From what I understand, Boehner was threatening committee seats, subcommittee seats, and everything in between in order to get the “insane” teabaggers — or as I like to call them, principled Constitutionalists — to go along with his plan to jettison Republican party principle, adopt the paradigm of class warfare (as Romney had before him), and set the precedent for punishing successful people in order to fund the government for a couple of days.

Thanks goodness for the Hobbity purists who wouldn’t let him do it.

Boehner, it needs to be pointed out for purposes of fairness, was looking for a strategy to protect the GOP’s electoral chances in 2014 — when they lose the House, the “teabaggers” who elevated him to the Speakership and  whom he’s since  been trying to purge will get the blame, of course — but he stupidly, not “smartly” or “adroitly”, set  the conditions for such a loss by acceding to the Democrat’s class warfare narrative.  That is, he got played, just as he always does.  Because he wants to be a compromiser; and yet he’s dealing with ideologues who use that against him at every turn.

He has to go.

The answer to Obama’s populist Marxist spiel has always been to say that, in August, with bi-partisan support, the House passed legislation that would have kept the tax rates of the last decade + in place for all Americans.   That legislation has grown dusty on Harry Reid’s desk.  Such legislation would have kept child credits where they were, kept rates where they were for everyone, and benefited the middle class in exactly the way Obama proposes.  Because in his plan, he doesn’t cut taxes on the middle class. He just allows them to remain the same

Instead, what the President is doing is holding the middle class he claims to champion hostage because he insists on punishing the wealthy, who already pay a disproportionate amount in federal taxes.  And all that would succeed in doing is weakening the private sector while at the same time providing for a week’s worth of revenue to run the government — a government already over 16 Trillion dollars in debt.  Obama has offered no specific cuts save cuts to the military. And every “cut” DC fights over is merely a cut to the rate of growth in spending.

What we need is to grow the economy to increase revenue, not steal revenue from private citizens in the form of governmental theft masquerading as compassion — with the demonized serving as carefully crafted scapegoats.

To that end, a new Speaker and the Republicans should simply note that the August bi-partisan House bill, for whatever reason, can’t make it to a vote in the Senate, so the House is now prepared to take a new tack:  author a bill that cuts tax rates 10% below the Bush rates on the bottom three brackets while keeping the rates the same on all other earners.   The bill should likewise issue a number of specific cuts to government, targeting redundant programs, fraud, waste, and abuse, particularly onerous regulation, and even some military cuts — noting that it is the GOP who wants to see Americans keep more of their money rather than have it laundered through DC and passed along to the President’s corporate cronies and his union backers.  Include in the bill a cut to corporate tax rates, some of the highest in the industrial world.  And then explain why you are doing so.  Using principles and past instances of growth as your guide while readying answers to the mythology of Pax Clintonia.

That is, under such a bill, a new conservative Speaker can say that by cutting tax rates on the bottom three brackets, and by cutting corporate tax rates, Americans will have more income in their pockets, businesses will be able to expand, off-sure money will come home, and unemployment will dive.  The resulting increase in disposable income — coupled with new investment and an end to unnecessarily punitive bureaucratic dictates meant to curb industry and development in the name of clean air and clean water, which is now predicated on regulating human exhalation as a pollutant — will raise revenue, increase jobs, and be coupled by the kinds of cuts that will prevent a “one-time” stimulus from being part of a baseline budget that each year adds a trillion + to the debt.

In fact, get rid of that “one-time” stimulus money from the operating budget, and you’ve blunted the very reasons we’re seeing calls for tax increases in the first place: so the government can continue to spend.  Creating, with their spending, a country more dependent on it.

There’s the GOP plan.  As a referent, go back to Reagan and what his policies did for growth and wealth creation.  Go back to Clinton and note how it was the Contract with America, written by conservatives, that helped level out the potentially dire effects of Clinton’s tax hikes.  Point out that under Bush, his “evil tax cuts for the rich,” which now, evidently, weren’t evil tax cuts for the rich at all, given the Democrats’ desire to keep them in place for the bottom three brackets, nevertheless increased revenue to the government.

Who then turned around and spent it rather than using it to balance the budget.

We have a spending problem.  A DC problem.  And if the GOP wants to engage in a coup over the Dems’ hold on the populist message, they will come out and tell Americans that they are for allowing you to keep more of your money; growing the economy; bringing investment back into the US; and most importantly, cutting the spending that has brought us to the brink of economic collapse.

Honestly.  Is it really that hard to do?