House Speaker John Boehner will get to keep his job — despite efforts by the less-government watchdog FreedomWorks, which urged its millions of supporters to blitz Congress with calls to oust him.
"This isn't about Boehner … It's whether or not Republicans govern on the issues they campaigned on," FreedomWorks' CEO Matt Kibbe said Tuesday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
Newsmax TV.
"And the performance from John Boehner and his leadership team has been very contrary to that."
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Boehner, an Ohio Republican, was elected to his third term as House Speaker by a narrow margin as ongoing party divisions saw 25 GOP lawmakers not supporting him.
He received 216 of 408 votes, which almost deprived him of a majority victory.
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"You have a number of members that are willing to stand up to the status quo in large part because they're trying to restore the Republican Party back to the issues that it stands for," Kibbe said.
"This is really about the budget process as much as anything else. In December, the last-minute, top-secret, massive Cromnibus bill is everything Republicans, including the sitting Republican leadership, said they would stop if we gave them the majority.
"That's what they ran on in 2010 … in 2012 … in 2014 — and yet that's what we got for it. We got everything that's wrong with Washington and it's a healthy thing to try to shake things up. The people that are willing to try are the heroes in this fight."
Kibbe expressed disappointment that Boehner has led House Republicans with the understanding they will not shut down the government — a move that proved detrimental to the party in 2013.
"That basically takes away the only authority they have. Oversight is all about the power of the purse and if the Republican majority is going to assert its policy priorities, they're going to do it through the budget process," he said.
"That means a showdown with the president sooner or later or signing off on the president's priorities. There's no way around that, even with control of the Senate now.
"The president still sits in the White House, he still has the pen. They have the purse, the question is, are they willing to use it?"
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