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Imaginary numbers do wonderful things for your position...

The height of Boehners’ power:
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2011/roll943.xml

Yes, a terrible loss for us. But it took weeks of some of the greatest political pressures I’ve seen to accomplish it.

Typical of his power:
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2011/roll941.xml
And:
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2011/roll857.xml
Where were his 175 ‘reliable votes’?
In all these votes- each an occasion when the Senate had shown it was ready to shut down part of the government-
he could never reach that high LOL!

No, the actual vote history show that a mere 40 members would give us a conservative Leadership in the House.

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“the House cannot control the party agenda unless they are in the opposite party as the President.”

A bully pulpit is nice, but the purse is better.
Were Tip O’neil and Jimmy Carter before your time?
Even if so you must have noticed Pelosi and Reid trading Obama back and forth for cartons of cigarettes...

A bully pulpit is nice, but the purse is better.

Were Tip O’neil and Jimmy Carter before your time? Even if so you must have noticed Pelosi and Reid trading Obama back and forth for cartons of cigarettes.

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An empty purse is NOT better than the ability to direct & control national policy.

And I think your example of the Obama-Reid-Pelosi relationship actually proves my point that the House and Senate leadership are subservient to the wishes of the President.

Pelosi and Reid knew that the Democrat Congress needed to do more than just Health Care and Stimulus and could lose (and should have lost) control of both Houses, but followed (to their own detriment) Obama's directive of "I don't care about anything else and don't care what's actually in them, but pass my top 2 priorities."

I was 11 in 1976, but vividly remember Jimmy Carter as President. I remember watching the "mailaise" speech (families used to watch Presidential speeches together back then), Billy Beer, the BCCI and Abscam scandals, the Camp David accord, the Soviets in Afghanistan, boycotting the Moscow Olympics, the Iran hostage crisis, the failed rescue attempt.

My earliest memories of Tip O'Neill, however, are of the Reagan era O'Neill. If your assertion is that O'Neill pushed Carter around on policy, you may be correct. BUT, I think there are 2 reasons for that:

1) Carter was a wimp, and
2) In the immediate post-Watergate era it would be logical for the legislative branch to assert supremacy over the executive branch. Upon his election, Reagan took it back.

Legislative branch dominance from 1974-1980 was a post-Depression aberration.