Whoa: John Boehner to Resign

[Content Note: War on agency.]

Speaker of the House John Boehner has announced that he is resigning, not just from the speakership but also from his seat in Congress:

Speaker John A. Boehner, under intense pressure from conservatives in his party, announced on Friday that he would resign one of the most powerful positions in government and give up his House seat at the end of October, as Congress moved to avert a government shutdown.

Mr. Boehner, who was first elected to Congress in 1990, made the announcement in an emotional meeting with his fellow Republicans on Friday morning.

...Most recently, Mr. Boehner, 65, was trying to craft a solution to keep the government open through the rest of the year, but was under pressure from a growing base of conservatives who told him that they would not vote for a bill that did not defund Planned Parenthood. Several of those members were on a path to remove Mr. Boehner as speaker, though their ability to do so was far from certain.

The rest of the Times article at the link describes how Boehner's ouster is part of the ongoing showdown between the "moderate" and extreme right wings of the House Republicans. (This is how far right the GOP has moved, that Boehner is now considered a moderate.) Boehner wasn't willing to force a shutdown of the entire government just to defund Planned Parenthood at the behest of the most virulently anti-choice misogynists in his party, so he's resigning the speakership and leaving Congress altogether.

I can't say I'm sad to see John Boehner go, but I am pretty horrified by the fact that he wasn't conservative enough for an increasingly powerful segment of his reprehensible party.