Worst year in Washington: The tea party
Bad year: Mitt Romney
Bad year: David Petraeus
Good year: The Clintons
Good year: D.C. sports teams
Best year: Nate Silver
The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza produces the best/worst year round-up for 2o12.
Boehner isn't on the list. But he and the tea party brought each other down. What the tea party managed to do was severely wound the Speaker and lacerate themselves with one or two swipes of the blade.
Plan B never made it to the House floor. The speaker and Majority Leader Eric Cantor couldn’t come close to securing the votes required.The defeat was spurred by the tea party, which saw Boehner’s plan not as a way to put political pressure on the president but as an unnecessary sacrifice of a core principle. That principle? It’s never okay to raise taxes on anyone. As Boehner’s strategy sunk, and with it, his power as speaker, it was the lawmakers he had punished who celebrated most heartily.
“Republican leadership thought they could silence conservatives when they kicked us off our Committees,” Huelskamp said in a statement after Plan B’s demise. “I’m glad that enough of my colleagues refused to back down from the threats and intimidation, thus preventing the Conference from abandoning our principles.”
Huelskamp’s victory, of course, was Pyrrhic. With Boehner marginalized, Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have been left to sort out a fiscal cliff deal — one that almost certainly will be worse for Republicans than what Boehner proposed. ...WaPo
And after all, don't forget, we're going into '13. With or without a dose of superstition, will it be worse or better for these winners and losers, not to mention the rest of us?
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