Republican Boehner Calls on Obama to Fire Geithner for Mishandling Economy
House Minority Leader John Boehner
Melissa Golden/Bloomberg
House Minority Leader John Boehner said, “We do not have the luxury of waiting months for the president to pick scapegoats for his failing ‘stimulus’ policies.”
House Minority Leader John Boehner said, “We do not have the luxury of waiting months for the president to pick scapegoats for his failing ‘stimulus’ policies.” Photographer: Melissa Golden/Bloomberg
Aug. 24 (Bloomberg) -- Richard Grasso, former chief executive officer of the New York Stock Exchange, talks about U.S. House Minority Leader John Boehner's call for President Barack Obama to fire Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and the other remaining members of the president's economic team. Grasso talks with Margaret Brennan on Bloomberg Television's "InBusiness. (This is an excerpt of the full interview. Source: Bloomberg)
U.S. House Republican leader John Boehner called on President Barack Obama to fire Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and the other remaining members of the president’s economic team.
In a speech today to the City Club of Cleveland, Boehner said Obama’s stimulus policies are failing to create jobs.
“We do not have the luxury of waiting months for the president to pick scapegoats for his failing ‘stimulus’ policies,” Boehner said. “We’ve tried 19 months of government-as-community-organizer. It hasn’t worked. Our fresh start needs to begin now.”
With little more than two months remaining before the midterm elections in which Republicans hope to claim a majority of the U.S. House, the Republican leader was sharpening an attack on the Obama administration’s economic policies with a direct aim at the president’s own advisers.
Boehner, an Ohio Republican who could become House speaker if his party gains control of the chamber in November, has repeatedly criticized the administration’s economic policies. With his speech in Cleveland, he added five demands for Obama, starting with the overhaul of an economic team that’s already starting to change with the planned departure of adviser Christina Romer.
Geithner, Summers
“President Obama should ask for -- and accept -- the resignations of the remaining members of his economic team, starting with Secretary Geithner and Larry Summers, the head of the National Economic Council,” Boehner said in prepared remarks provided by his office in Washington.
Vice President Joseph Biden used Boehner’s remarks to repeat a theme that the administration and Democrats are trying to emphasize before the November elections.
“Let’s reveal a little history here,” Biden said at an event in Washington to highlight the impact of stimulus programs. “Mr. Boehner and his party ran the middle class, literally, into the ground.”
Bill Burton, the White House deputy press secretary, said Boehner gave a “full-throated defense of the indefensible” by supporting tax breaks for companies that move jobs overseas and attacking programs to “keep teachers in schools and firefighters on the streets.”
Don’t Raise Taxes
Boehner issued four other demands, including calling on the president to refrain from plans to “impose job-killing tax hikes on families and small businesses.” He and Republican leaders in the Senate oppose Obama’s plan to allow the Bush-era tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 to expire next year for households earning more than $250,000 a year.
“Raising taxes on families and small businesses during a recession is a recipe for disaster -- both for our economy and for the deficit,” Boehner said.
He called on the president to announce that he will veto any “job-killing bills sent to his desk by a lame-duck Congress.” This was a reference to the possibility that Congress could act on the extension of the Bush tax cuts after the November elections and before a new Congress is seated.
Boehner said Obama should submit to Congress “an aggressive spending-reduction package.”
“President Obama says we should wait and talk about a deficit-reduction plan next year,” Boehner said. “I say, let’s talk about it right now.”
Repeal Health Law
Boehner said the president should “stop obstructing” Republican attempts to repeal the health-care legislation that Congress approved earlier this year. The president won approval of that package after a year of legislative debate, and Republicans hope to use the law as an election issue.
Democratic Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, a member of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s leadership team, told reporters that Boehner’s plan would send the signal “that we’re not serious about getting our fiscal house in order.”
“It would not only put the brakes on the positive private sector job growth we’re seeing, it would throw it in reverse,” Van Hollen said during a conference call. “You would see people thrown out of work as a result of this plan.”
Boehner didn’t offer specific policy proposals in his remarks or during a question-and-answer period that followed. He and other congressional Republicans plan to unveil proposals next month. Boehner also withheld judgment on a presidential commission that will recommend ways to balance the budget late this year.
He called on Congress to perform more oversight to keep “unelected busybodies” in the federal government from writing rules that have a more dramatic impact than lawmakers intended in legislation they passed.
“I’ve had enough, and I think the American people have had enough,” he said.
To contact the reporters on this story: Brigitte Greenberg in Washington at bgreenberg2@bloomberg.net; Mark Silva in Washington at msilva34@bloomberg.net
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