Boehner ready to compromise, but will GOP?

WASHINGTON

After Mitt Romney's defeat on Tuesday, John Boehner is the undisputed leader of the Republican Party.

Pity him.

President Obama's reelection and the Democrats' successful defense of their Senate majority have put the House speaker in a vise. Squeezing him on one side are the "tea party" conservatives and their ilk, dominant in the House Republican majority, who say Romney lost because he was too accommodating and moderate. Squeezing him on the other side is a Democratic president who campaigned for the rich to pay a higher share of taxes.

Boehner's first instinct on Tuesday night was to side with his House firebrands.

"While others chose inaction," he said at a Republican National Committee event, "we offered solutions." Americans, he said, "responded by renewing our House Republican majority. With this vote, the American people have also made clear that there's no mandate for raising tax rates."

After sleeping on it, Boehner appeared at the Capitol on Wednesday and offered a dramatically different message: He proposed, albeit in a noncommittal way, putting tax increases on the table.

"Mr. President, this is your moment," he said into the cameras, reading, sometimes with difficulty, from a teleprompter. "We're ready to be led, not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans. … We want you to succeed. Let's challenge ourselves to find the common ground that has eluded us."

Boehner left himself sufficient wiggle room, saying, "We're willing to accept new revenue under the right conditions" -- which keeps alive the possibility that the revenue would come only from economic growth (the old Republican position) and not from a higher tax burden.

Still, Boehner's new tone was starkly different from the one set two years ago by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who declared that "the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." McConnell continued that approach after Tuesday's election, saying, "The voters have not endorsed the failures or excesses of the president's first term."

But the voters denied McConnell his top priority.

And exit polls Tuesday showed that a majority of them favored higher taxes on income over $250,000, as Obama has proposed -- something Boehner's Democratic counterpart in the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., made sure to point out in a news conference before the speaker's appearance.

The voters, Reid said, "want a balanced approach … and taxes are a part of that."

But Boehner's talk of common ground is likely to enrage the no-compromise wing of his House Republicans, who live in fear of the tea party, Grover Norquist, the Club for Growth and other enforcers of conservative orthodoxy. And tea-party leaders have convinced themselves that Romney lost because he wasn't conservative enough. The Tea Party Patriots, for example, attributed Romney's defeat to his being a "weak moderate candidate, handpicked by the Beltway elites and country-club establishment."

More likely, the tea party itself bears the blame for Romney's loss -- just as losses by far-right candidates kept Republicans from taking over the Senate.

To survive conservative primary challenges from Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry and others, Romney had to take positions that ultimately doomed him in the general election.

His tough-on-immigration stance, in particular, helps explain his loss of more than 70percent of the Latino vote, which sealed his defeat.

Boehner knows this, of course, and that is why he was so careful when he made his remarks Wednesday afternoon, taking the rare precaution of using a teleprompter.

He left without answering questions, and when reporters shouted queries at him, he only smiled.

"The American people have spoken," Boehner said somberly, his eyes glistening. "If there's a mandate in yesterday's results, it's a mandate for us to find a way to work together."

Although he was vague about what he was offering, his bargaining position was very different from 18 months ago, when he went to the Economic Club of New York and pronounced tax increases "off the table."

This time, he outlined the general framework of a grand bargain: "In order to garner Republican support for new revenue, the president must be willing to reduce spending and shore up entitlement programs."

Boehner chose to make his post-election speech in the Capitol's Rayburn Room, named for Sam Rayburn, the late House speaker who is credited with saying: "Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one."

Boehner sounds as though he's ready to pick up hammer and nail. But will his fellow Republicans stop kicking?

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GOP on Taxes: Boehner Says 'No;' Cantor Says 'Maybe' (ContributorNetwork)

COMMENTARY | As Republicans and Democrats go back to work on a debt compromise, there is less than a month before critical mass is reached. The debt ceiling for the United States needs to be raised by August 2 or the United States will default on its loans.

Members of the GOP are holding conferences with top Democrats and the White House to hammer out a proposal to reduce the national debt. Otherwise, the Republican-led House of Representatives may not raise the maximum amount of debt the United States can borrow.

Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) reiterated his stance by saying there will be no tax raises on working Americans or job creators. Yet his partner in House leaderships, Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said just a day earlier Republicans would be open to a tax increase , but only if they are cut somewhere else.

Which is it? Either there are more tax increases or their might be. It's just a small sliver of difference between what both men said during the negotiations, but it presents a wide difference in bargaining tactics. It also exposes a rift in the GOP.

Boehner must please the conservative base and the tea party when he says no new taxes. Cantor seems to be a little more pragmatic and deals with more centrist and mainstream Republicans who believe a more rounded approach is necessary to solve the budget crisis.

There are no easy answers. President Barack Obama even went so far as to say cuts in Social Security and Medicare may be an option when previously he hadn't. Both sides are supposedly still far apart on the issue. They are all agreeing to disagree even though they already agree. Leaders all come to the consensus that the national debt needs to be solved. Their dispute comes in how they should go about reducing the debt and creating jobs.

Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform warned the president and the House leadership that tough choices would have to be made. Cuts will have to come from everywhere, regardless if taxes are raised. The commission suggested raising excise and use taxes on things like gasoline to help bring in more revenue while making cuts at the same time.

Eventually both parties are going to have to realize the combination of more taxes and less spending will bring the United States into fiscal responsibility faster than severe cuts with no tax increases.

William Browning is a research librarian specializing in U.S. politics. Born in St. Louis, Browning is active in local politics and served as a campaign volunteer for President Barack Obama and Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill.

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Boehner reportedly raises $29 million for Republicans (The Ticket)

(Photo of Boehner: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Fundraising in the 2012 GOP presidential race may have gotten off to a slow start, but that's not the case for the cash-collecting work of House Speaker John Boehner.

Sources close to Boehner tell The Hill's Michael O'Brien the top House Republican has raised more than $29 million so far this year. Of that total, $12 million went to his various fund-raising committees, including his leadership PAC. The rest he raised for individual GOP candidates and party committees.

By comparison, Boehner raised $50 million over the entire course of the 2010 election, when Republicans were fighting to regain majority control of the House.

Boehner's enormous fundraising haul comes as Republicans prepare for what could be a bruising 2012 campaign.

It's probably not a coincidence that aides to the House speaker are leaking out how much Boehner is doing to financially boost the party. As he continues to attempt to negotiate a deal with the White House over the debt limit, Boehner is facing a rebellion within his own ranks over how to reduce the federal deficit.

As the New York Times' Carl Hulse reports, Boehner has reportedly signaled his willingness to generate new revenues though an overhaul of the tax code. But other House Republicans have rejected that proposal, saying that it could prompt tax increases. Meanwhile, a significant portion of the House GOP caucus simply won't vote to raise the debt limit, no matter how strongly Boehner lobbies them.

If a budget deal is to be struck, Boehner must convince at least two-thirds of his caucus to support him--hence the reminder of how much the speaker has done to help them in their bids for re-election.

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