President Obama is arranging a bipartisan health care summit Thursday to allow both parties to have a venue to discuss their “best ideas” for reform. Republicans have since been sending “mixed signals” about the President’s invitation, continuing to urge bipartisanship but decrying the President’s attempt at it, sometimes in the very same press release. House Minority Leader John Boehner suggested that the summit was “some kind of trap.” Rep. Tom Price called it a “Hollow PR Blitz.” Now that House GOP leaders have finally committed to attending, however, they’re facing a new PR problem: selling the decision to their own caucus. Minority Leader John Boehner took his best shot, telling his conference today that he has decided to attend in order to “crash the party:”
According to a House GOP leadership aide familiar with the top-ranking Republican’s remarks at the weekly closed-door conference meeting, Boehner appealed to skeptical Republican lawmakers, saying, “We shouldn’t let the White House have a six-hour taxpayer-funded infomercial on ObamaCare. We need to show up. We need to crash the party.”
It hardly needs mentioning that Boehner cannot crash a party to which he was invited from the start.