It’s hard not to feel some sympathy for John Boehner, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, who on Friday announced his resignation from Congress, effective at the end of October. Some. You wouldn’t wish the job of leading hundreds of G.O.P. congressmen and congresswomen, many of them hailing from the Tea Party/foaming-at-the-mouth wing of the Republican movement, on your worst enemy.
Moreover, unlike, say, Donald Trump, Boehner didn’t have a rich daddy who set him up on easy street. His parents didn’t attend college. The second of twelve children, he grew up in a modest two-bedroom house in Cincinnati. (He and his siblings took the bedrooms; his parents slept on a sofa bed.) From a young age, he helped out in the family’s bar, Andy’s Café, which his grandfather founded, in 1938, and his father ran for forty-five years. After being discharged from the United States Navy with a bad back, Boehner took seven years to work his way through Xavier University, getting a bachelor’s degree in business administration. With his cigarettes, his perma-tan, his French cuffs, and his Midwestern good manners (on Friday, President Obama called him a “good man” who had always treated him courteously), Boehner often seemed like a politician from another time.
To be sure, Boehner milked his modest background for political purposes. In 2010, shortly after being voted Speaker-elect, he invited “60 Minutes” to film a family reunion at Andy’s, which remained in the family until 2006. And why not? In a country that seldom lives up to its reputation as a place of equal opportunity, Boehner was that rare thing: a self-made man who rose to the top.
And, boy, did he pay for it. From the moment he took over as Speaker, in January, 2011, many members of the Republican Party made his life difficult. Despite his rightist credentials—he first attracted attention as a supporter of Newt Gingrich during the early nineteen-nineties—Boehner wasn’t considered part of “the conservative movement,” which claimed responsibility for overturning the Democrats’ majority in the House in 2010. He had been around Capitol Hill too long, and, worse, he had a record of occasionally coöperating with Democrats, such as Ted Kennedy, with whom he cosponsored the No Child Left Behind Act, of 2001.
Not that he was a liberal, or even a liberal Republican. A staunchly pro-life Roman Catholic, he had a zero per cent rating from NARAL, the abortion-rights group; an A rating from the N.R.A. on gun issues; a rating of zero per cent on energy issues from the Campaign for America’s Future, a progressive group; a rating of seven per cent from the A.C.L.U. on civil-rights issues; and a rating of a hundred per cent from the United States Chamber of Commerce. He wanted to cut taxes, reduce the size of government, and repeal Obamacare. But, in today’s Republican Party, none of this was enough to prevent accusations that he was a RINO—Republican In Name Only.
Following the rise of Tea Party-backed candidates in the 2010 midterms, many Republicans wanted all-out war with the Obama Administration. Boehner found himself playing the role of Count Mirabeau, or, perhaps, Alexander Kerensky, a reformer rapidly outflanked by genuine revolutionaries. On a range of issues, from public spending to the debt limit to Obamacare, the ultras wanted to shut down the federal government. Boehner, well aware that Congress was already highly unpopular, resisted.
In April, 2011, he reached a budget deal with the White House that averted a shutdown. In 2013, however, he was unable, or unwilling, to stymy an effort to defund the Affordable Care Act, which a coalition of conservative activists was pushing. The partial shutdown, which began in October, lasted sixteen days, and, sure enough, Congress’s approval ratings fell into single digits. A couple of months later, when conservative groups started causing more trouble, once again over the budget, Boehner finally lashed out publicly, calling them “ridiculous” and saying, “They pushed us into this fight to defund Obamacare and to shut down the government. Most of you know, my members know, that wasn’t exactly the strategy that I had in mind.”
Boehner soldiered on, easily winning reëlection as Speaker in January of this year. But, as his sixty-sixth birthday approached, he was facing yet another conservative push for a shutdown, this time over the funding of Planned Parenthood. Some Republican representatives were also agitating for another effort to overthrow him. This time, evidently, Boehner didn’t have the stomach for another fight.
He waited to oversee the Pope’s address to a joint session of Congress, which had taken place at his invitation, and during which he wiped tears from his eyes. (That wasn’t the first time he had cried in public. Following his tearful “60 Minutes” appearance, he earned the nickname “Weeper of the House.”) On Friday morning, he told his colleagues that, on October 30th, he would resign as both Speaker and as congressman. According to the Times, he blamed the ultra-conservative members of his caucus, whom he accused of being unwilling to govern.
Boehner’s resignation makes a shutdown less likely: freed of the obligation to pander to the right, he and his colleagues in the G.O.P. leadership will probably push through a funding bill with Democratic support next week. But the larger question of where the party is headed remains open. The early favorite to succeed Boehner is Kevin McCarthy, a Californian Republican who is currently the House majority leader. Although some conservatives regard McCarthy with suspicion, they also see him as someone who is more willing than Boehner to take account of their views.
Whoever becomes the next Speaker will have no choice but to deal with the zealots, a task that often drove Boehner to seek assistance from a higher authority. “I pray from the moment I wake up. I may pray all day long,” he told NBC’s Brian Williams in 2011. At a press conference on Friday afternoon, he told reporters that he had said his prayers in the morning, as usual, “And I said, ‘Today I’m going to do this,’ and that was that.” Who could blame him?
