U.S. - Speaker John Boehner Quits the Arena

Speaker John Boehner’s shocking decision to resign from Congress is a sorry measure of how far right-wing extremism has advanced in immobilizing the Republican Party and undermining the process of healthy government.

In abruptly quitting the arena, Mr. Boehner may have headed off the latest threat of a government shutdown. But he did so by yielding to the attack on his leadership being waged by some of the same Tea Party zealots and conservative naysayers who supported his ascent to speaker nearly five years ago. Though he is deeply conservative himself, he has been tormented ever since by right-wing malcontents who condemned any hint of the sort of political accommodation needed for legislation.

Mr. Boehner said that putting members through “prolonged leadership turmoil would do irreparable damage to the institution,” and so he is yielding the gavel and quitting Congress after 25 years on Oct. 30. Whomever the Republicans might choose as the next speaker, the victor will have to show even greater obeisance to the right than Mr. Boehner did, though he tried. Mr. Boehner reportedly thought he could survive a leadership challenge only by accepting Democratic support. A party stalwart, he quit instead, obviously mindful of the fate of his protégé and the former House majority leader, Eric Cantor, who was turned out of office last year in a right-wing primary challenge that sent shock waves through party ranks.

Mr. Boehner sparked fury from his right flank in his unsuccessful attempt to work out a budget compromise with President Obama. His leadership was marked by endless votes against Obamacare even as it became a national success. The 2013 shutdown of government, engineered by conservative Republicans, was a low point in what seems to have become an increasingly impossible job for Mr. Boehner.

The latest challenge — a threatened government shutdown over demands by conservatives to defund Planned Parenthood — is exactly the kind of absurd and dangerous move that the right wing has made its signature tactic. It appears that Mr. Boehner, like most of the nation, finally decided he had had enough.

With his decision to retreat, some Republicans seem to think the right wing, claiming victory over Mr. Boehner’s ouster, might drop the Planned Parenthood fight and approve a budget extension bill this month in order to concentrate on the looming leadership fight. This, of course, would be the height of hypocrisy since they’ve been howling that defunding Planned Parenthood was a matter of life and death. Now it seems they might welcome a way out of the cliff-hanging scenario they created, since opinion polls show voters would blame the Republicans for any government shutdown.

If nothing else, this intramural brawl makes it ever clearer that congressional Republicans are incapable of governing themselves, much less the government and the nation. The current Republican candidates for president might find an object lesson here. Far from a moderate in any normal sense of the word, Mr. Boehner departs as a figure thrown out by party zealots enthralled by Ronald Reagan’s woeful dictum that “Government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.”