now for our con job of the day. boehner gave a teary commencement address saturday at catholic university and told graduates to live according to the catholic church s teachings. for the right reasons, good things will happen. so there you have it. humility, patience and faith. come on. again with the crying. okay. please stop crying. by the way, a lost catholic leaders are not buying it. they don t think boehner is doing such a great job upholding those values. more than 57 professors at catholic colleges criticize boehner s supports for cuts to medicare, medicaid and the nutrition program for women, infants and children. they wrote a letter saying, your
full-throated endorsement of john boehner s leadership. and i m not picking here. i mean, some people say he wants to be speaker. i think everybody would say he d like to be speaker. okay. everybody would say that. but yesterday he basically said, this is not so good. he vote for it. i think privately he s letting people know, this wasn t my thing i negotiated. this is the backdrop between cantor and boehner for a long time. i think speaker boehner accepts that and he s got the rest of his team together. but there is this group which you always have on both sides when they don t get ha they want, let s get clang in leadership. i think the cantor is the leader of that discussion. i don t think boehner has anything to worry about in the short term. i think this is a big victimry of him, move on and focus on the ryan plan and lose about a third of his caucuses. i think this deal was all smoke and mirrors. when you only cut a few hundred
people. i leave that to tom in terms of whether he can deliver enough of them but i don t think the leaders and in particular the leaders in the senate on the democratic side don t want a government shutdown. the president doesn t want it, i don t think boehner does. i don t think the leaders want it. remember, if the government shuts down and you can blame it on the other party, they re getting the blame the question is who gets the blame now. that helps your leverage then. the question is who gets the blame. right. i m not sure that the democrats get the blame if the republicans force a government shutdown on april 8th. i think they know that. they don t force it. it s a question of, you send a bill to the president and there s not enough money and he shuts it down because you re not getting enough money. the question is whether it gets to the president. right here is the evidence of why republicans and democrats can t agree. if tom and i were still there, we co
wouldn t immediately suffer as a result of it. but a couple of things here. first of all, on the down side for president obama and the democrats, john boehner is not newt gingrich. he s not the ego guy that newt was. newt managed to make it about him. i don t think boehner is going to make that mistake. i m not sure that barack obama is quite as good at survivalist maneuvering, the hand to hand combat as bill clinton was back when newt was around. but on the other hand, there are those 87 or so tea party people in the house on the republican side and they are so ideologically driven that they might make the mistake of standing up and cheering if the government is shut down. if they do that then they are leaving themselves open for the same thing to say oh, we re not going pay the troops, you won t get your social security check. look at these tea party people cheering the shut down of the government. that s what the republicans need to watch out for. good point. i want to go through
people come regardless of party labels, they come with all kinds of beliefs and ideas. it s the melting pot of america. it s not up to me to tell them what to think. james, should boehner oh, please. tell them or be more specific about it? that s his job. he s the speaker of the house. why do you think they call it a whip? because he goes and whips people in line. if they have some vote i like that. he s telling people yeah, that s pretty good. i d rather a crowbar. right. a sledgehammer or something, whatever, a tire tool. a tire iron. that s it. a tire iron. but, at any rate, the job of the speaker is to keep his caucus in line. that s his job. i understand he was trying to i don t think boehner is a bad guy. he s trying to have it both ways. he s not the first politician to do that.