Boehner Elected Speaker, Ushers in New Republican House

DCCC chair: Our 2012 agenda will be making Pelosi Speaker again
The reknowned political satirist Tom Lehrer once declared that Henry Kissinger’s Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 made political satire redundant.  After reading about the DCCC’s new strategy to win back the House in 2012, I must admit that for the first time in my life I feel a bit of sympathy with the general sentiment.  Guess who Rep. Steve Israel, the DCCC chair, wants to make as his poster girl for 2012? House Democrats’ goal is to make Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) the Speaker of ...

Could John Boehner be a Great Speaker?
I have long been Bullish on the man who is now Speaker of the House.  Perhaps, it’s that John Boehner and I grew up not far from one another, he in the Working Class Cincinnati suburb of Reading, I in the more affluent enclave Wyoming just west of the Republican leader’s hometown. Cincinnati folk have always struck me as hard-working, decent Americans, largely respectful of their peers and generally treating people from different backgrounds with dignity.  It is no wonder that th...

Conservative leader urges House to follow through on spending
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Influential conservative Dick Armey on Thursday urged the new House to take leadership in reducing the size of government and reining in spending by cutting "obnoxious programs" out of the Budget. Armey, a Republican and Veteran Washington insider who was the House Majority Leader in the late 1990's, has emerged as a force within the Tea Party movement. His FreedomWorks political action group has given direction, know-how, and financial support to many within Congress' rec...

GOP fundraises off specter of another term of 'Speaker Pelosi'
House Republicans' campaign arm sought on Thursday to raise money off of the possibility that Nancy Pelosi could become House Speaker again someday. In an email sent out to supporters, National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) Executive Director Guy Harrison "urgently" warns readers about a comment Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) Chairman Steve Israel (N.Y.) made on Wednesday. "The new Chairman of the DCCC, Rep. Steve Israel, has decided to take a page from the NRCC...

Congressional Hostages
One of the things new House Speaker John Boehner said he intended to do was to give up some of the power the majority holds in the House, to spread around some of the power he and his party holds. He didn't give out too many details, but the general idea was to make the House a bit less of a pure Democracy, and more of a republic -- majority rule, but recognition of the rights of the minority. Kind of like the Senate, in a sense, where a simple majority isn't enough to do much, but needs a sup...

Ms. Magazine Pelosi Cover Takes A Dig At Time And Newsweek (PHOTOS)
Ms. magazine is hitting back at Time and Newsweek for putting John Boehner on their covers after he became the presumptive Speaker of the House in the wake of the 2010 Midterm Elections--and they're doing it by putting someone those magazines never featured on their covers during her four years as Speaker: Nancy Pelosi. The cover line? "The Woman Time and Newsweek Won't Put On Their Covers." PHOTO: Pelosi herself mentioned this discrepancy to the New York Times' Deborah Solomon in a November...

Speaker Boehner Dismisses CBOs Report Health Care Repeal Increases Deficit
ABC News’ John R. Parkinson reports:  Speaker of the House John Boehner dismissed a report by the Congressional Budget Office that found that repealing the Health Care law would increase the federal Deficit and warned that the “best Health Care system in the world is going to go down the drain” if Congress fails to Repeal the law. Earlier Thursday, the Congressional Budget Office released a preliminary analysis that the Repeal of the Health Care Reform law, including reduced spend

Underwhelmed by Speaker Boehner
Bill Daley: Is it about competence or ideology? Is Darrell Issa the new Joe McCarthy? Nancy Pelosi spoke of combating Climate Change, ensuring college affordability, expanding access to Health Care, ending the war in Iraq. Newt Gingrich envisioned a Balanced Budget amendment, welfare reform, Tax Cuts, Deregulation, term limits. John Boehner promised... well, not very much. The 112th Congress, he said, will not "kick the can" or "fall short." It will be "the people's House," a place where "we ca...

Conservative leader urges House to follow through on spending
Armey, a Republican and Veteran Washington insider who was the House Majority Leader in the late 1990's, has emerged as a force within the Tea Party movement. His FreedomWorks political action group has given direction, know-how, and financial support to many within Congress' recent wave of rookie conservative members. "Reduce the size of the government," he urged the new Congress. "It's big. It's obnoxious. It's counterproductive. Being in control of this monster that has been out of control, ...

Bachmann intel post about politics?
The country has a new guardian for its National Security secrets: Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN). The outspoken Minnesota congresswoman, and Tea Party favorite, has been tapped by House Speaker John Boehner for a coveted slot on the House Intelligence Committee, giving Bachmann a new role as overseer of the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community, her office confirmed today. The move comes at a time when Bachmann is seeking to burnish her national securit...

Congress to Tackle Healthcare, Filibuster Rules
On Wednesday, congressional observers were treated to a spectacle which used to be rare—a changeover in power at the House of Representatives. Both the House and the Senate swore in new members, and the new 242-seat Republican majority in the House handily elected Ohio Representative John Boehner to become Speaker of the House. In between raucous cheers and some campaign-style Rhetoric from both sides, now-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi handed Boehner the gavel and watched him give h...

Obama challenges Republicans on US debt
Newly empowered US Republicans faced stiff early challenges as President Barack Obama pressed them to raise the US Debt Limit and his Democratic Senate allies vowed to defend his policies. One day after Republicans took over the House of Representatives, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner formally asked politicians to let the US government to borrow more money, the opening shot in a political war over the giant US Debt. Geithner warned in a letter to senior members of Congress that failure to r...

And on the second day, they read
Day Two of Republican control of the U.S. House of Representatives was highlighted with a reading of the 223-year-old Constitution — the document that formed the American government and guides it to this day. It’s often a raucous scene on the House floor. Today, it was raucous in the visitors’ gallery, when a woman calling herself “Theresa” disrupted the recitation of the Constitution at the exact point in which a lawmaker read that the president must be a “na...

Democrats Turned Away From Pelosi in Record Numbers in Ceremonial Vote
The abandonment of Rep. Nancy Pelosi by 19 Democrats in the pro-forma vote for speaker of the House marked a breakdown in party loyalty of historic measure, according to the Washington Post. Not since 1913, when 23 Republicans bolted from the GOP's speaker nominee, has a Party Leader suffered so many defections, Congressional Research Service records show. Of the 19 Democrats who didn't support Pelosi, one voted "present" and the other 18 cast Protest ballots for some other Democratic House memb...

Is Congress Listening to the American People?
Elected representatives are clearly talking more and more these days about listening to the American People. This is particularly true for the new Speaker of the House, John Boehner. As Politico put it in their Wednesday morning edition: “John Boehner will take the Speaker’s gavel with a commitment to restoring the House as an institution focused on listening to the American People.” The Washington Post reported that Boehner told reporters outside his apartment on Wednesday ...

Boehner: Transparency In House Subject To My Discretion
How "open" will House Speaker John Boehner's (R-OH) more-open House of Representatives be? That's up to John Boehner. At his first Press Conference as House Speaker Thursday morning, Boehner cautioned that the implementation of the GOP's transparency promise will be left to his discretion. That includes the Repeal of the Job Killing Health Care Law Act -- which will be expedited to the floor without amendment, and will ignore CBO's warning that it will significantly increase the Deficit. "I d...

Health care repeal: Democrats' dilemma or GOP overreach?
The best of the best of state-based political blogs -- as of April 2009. With the House set to vote on a Repeal of the Health Care bill next week, the drama is in the details. Why? Because the bill is 100 percent symbolic; it will not pass the (still) Democratic-led Senate, and even if it did, Republicans could expect a lightning-fast Veto from President Obama . (This is his major legislative initiative, after all). Strategists on both sides of the issue acknowledge that the Repeal effort is pur...

Boehner: Budget office "entitled to their opinion" on health care repeal's deficit impact
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Thursday defended House Republicans' efforts to Repeal the national Health Care law, disputing the accuracy of a preliminary Congressional Budget Office estimate that a Repeal of the law would add $230 billion to the National Debt through 2021. "I do not believe that repealing the job-killing Health Care law will increase the Deficit," Boehner said at a Capitol press conference the day after the GOP formally regained the House majority. "CBO is entitled to ...

Boehner elected House speaker as 112th Congress convenes
Rep. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), taking the gavel Wednesday as the new speaker of the House, promised to work for Fiscal Responsibility while offering "openness" to the chamber's Democratic minority. This Story A changing of the gavel as 112th Congress is sworn in John Boehner sets humble tone as he claims House gavel Boehner assumes speaker's gavel House Republicans adopt new rules for tax and spending Legislation For GOP freshmen, congressional swearing-in is 'game day' Ezra Klein: ...

Boehner defends GOP against charges it's backtracking on promises
Washington (CNN) - Under fire for already backtracking on promises for more openness, House Speaker John Boehner admitted Thursday there are limits. "I promised a more open process. I didn't promise that every single bill was going to be an open bill," said Boehner during his first news conference as the new House Speaker. "There will be many open rules in this Congress, just watch," he said. Boehner was responding to a question from CNN about the fact that House Republicans plan to bring a hea...

America Recoils in Horror as Dem Campaign Chief Says Making Pelosi House Speaker Again is Their Goal
You know, because Pelosi’s so wildly popular among American voters…no, wait?… (The Hill)- House Democrats’ goal is to make Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) the Speaker of the House again, their campaign chairman said Wednesday evening. Rep. Steve Israel (N.Y.), the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), set his goal as nothing short of winning back control of the House in the 2012 Elections. “We’re all trying to win it back,” Israel s...

Top Line: Democrats Re-Selling Health Reform in Fact of Repeal
ABC’s Z. Byron Wolf reports: House Democrats, chastened by voters in November, are newly in the minority on Capitol Hill. But they’re not shy about defending their signature achievement of the past two years - passage of the sweeping health reform law last March. Even though most of the law won’t go into effect for another three years, Democrats got good news today when the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted it would add $143 billion to the Deficit to Repeal the pro

Republicans take control of the House
The results of the mid-term election became a reality for Democrats yesterday as Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, and more than 90 new members were seated. John Boehner (R-OH) defeated Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in the election for Speaker. In fact, 19 members of her own Caucus voted for someone else (11 voted for Heath Shuler), voted present or did not vote at all; the most members of a Caucus to vote against their party’s nominee since 1923. The power exchange wasn̵...

In House Constitutional Reading, Some Inconsistencies
Updated: 1:35PM ET House Representatives participated this morning in a full reading of the Constitution of the United States, marking the first such occasion in American history -- though the version of the Constitution that was read varied from the original document. (Watch video of the proceedings at left.) Following initial questions regarding which Constitutional document was being read - the amended or original Constitution - Rep. Bob Goodlatte, of Virginia, who is leading the proceedi...

Change in Congress Looks Awfully Familiar
Players may change, and the party which controls the chambers of Congress may change, but one thing stays distressingly consistent: the House is run by an iron-handed majority, and the Senate is run by the minority. The House this week adopted its rules for the 112th Congress, and unsurprisingly, they heavily favor the majority Republicans. (The Democrats, it should be noted, also used the rules to their advantage, especially through the powerful Rules Committee, which is hyper-weighted toward...