John Boehner's Boys' (Golf) Club

What can John Boehner do that Nancy Pelosi (and Hillary Clinton, and Sandra Day O’Connor, and anyone else unlucky enough to possess ladyparts) can’t? Be a member or even set foot at his preferred golf club, the Burning Tree Club, as the co-editors of Mother Jones point out today. (They are similarly cursed.)

The June “golf summit” our president played with Boehner may not have yielded anything in the way of real amity, but at least someone had the sense to make sure it was Andrews Air Force Base’s course and not Burning Tree’s. (In the elite golf world, Burning Tree is considered relatively progressive when it comes to letting in African-American male members. Whole “decades” before 1990!)

According to MJ‘s Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery, golf aficionado Sandra Day O’Connor became the first justice not to be offered a membership, followed by the other ladies brazenly sitting on the nation’s highest court. They note,

“91 years after women won the right to vote and 40 years after our mothers fought for more than token access to the levers of power, the signal the man second in line for the presidency intends to send to 51 percent of the nation, 40 percent of Republicans, and his own daughters is…well, we’re too ladylike to say….The foundational impulse for both is that fairness matters less than power.”