Boehner calls for Summers' resignation

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) will call Tuesday for the mass firing of the Obama administration’s economic team, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and White House adviser Larry Summers, arguing that November’s midterm elections are shaping up as a referendum on sustained unemployment across the nation and saying the “writing is on the wall.”

Sucks he's basically right. That Boehner himself was also on the wrong side of all the recent economic policy debates hardly matters. Obama was elected to put the economy in order. He hasn't done that. He pushed through a stimulus which was too small, waited 16 months on an FOMC appointment, and made a stupid decision to reappoint Bernanke.

And, hate to say it, but had McCain been elected, the Republicans would have pushed through a massive stimulus containing the mother-of-all tax cuts. Republican opposition to the stimulus was largely because it was in their self-interest to oppose it (and, oppose everything obama did). Had the Democrats been in the opposition, there wouldn't have been nearly as much opposition to the stimulus. Add to that, the right-wingers on the Fed would likely have been less hawkish over the past 18 months of what I would term "very strange" Fed policy. Combine all of this, and it's not at all clear that the economy would be worse off with a President McCain at the helm.

The mid-terms are basically a referendum on Geithner, Summers, and Bernanke. These guys were simply not up to the task, and so Boehner is right to attack them.