Washington Post:

Minority leader Boehner calls for extending tax cuts, question stimulus spending
By Paul Kane
Tuesday, August 24, 2010; 9:48 AM

CLEVELAND -- House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) called Tuesday for the mass firing of the Obama administration's economic team, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and White House adviser Larry Summers, arguing that November's midterm elections are shaping up as a referendum on sustained unemployment across the nation and saying the "writing is on the wall."

Boehner said President Obama's team lacks "real-world, hands-on experience" in creating jobs that are needed for a full economic recovery. The Republican lawmaker cited reports that some senior aides complained of "exhaustion," including the recently departed budget chief Peter Orszag.

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"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 the morning speech to business leaders at the City Club of Cleveland. The mass dismissal, he added, would be "no substitute for a referendum on the president's job-killing agenda. That question will be put before the American people in due time. But we do not have the luxury of waiting months for the president to pick scapegoats for his failing 'stimulus' policies."

Boehner's demand for the ousters of Geithner and Summers is likely to be met with derision in the West Wing, and denounced as mere electioneering less than 75 days before the midterm election. Calls for cabinet officials to be fired is nothing new for the party out of power -- during the Bush administration many Democrats called for the ouster of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a demand that was not met until Democrats swept the 2006 midterms.

Even before the speech, White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer issued a statement accusing the GOP leader of offering no new job-creation proposals.

"Ohioans will hear an argument for a return to the economic policies that turned a surplus into record deficits and helped create the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression," Pfeiffer wrote on the White House blog. "While the rhetoric today may be new, the ideas remain the same: out-of-control deficits, decreased oversight of the big Wall Street banks that helped create the financial crisis and putting special interests first by maintaining tax loopholes for corporations that ship American jobs overseas."

Told of Boehner's call for mass firings, administration officials declined to comment beyond what Pfeiffer had said.

In his speech, Boehner sought to personalize mounting concerns among voters about Obama's handling of the economic recovery--arguing that Obama's advisers unfairly highlight brief signs of marginal improvement to suggest a coming surge in job creation.

"The American people are asking, 'where are the jobs?' and all the president's economic team has to offer are promises of 'green shoots' that never seem to grow," Boehner said. "The worse things get, the more they circle the wagons and defend the indefensible." After the speech, he held a question-and-answer session with business leaders in this economically distressed Rust Belt city.

Democratic National Committee officials organized a conference call Monday to critique what they consider a lack of new proposals from the GOP and unveil a Web ad rehashing attack lines against the minority leader, including a 15-year-old story about handing out campaign checks from tobacco companies to Republicans on the House floor.

"It was John Boehner and Republicans who invented the ways of Washington," the narrator says in the ad.

House Republicans do not plan to unveil a detailed policy agenda until late September, and Boehner's speech did not expand the GOP's existing economic proposals in any significant way. The speech was part of a bus tour of battleground House districts, focusing on manufacturing-centric regions such as Indiana, Ohio and western Pennsylvania.

Boehner told the City Club officials that the key to sparking job growth is extending the tax cuts implemented by then-President George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003. Republicans want to extend the tax cuts across the board, while Democrats have argued for extensions to all but the top 2 percent of income earners. Both proposals would result in sharp increases in deficit spending -- more than $3 trillion under the Democratic plan and $3.7 trillion for the GOP plan -- but both sides argue that some extension of tax cuts would provide an additional stimulus to spur consumer purchasing power.

Boehner needs a net gain of 39 or more Republican seats to seize control of the House and fulfill his self-proclaimed campaign of "Boehner for Speaker." No issue will be more key to that effort than the economy. In Boehner's home state of Ohio -- a critical battleground in the last two presidential campaigns -- unemployment has remained higher than the national average, at 10.3 percent in July. Neighboring Indiana is barely better, at 10.2 percent.

Vulnerable House Democrats from Ohio have embraced Obama's stimulus legislation as something that has, at the least, helped mitigate the damage to the region. Rep. Zack Space (D), elected in 2006, last week hailed a $66 million grant from the Recovery Act to expand high-speed access to the Internet in his eastern Ohio district. Rep. John Boccieri (D-Ohio) trumpeted a $1.6 million grant to a local port authority for a project that would ultimately create 500 jobs in his district. Republicans, however, say Obama's Recovery Act has been a failure.

Boehner said that extending the tax cuts for all income brackets would help small business owners, who have been the toughest hit since the financial collapse of 2008. "Raising taxes on families and small businesses during a recession is a recipe for disaster - both for our economy and for the deficit. Period. End of story," he said. "That's why President Obama should work with Republicans to stop all of these job-killing tax hikes."