Erick Erickson slams John Boehner for latest “political stunt”
The leading conservative pundit says the House speaker's plan to sue the president is a "waste of taxpayer dollars"
Elias Isquith
Topics: Erick Erickson, John Boehner, Government shutdown, Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, Red State, Barack Obama, GOP Civil War, Media News, News, Politics News
Erick Erickson slams John Boehner for latest "political stunt"Erick Erickson (Credit: CNN)
Speaker of the House John Boehner is pushing ahead with his quixotic plan to sue President Obama, but at least one highly influential conservative pundit is calling BS on the whole endeavor and dismissing it as little more than a wasteful “political stunt.”
Writing at the popular conservative blog Red State, right-wing pundit Erick Erickson slammed Boehner’s plan as “nothing more than political theater and a further Republican waste of taxpayer dollars.” He also claimed that the move by Boehner was made out of desperation and cowardice rather than a real conservative’s eternal stance of principled fortitude.
“I realize John Boehner and the House Republicans may lack the testicular fortitude to fight President Obama,” Erickson writes, “but I would kindly ask that he save the taxpayers further money on a political stunt solely designed to incite Republican voters who might otherwise stay home given the establishment’s bungling of Mississippi and abandonment of their constitutionally derived powers.”
Rather than sue the president, Erickson argues, Republicans should look to last fall’s government shutdown and use a threat to refuse to raise the debt ceiling in order to extort policy concessions from Democrats. Republican politicians’ refusal to repeat that experience, Erickson says, is to blame for Obama’s supposed lawlessness and seizures of power.
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“It is Republicans in the House and Senate who orchestrated giving Barack Obama a blank check to raise the debt ceiling through March of 2015,” Erickson writes. “It is Republicans in the House and Senate who were so scared of a government shutdown, that they threw Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee under the bus before the President even initiated a government shut down.”
Absent a willingness to force another shutdown, Erickson writes, “the Republican leaders in the House [who] are too chicken to use their constitutional powers to rein in the President … should just call it a day and go home.”
Elias Isquith
Elias Isquith is an assistant editor at Salon, focusing on politics. Follow him on Twitter at @eliasisquith, and email him at
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