John Boehner swears off secret deals.
This made sense to me before; I don’t know why, with a history of failure, Boehner believed that this time, secret deals could work. Hopefully he has actually learned his lesson, given that he remains by default the most responsible governmental leader.
Has any secret political deal actually succeeded?
Comment by Tony Demchak — January 11, 2013 @ 1:45 am
Yes: negotiations after the Aroostook War, and specifically, the Webster-Baring Treaty. Daniel Webster and Alexander Baring used secret chicanery to stop a major source of international trouble between the US and Canada. Both sides took old maps of the contested area and basically told their respective legislators, “Hey, look, in all honesty, those other guys own the whole thing, as you can see from this old map. So let’s compromise and only take half.” Baring and Webster never admitted that they conspired to do such a thing, of course… And incidentally, this is where Minnesota gets its slightly different shape from the rest of the western part of the US-Canada border, an area which just happened to be the biggest iron deposit in North America. Daniel Webster was a pretty good negotiator…
Any secret political deals involving Republicans? I doubt it.
Comment by Kevin Feasel — January 14, 2013 @ 9:16 am