Now that the dust has settled over John Boehner’s announcement that he’ll be resigning at the end of October, let’s take a look at what that will actually mean for the future of the country.
There have already been volumes written about how Boehner, although a horrible leader and the worst of the worst of corporate Republicans, will be replaced by someone much, much worse than he is. And that’s absolutely true. All of his possible replacements are hard-right fundamentalists that would have no problem shutting down the government and endangering the US economy just to prove a point.
So yes, the country is in for a very bad year once Boehner is gone.
But its only one year.
One year after Boehner leaves, every single seat in the US House of Representatives will be up for election. And since 2016 is also a Presidential election year, Democratic voter turnout is expected to be higher than it has ever been in the past. That’s already bad news for Republicans, but it gets even worse.
Once a Republican extremist takes over control of the House, it will energize the Democratic base like never before. It will also have the effect of turning off Independents and moderate Republicans, who will either flip their vote to a Democrat, or abstain from voting altogether.
To put it bluntly, John Boehner just handed the 2016 elections to the Democratic Party. Because it isn’t just control of the House that’s on the line – control of the Senate is also up for grabs with at least 25 Republicans in the awkward position of having to defend their seats and their constant obstruction tactics in order to appeal to the far right. The Democratic voter surge that’s expected to happen in 2016 will easily flip control of the entire Legislative Branch over to the Democrats.
And again, its all because John Boehner is giving his seat to an extremist Republican. Once the American public sees how bad things get under extremist Republican rule, they will abandon the Party faster than they would a sinking ship. The only Republican voters left will be religious extremists, the few remaining Fox News viewers, and Ted Nugent.
So let’s not think of Boehner’s resignation as the end of the world. Things might get very bad in the next year, but we’ll have the power to change this next November, and that’s the best outcome we could hope for. All we have to do is sit back and watch as the Republican Party burns itself down from the inside.
