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Speaker of the House Boehner Announces Resignation
halfEvilTech writes: House Speaker John A. Boehner announced Friday morning that he will resign at the end of October. The Washington Post reports: "The resignation will end a nearly five-year reign as speaker, allowing House Republicans to approve a short-term government funding bill that will avert a shutdown of federal agencies. Boehner's hold on the speaker's gavel had grown increasingly unsteady amid threats from more than 30 Republicans that they would force a no-confidence vote in his speaker's position, which would have forced him to rely on Democratic votes in order to remain in charge. Several GOP members told The Washington Post that Boehner would step down from Congress Oct. 31."
He might have been Republican in name but seemed to vote more like a democrat.
If you're not with us you're against us, eh? If you look at a graph, he's moderate. "More like a Democrat"? You can be moderate, you know. For a site that rails against the two party system, the comments seem to want to reinforce it.
that this will leave the insane tea partiers in charge of the asylum that is the House of Representatives. It's like the last adult is leaving the room.
You mean like President Ronald Reagan who raised taxes 11 times, cooperated with Tip O'Neil and the Democrats to get things done, negotiated with the Soviets and the Iranians, and granted amnesty to illegal immigrants?
Reid has already announced his departure. Too many career politicians. We need new blood.
Expected outcome: End to gridlock, new era of bipartisan cooperation, intelligent debate, and compromise.
Nobody expects that. The reason he is being pushed out, is that he is perceived by the right as compromising too much.
Don't you know? If you're a moderate, then you are like a Democrat. The Republican party is far-right extremist, and "the left" no longer exists. Even "socialist" Bernie Sanders is only about as far left as Eisenhower.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
You say "gridlock" like it's a bad thing.
Every time Congress does anything, more of our rights and more of our money disappear.
They can all take a good long vacation, if you ask me.
Too many repubs conveniently gloss over the facts with their vaunted Reagan. Someone with his record would be considered the worst kind of RINO by the repub base today. If could, I'd be +1'ing this.
Boehner is a devout Catholic.
Boehner invited the Pope to speak before Congress.
During the Pope's address to the Congress, an address that specifically rebuked many Republican stances* Boehner has supported, Boehner was visibly crying.
The day after the Pope's address, Boehner announces his resignation.
We should wait and see what he actually does next following his resignation, but a part of me can't help but hope that he saw the light finally, that he saw the discrepancies between the faith he claimed, and the party he was part of for so long. One can hope.
(*yes I know he chastised both sides)
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
That would be perfect if Congress didn't have to vote once or twice a year for the government to stay open.
Unfortunately, they seem incapable of that even.
Obama will veto anything that the Republicans do anyway, even if it were to get past a filibuster in the Senate.
Anything? Obama said he will veto if a bill has something to defund Planned Parenthood. If the Republicans let go of the whole defund Planned Parenthood thing, Obama more than likely will go along.
It's a shame that heavily edited video came out. PP mostly does women's health screening: pap smears, breast exams, free birth control so they don't have to get abortions, and other free health services that have nothing to do with abortion - all for poor women and it's 99% of what they do. PP does very very little abortions. But unfortunately, the anti-abortionists insist on lying about and exaggerating their abortion services.
But I don't care. See, I'm well to do. If a woman in my family want's an abortion and it's illegal, we'll hop on a plane and get it done where it's legal and there's not a goddamn thing in the World anyone can do about it.
Banning abortion just commits poor women to have their babies.
And the adoption myth. Adoption is viable for white healthy babies. The rest get thrown into the foster care system or into abusive families who are gaming the welfare system.
Oh, wait. His replacement might be worse and the House of Representatives may get even less done. Now, it'll be interesting whether Boehner has lined up a job with an existing lobbying company or will form his own company. He'll likely make many millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars per year no matter what he does.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
and meanwhile thousands of families lose their livelihood to shutdowns and furloughs because 535 people can't work together to get anything done for the 320 million people that sent them there to do a job they refuse to do.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Reagan also cut more taxes than anyone in history (dangerous facts)
No president has ever cut taxes or raised them. That's the responsibility of Congress. The President can suggest tax policies and can veto them but ultimately it is up to Congress to actually affirm or deny them. Now admittedly the President does have substantial influence on tax policy but saying Reagan or any other president raised taxes is technically incorrect. You could correctly say that he supported a tax increase or opposed one and that would be factual.
"... amid threats from more than 30 Republicans that they would force a no-confidence vote in his speaker's position..."
Wow! I never knew politics could be as exciting as a Star Wars movie!
I mean, yeah, the most boring part of the most boring one, but still...
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
A large and increasing portion of Americans realize that their financial health is threatened by immigrants and their very existence is threatened by Muslim terrorists.
Please elaborate on exactly how "Muslim terrorists" constitute an existential threat to America. More people die if bathtub falls and choking than die in terrorist attacks.
Many smaller, less stable countries deal with far larger rates of things like suicide bombings without their societies being destroyed. Is America that fragile?
Gotta call Poe's Law on this one...
I wish the people who wave the constitution would occasionally read the damn thing
The same goes for the Bible, but I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you.
Speaking as a Democrat, I'm happy to see that the R's gave in on abortion, funded women's health care, stopped oil subsidies, went along with a single payer health care system, cut back on war funding, funded basic infrastructure, etc etc etc. Oh wait, that never happened.
What did the Democrats get that they wanted? I'm dying to know. That's a big statement. Let's see it backed up.
I always get a kick out of this partisan "give them everything" BS that's always quoted. The essence of deal making is no one gets everything they want. There are people on the right like yourself that fail to acknowledge one simple fact. That is that the republicans do not have the votes necessary to override the democrats against their wishes. The solution you propose is to simply refuse to play as if that's a solution. A solution with only one outcome, you shutdown government, put millions out of work, cost millions more and damage the US economy in the process in the hope that the Democrats will roll over and give you everything you want.
So Boehner is going to do the smart thing and quit before the Republican's shut down government yet again and piss off even more Voters with the resulting cost of loss of seats and less power for the party. You and the republicans like you represent the decline and eventual destruction of the republican party.
My own financial health is far more threatened by outsourcing, H1-B visas, and the threat of removing my affordable healthcare than immigrants (those people this country was built out of), and the Americans in the cars around me each day are many hundreds of times more likely to kill me than any Muslim terrorist. America suffers more Christian terrorist attacks every year than Muslim terrorist attacks within our borders, but since Christians are the majority in this country, the news refuses to phrase it that way.
There are a couple issues the republicans have gone so far to the right that they actually accomplished a far Left policy goal. Berny Sanders has been trying to shutdown the EXIM (Export/Import) Bank for almost a decade and was always thwarted by the Republicans and blue dog democrats. In their effort to be as far right as possible the Tea Party Republicans actually accomplished one of the Sanders policy goals. It's almost Ironic if it weren't funny and tragic at the same time. We've already lost 1000 jobs shutting down a bank that made the treasury money.
Obamacare would have done much to reduce the need for Planned Parenthood's rural healthcare services had states actually expanded Medicaid as the law required. Because so many states with Republican controlled legislatures and governors offices refused to support the medicaid expansion planned parenthood's services are still needed by many poor women.
Your argument is without merit until the medicaid expansion is fulfilled.
Remember the old "You don't have to be a brain to be boss, just an Asshole." story? The Republicans apparently adopted that as gospel truth... For those of you unfamiliar with it:
THE BRAIN SAID : Since I control everything and do all the work I should be boss.
THE FEET SAID: Since I carry man where he wants to go and get him to do what the Brain wants, I should be boss.
THE HANDS SAID: Since I must do all the work and earn all the money to keep all the rest of you going, I should be boss.
THE EYES SAID: Since I must look out for all of you and tell you where danger lurks, I should be boss.
And so it went with the Heart, the Ears, and the Lungs.
Finally the Asshole spoke up and demanded that he be boss. All the other parts laughed and laughed at the idea of an asshole being boss.
The Asshole was so angered that he blocked himself off and refused to function. Soon the Brain was feverish, the Eyes crossed and ached, the Feet were too weak to walk, the Hands hung limply at his side, the Heart and Lungs struggled to keep going.
All pleaded with the Brain to relent and let the Asshole be boss, and so it happened. All parts did the work and the Asshole just bossed and passed out a lot of shit.
MORAL: You don't have to be a brain to be boss, just an Asshole.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Kim Davis is a Democrat.
Not any more!
It just kills me when I see comments like this, especially when they get modded up. You people have no idea how much the government does that would immediately cease if the government completely shutdown. You might miss border control with unregulated crossing of the US borders, you might miss consular assistance if you're in a jam abroad, you might miss the justice department enforcing a breach of contract you are involved in, you might miss the coast guard if your ship sinks in US territorial waters, you might miss the FAA when suddenly there is no air traffic control. These are all things that are inherently government functions that would cease immediately if the government just stopped. And this is only what I could think of off the top of my head in 60 seconds--the max amount of my life I'm willing to waste responding to drivel on the internet.
Well, while you can get by without meat and poultry inspections for a little bit, and without water quality monitoring for awhile, or game and fisheries monitoring for awhile, or atmospheric tracking and monitoring for awhile, or auditing financial institutions for legal compliance, there would be a time afterwards when stuff like that would become meaningful again. None of that stuff showed up in the government basket out of thin air. It's nice to think that it can all be burned down and nobody would care, but the truth of it is that there are things the government does (most of what it does, actually) which private industry does not or cannot do reliably or without undue influence. Yep, there's also a lot of paperwork and inefficiency, too.
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
The Constitution hasn't been enforced in a long time.
As originally written? Damn good thing, too. Slaves counting three fifths of a person, no women's suffrage, no birthright citizenship, appointed Senators, poll taxes: the original constitution was a fucking shambles, and took quite a few amendments to get functioning properly as the foundation for a modern government.
You must have missed Obama going out of his way to refuse to negotiate with the Republicans over the last government shutdown.
And why should he? The "government shutdown" is Congress refusing to pay for bills Congress ran up. What possible benefit to the POTUS is there in playing with them on this? If they were offering something the Democrats might like in exchange it might be different. But sticking a gun to your own head and demanding my car keys isn't going to get you a "negotiation".
No one should ever negotiate on the debt ceiling. The time to talk about spending too much is when you want to open the wallet and buy things. It's a bit late to for that discussion when your new TV is sitting in the living room and you're wondering if you want to bother paying the credit card bill for it that just arrived.
Because contraceptives have other uses than just preventing pregnancy. For example, oral contraceptives lower women's ovarian cancer risk, clears up acne, lighter menstruation, reduction in PMS symptoms, relief from endometriosis, and relief from polycystic ovarian syndrome.
They also serve as a pretty effective form of birth control. But when a woman is advised by her doctor to use oral contraceptives for any of the above conditions (or anything else), and reasonably wants them to be covered by her insurance, she gets Rush Limbaugh calling her a slut. Personally, I think if we can manage to cover boner pills with medical insurance, we can probably cover birth control pills also, regardless of the reason a woman wants to take them.