t helpful, but I’m not anticipating there will be a groundswell of similar sentiment from a large chunk of our conference.”

The problem is that House Republican leadership doesn’t know or understand their own members. If Boehner understood his caucus, he wouldn’t have to face humiliation after humiliation caused by the defeat of his own legislation.

The reason why anyone should be skeptical of the Republican promises is that Boehner said the exact same thing before the government shutdown last year. Boehner spent months last year publicly proclaiming that there would be no government shutdown only to see Ted Cruz led chaos break out in the Republican House that the Speaker was powerless to stop.

Rep. Boehner’s words and promises mean nothing because he is powerless. He has no control over his right-wing billionaire funded caucus. They do what they want. When they feel like it, they ignore John Boehner. This is why Speaker Boehner’s promises of no shutdown at the end of September are meaningless.

If House Republicans want to avoid a government shutdown, they are going to have to fund the government. There are already a group of Republicans in Congress who have gone back on their original promise of passing a short-term funding bill because they don’t want Democrats to have another chance to set the funding in 2014. Republicans are looking at their potential takeover of the Senate, and they want their potential Republican majority in the Senate to work with them on a funding bill in 2015.

There is already division among House Republicans on the issue of the length of the continuing resolution. The House is only in session for ten days in September, so if Republicans keep fighting among themselves, the government could be shut down by the end of next month.

Boehner’s promise isn’t enough to overcome the dysfunctional dynamics of the Republican led House. After he has failed to deliver time and again, only a fool would take Speaker Boehner’s word seriously. No matter what Rep. Boehner says, all of the dynamics are in place for a government shutdown.

Jason Easley

Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.

Awards and  Professional Memberships

Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association