As part of their continuing resolution, the GOP have voted to defund planned parenthood, the healthcare law, gutting the social security administration, and forbidding the EPA from regulating mercury pollution.

This was all pretty standard. Obama has threatened a veto, and Reid has said that it will never see the light of day, so they can get in their votes, and not see much blowback.

What surprises me though is that they lost on a vote to defund the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB):

Sixty House Republicans joined with every Democrat to beat back an anti-union amendment on Thursday that would have defunded the National Labor Relations Board, a New Deal-era independent agency that arbitrates labor disputes. The sixty defections come as the Midwest GOP governors in Wisconsin and Ohio are launching direct assaults on public employee unions.

Nine high-ranking Republican members of the Education and the Workforce Committee broke with their party to support the agency, including the chairman, Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.). GOP hostility toward organized labor is not a new phenomenon, but the hostility has intensified since Republicans took control of the House; the party went so far as to rename what had been called the Education and Labor Committee, replacing “labor” with “the workforce.”

The fact that, “piling up losses in a chamber where the majority party typically rules with an iron fist,” is telling.

The Republican Party has been anti-union since Abraham Lincoln.  Support for organized labor one of the things that (used to) distinguish between conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans.

Still the fact that Boehner, and  Cantor could not successfully whip the vote on this is telling.

Boehner is clearly the weakest house speaker in decades, possibly since Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neil 1981-3.

My guess is that the nut job in Wisconsin is spooking some of the Republicans in Wisconsin, and neighboring, states.

Wisconsin is beginning to look a lot like MacArthur’s assault on the bonus army, and some people on the ‘Phant side realize that this will not end well.