If you follow the news you probably know that John Boehner announced his resignation from the Speakership yesterday. He’s going to continue on until the end of October and then he’ll be resigning both the Speakership and his seat. This was a day after the Pope addressed Congress, where Boehner was visibly moved, both by the Pope’s address and by a personal encounter he had with the Pope after the address.

Why is Boehner doing this? Let us count the ways.

1. Boehner has been fighting with the Teaparty wing of his party since he began his Speakership back in 2011.
2. Boehner has apparently been thinking about resigning the Speakership for a while, and was going to announce that this would be his last term on his birthday in November.
3. The Teaparty wing was planning to challenge him through a leadership vote because Boehner is not committed to shutting down the government over the defunding of Planned Parenthood.

This is what happens when you elect a bunch of “outsiders” (read: amateurs) to the Congress and expect that they’re going to know how to govern.

Congress has been hovering around all-time lows in terms of their overall job approval from the electorate.

And it’s not because there are a bunch of politicians running Washington. It’s the exact opposite: it’s because there are a bunch of amateur yahoo non-politicians who are currently running Washington.

The Teaparty Republicans seem to believe that there complete agenda should be pushed on the entire nation, notwithstanding that much of the nation has never voted for them and has, in fact, voted for Barack Obama twice. The last time around, barely anybody voted at all.

Whatever the cause du jour seems to be — whether it’s not raising the debt ceiling or defunding Planned Parenthood — these Teaparty yahoos must prevail because no compromise may be brokered. That’s the philosophy under which they operate.

The direct result of this intransigent attitude is that they are making a lot of progressives very angry.

Like me.

I’ll be telling my representatives in Congress to go ahead, and let them shut down the government, because they’re not going to have their way with Planned Parenthood just because they hate that organization.

A lot of pacifists and anti-war citizens are completely opposed to more military interventions, yet we’re not threatening to shut down the government every five minutes.

Boehner, by the way, was quite conservative. Evan Horowitz has made the argument that Boehner was significantly more conservative than Dennis Hastert and Newt Gingrich, his Republican predecessors.

I haven’t done the math, but I’ll take Evan at his word. He’s usually pretty reliable.

What was the reaction at the “Value Voters Summit” when the news was announced? They cheered!

That’s right, these yahoos cheered that their own Speaker has become so exasperated that he decided to resign. The first one in the last century or so who wasn’t being dogged by some kind of ethics probe.

But let the Teaparty yahoos keep it up.They seem to be determined to alienate the few minorities and reasonable women who are still considering voting Republican.

Maybe in 2016 they will discover that there is a majority of us out here, that we haven’t been drinking the Kool Aid, that some of us vote, and that very few of us share their radical, self-delusional agenda.