Who won and who lost with the FY 2011 budget deal?
Most seem to think Speaker John Boehner did particularly well. He cut the FY 2011 budget a lot more than Democrats wanted, and he wrangled most of his rambunctious freshmen into order.
Speaker of the House, Republican John Boehner of Ohio, enters with Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., right, to speak to the media on Capitol Hill in Washington. Perilously close to a midnight deadline, the White House and congressional leaders reached an agreement to cut billions of dollars in spending to avoid the first government shutdown in 15 years.
Alex Brandon/AP
Now that the dust is settling from Friday night’s Perils-of-Pauline budget deal averting a federal government shutdown, the posturing and punditry over “who won” is coming fast and thick.
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Within party ranks, the analysis is mostly predictable.
Republicans are rallying around Speaker John Boehner, who managed to wrangle his rambunctious caucus into some kind of order – especially the 87 tea party-fueled freshmen itching to whack huge chunks out of federal spending.
“We have…forced the Senate’s hand and will require them to take an up-or-down vote on repealing ObamaCare and on de-funding Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest provider of abortions,” Rep. Jack Kingston (R) of Georgia said in a statement. “We have blocked the increased funding for the Internal Revenue Service and banned taxpayer funding of abortion in the District of Columbia. While this package isn’t a good year’s work, it certainly is a good day’s work.”
CBS News political analyst John Dickerson declared it “a big, big night” for Boehner.
“John Boehner got a lot of spending reductions that Republicans wanted, [and] moved Democrats much closer to where the Republican position was,” he said.
“Boehner achieved much of his substantive policy objectives, but he also gained a great deal of stature,” John Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont-McKenna College, told the Monitor’s Gail Russell Chaddock. “This was his battlefield commission – his first big confrontation as Speaker, and he came out well.”
Not everybody in the Republican caucus was happy.
“I appreciate the speaker’s effort. I just don’t like the final product,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R) of Ohio, chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee, told Politico.com. “I’ll be voting no, heck yeah.”











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